Deaf and Tactless

Greatest Hits of the Summer: July

2009-10-21T23:39:00.012+01:00

Since it's been a good three months without an update, what I'm going to do with my free time over the next few days is go through my photos of the summer and early autumn in an attempt to showcase the stuff that doesn't totally suck.

Photos of Salisbury Cathedral, shot with Leicaflex SL on some sort of crap Kodak reversal film and Vario-Elmar 35-70mm f/3.5:

My friend Emily's birthday party, shot with Leicaflex SL on Fuji Sensia 400 transparency:

Pelin (http://www.myspace.com/pelinmusic) at the Cobden, July '09.

Shot on D70 with Nikkor-P 105mm f/2.5 and a fuckton of gain.

OK, I lied. This one is definitely the work of the 35-105mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom. Only because I could have done the same thing with a point-and-shoot.

More to come!

Yellow

2009-07-22T23:25:00.002+01:00

Like the Coldplay song. Except less shitty.

Not dead yet, just wildly busy. More photos to file than I know what to do with, so check back for updates.

Photography, Nokia-style

2009-07-13T01:07:00.010+01:00

Last night in the middle of Brighton's Corn Exchange--part of this year's Loop Festival (www.loopbrighton.com)--I went to one of the best shows I've seen in ages.

If you don't know Fever Ray, they're half of The Knife and at least 95% as awesome. I mean word on the street is that they are getting a lot of airplay on US radio, but I'm frankly not into such philistinism so I can't confirm.

The laser show alone would have been worth the price of entry, but Karen Andersson and crew rocked the house with tectonically slow syncopation for over an hour. The only problem was the fact that I didn't have a camera to capture the ridiculous laser + fog machine + incense effects that were damn near trance-inducing, even though I was sober.

So what I'm thinking is I need more loyal readers so that everyone can chip in a dollar or a quid or what have you and some day I'll be able to afford a Leica D-Lux 4 (yes, but a D-Lux 3 doesn't accept external flash, the bastards) or a Canon G9: a pocket-sized point-and-shoot camera with manual controls that looks acceptably cheap to doltish security personnel.

I would be unstoppable.

Nevertheless, enjoy:

The weird-ass thing to the left that looks like two pillars with Christmas lights strung on them is actually Karen in her giant fur outfit. It's not quite a coat, but more something that you might wear in the dead of winter in the coldest regions of the Ice Planet Hoth. It was sweltering in the auditorium, by the way. And for what it's worth, those may well have been Christmas lights strung into the coat-type thing.

Also: there are some great video clips with pitiful sound, also thanks to Nokia. If anyone knows how to upload videos instead of just photos from a Nokia 6300 to a computer, your expertise would be appreciated.

All a Bit Flash

2009-07-13T00:44:00.010+01:00

Here's a shout-out of sorts to the lovely folks chez Nikon: the one piece of kit I've ever bought new, an SB-600 flash unit, crapped out less than two months out of the package. Here's hoping your warranty is good.

I make do 1) by falling in love with ultra-fast lenses and 2) more pertinently gimping around with a Leica SF-20 flash that I really need to sell (give me a shout if you're interested: TTL on M6/M7, £60). The SF-20 has a reputation for being somewhat weak. God knows where that came from, because to me it's like trying to take a piss and realizing that you're holding a fire hose instead.

Nevertheless, some interesting effects came out of playing around with it. Here are the results:

This is one of the more sinister photos I've ever taken, of some of the least sinister people I know. She'll bite your straw and he'll drink you to death with a determined stare.

And then sometimes it was dead-on.

I'll never figure this crap out.

London Block Party

2009-06-29T20:11:00.019+01:00

A phenomenon not exactly endemic to London happens at least once a year on several lucky East London streets: the block party. I live on one of these streets.

Save a breakup, it's the world's best excuse for a Sunday night piss-up... at least to a Yank like me, unused to doing such things as part of the culture.

Lots of interesting stuff happened: between the one-man band and the incessant Jackson 5 (nobody minded), there were dogs, booze, and great curry.

If this is all too vanilla for some of you, there was some underage keg-love going on,

as well as a capella renditions of your favorite Motörhead classics.

My roommate

even managed to take a flattering candid shot of me. I really didn't think that was possible.

I'll just have to remember to drink irresponsibly next time someone does a photo shoot of me.

Love is Folly

2009-06-25T13:16:00.011+01:00

The “young lovers on the run” story has become such a cliché in modern cinema that one rarely considers its provenance, let alone its psychological or environmental basis. However, these two fundamentals of such films take us on a straight line through three of the most powerful and poignant of such films, beginning with arguably the first, Fritz Lang and writers Gene Towne and C. Graham Baker’s You Only Live Once, through to its direct antecedent, writer-director Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night, adaptation of the Edward Anderson novel Thieves Like Us, and on to Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers, rewritten and directed by Oliver Stone, with only stepping stones of style in between.

In considering the environment, one must ask: is it the tacit oppressiveness of the circumstances of lower middle class American society that leads these young men to crime and these young women to fall in love with them, thereby leading the women to become at least accomplices? Arguably, they are each stories of ordinary people forced into extraordinary circumstances, and are in no small way specifically relevant to the mores of their respective times. The relative banality of each female character’s life before meeting her paramour highlights both the confinement and boredom that many might consider inherent within modern American society. These women have little choice but to live the lives they are given due to lack of education and lack of support. For these women, having no feasible belief in better social circumstances, the prospect of love, no matter how ill advised or tragic, understandably seems something of a panacea. It is thus perhaps not irrelevant that in each of the three movies at hand, the couples begin legally single but treat marriage as an imperative. Coincidentally or not, the marriage marks the end of the first act in each film.

Joan in You Only Live Once is trapped in her role as a secretary because it was one of the few jobs that an independent woman in her time could find. An independent, uneducated woman would have no choice but to take some similar type of job simply to support herself. Her prospects, to her own eyes, might seem nothing better than to find a stable (read: boring) man whose hausfrau she should consider herself lucky to be. It is therefore little surprise that Joan finds herself madly in love with the beautiful, tormented ex-criminal Eddie Taylor. He provides a light of interest in her life that she has never seen before. In They Live by Night, Keechie finds herself in a similar position, except that she is quite simply trapped by her circumstances: she lives in a small town in the middle of nowhere and is forced into domestic slavery by her criminal family. It is only when provided the opportunity of love by repentant murderer Bowie that she begins to see that there could be more to her existence. In a sense, these women are just along for the ride: their love for their respective boyfriends/husbands is necessary for the story, but the female character is honest until forced into dishonesty by external circumstances. Neither Joan nor Keechie ever becomes more than an accomplice to the terrible acts of their worse halves.

Mallory in Natural Born Killers provides a radical difference. Abused in the home and subject to some of the most realistically disgusting treatment a name actress (Juliette Lewis) has ever endured on screen, it is no surprise that she bolts as soon as she meets the first charming man to come into her life. However, Mickey begins the film as flirtatious yet passive , only potentially criminal. It is Mallory, and more importantly his love of Mallory, that provides the catalyst that turns him into a cold-blooded killer. Furthermore, while the two entities have a separate personality at the beginning—as in each of the films discussed herein—it is Mickey who plays the sanguine, level headed role and Mallory who portrays the loose cannon. It is she who murders the first two victims (her parents) and kicks off the cross-country crime spree. This is, notably, a reversal from Tarantino's version, where Mickey begins as the murderous psychopath and Mallory is more or less just along for the ride, but Mickey is the principal character in Tarantino's version, whereas the couple itself plays this role in Stone's version.

If anything, Natural Born Killers is the most distilled example among the three films. In the case of this film, it is love itself—albeit an “unfortunate” or “misguided” love--that provides the obsessive quality leading its participants to a mutually solipsistic (to coin an oxymoron...) state so removed from societal norms that they show no compunction about indiscriminant killing. It may not reach this extreme in the other two films, but the fundamental point is the same: why should it matter, as long as the only two people who matter remain together?

Thus one can argue that it is love itself that in each case provides the unusual situation for all of the characters. The men would be happy enough to live their criminal lives were it not for the influence of women who provide them the fallacious belief that domestication is possible. It is this belief that a “normal life” is just around the corner, or the possibility that with the influence of that one right person, that provides the grain of sand around which the pearl of obsession develops. To put a cynical spin on it, one might consider James Ellroy’s claim that “…obsession is a self-referential madness commonly known as love. It liberates in the short run and finally destroys .” In Ellroy’s canon, this more often than not refers to frustrated love, but as the frustration is the key, there is no reason that the same principle cannot cross-apply to an achieved relationship with any manner of external frustration. It is this unyielding, unsatisfied need that drives the person experiencing it to commit heinous acts without fundamentally registering that these acts are unspeakable.

In fact, it would seem that there is a certain fallacy of psychological projection here. For example, in Natural Born Killers, the psychologist Emil Rheingold says, “Mickey and Mallory know the difference between right and wrong. They just don’t give a damn .” It is quite obvious that Eddie Thomas and Bowie know the difference between right and wrong, but that does not prevent them from committing heinous acts when it becomes necessary. However, the term “necessary” is very much relative, and dependent on a sense of false justification or rationalization. It would seem that this ability to rationalize an act contrary to any and all societal norm(s) is, in and of itself, a sign of a fundamental break with the psychology of the “normal.”

Furthermore, it only leads to alienation from normal society by virtue of the couple psychologically secluding itself from the “normal world,” which is often painted as venal and certainly less sympathetic than our doomed lovers . It is Mickey and Mallory who again take this idea to its extreme: by psychologically distancing themselves from anyone other than each other, they are able to justify their twisted, violent actions. That is, according to a Rheingold line from Tarantino's original work, “They have created a world where only two exist and anybody who inadvertently enters that world is murdered .” If not to fiercely protect their existence à deux, these heinous actions serve to build the Legend of Mickey and Mallory: a testament to their love.

The be-all end-all of these people’s situations is simply to further their love, and they behave in ways that seem (to them) logically lead to this goal. However, as the audience, our rational sides should sit there cringing or biting our nails at the poor decision-making, as we would were we to know such people in real life. Nevertheless, we find ourselves taken along for the ride because through the medium of film, we are provided newfound insight regarding the thinking of people in such a situation (after all, few would argue that the brilliance of Lolita lies at least partly in Nabokov's ability to make us sympathize with a pedophile). Alexander Mackendrick knew this full well when he said, “…the most thoroughly deranged people are those who act in an utterly logical way, except that this logic is based on one insane premise. The madman behaves in a way that would be totally acceptable if he really were Napoleon .” It is this restructuring of our understanding--and thereby our sympathies--that became a hallmark of noir film.

Interestingly, and uniquely among the three films discussed, in You Only Live Once, Towne and Baker make a rather heavy-handed social claim that “you never really escape from prison.” We see Eddie attempting to make good on his promise to go straight, but frustrated at every step by the inherent societal prejudice against convicts. Nevertheless, in an interesting scene, we see that Eddie is fired from his first respectable job because he “cannot maintain his schedule” as a truck driver. The reasons that he cannot keep the schedule are rather unclear: Eddie could be irresponsible by standing around chatting to people when he should be driving, or perhaps his schedule planned too tightly for him to succeed. His boss knows that he is a convict, and it is possible that the boss is looking for a clear excuse to rid himself of Eddie. It is equally possible that the boss is simply extremely uptight and hard-nosed. Fundamentally, it is probably a terrible collage of all these circumstances, but Eddie, as the emotionally sensitive tend to do, it is easy to focus on the one closest to one’s deepest insecurities: he was fired because he was a convict, and therefore there is no room in this world to go straight.

Furthermore, the plot mechanism that puts Eddie on death row is interestingly not dependent in the slightest on whether Eddie actually committed the robbery/murder. It is surprising at first that he didn’t do it, but this quickly subsides in a touching moment with Joan where he swears his innocence. Eddie has no reason to hide criminal behavior from her (after all, she waited for him while he was in prison), and the frankness that he is allowed by the intimate nature of their intense love for one another here allows him the chance to prove himself innocent in the eyes of the audience as well as Joan.

Such a claim is interesting inasmuch as it is ultimately irrelevant to the use of love in the story. That is, it functions as something of an explanatory mechanism for the reluctant viewer: Eddie tried, but found himself stymied. Therefore, it is easier for the audience to stomach supporting a criminal. Arguably, Nicholas Ray took a wider dramatic leap by making Bowie not only a prison escapee but also a murderer. Ray’s later films, especially those he scripted personally, such as Rebel Without a Cause, show a more complex eye for the social causation of deviant behavior, but this early attempt has a simpler structure and allows such concerns to fall by the wayside.

It would seem that Ray trusted the audience to see the love between Bowie and Keechie as the fundamental point of the film; that is, that one can respect this universal quality even among those whose lifestyle wholly in opposition to mainstream, “straight” society. Bowie might speak of wanting to repent, but he never actually makes any sort of bold move in this direction (excluding his halfhearted attempts to run from his gang), very much in contrast to Eddie Thomas. It is this dramatic restructuring that paved the way for the glamorization of mayhem in later films such as The Getaway and Bonnie and Clyde.

However, it is only with Natural Born Killers that we see this obsessive love taken to its extreme. We see Mickey and Mallory shamelessly murder, pillage, and wreak havoc from the first scenes of the film. We develop a certain degree of sympathy when we see Mallory’s backstory, but this sympathy is lost almost as soon as it arrives when we watch her brutally murder her parents on screen. Yet it would be heartless not to appreciate the intensity of Mickey and Mallory’s devotion to each other. They each do stupid, irresponsible things (e.g., the killing of the gas station attendant and the old Native American) and their mutual interactions are fraught with tension, but it is the fierce devotion to one another that shows most plainly in the best and worst of situations (the marriage and their capture due to Mallory’s snakebite, respectively) that shows us exactly the depth of their mutual care. That is, either is ready and willing to die for the other because it is in such extreme situations that their love is most clear. Stone’s avowed intention may have been to suggest that media influence ultimately allows Mickey and Mallory to survive the end of the film, which has its merits but is rather too cynical and on-the-nose. It is not inconceivable that their love subsists primarily on dangerous situations, which feeds back into their mutual solipsism. That is, their relationship is such that it at once conjures Mickey and Mallory’s vicious whirlwind of destruction while also protecting them from the fallout.

Perhaps there is something to the fact that each of the female leads shares a certain animalistic quality : none of the three are conventionally beautiful, yet each exhibits a fierceness and strength of reserve that likens her to a savage creature threatened with death. It is some relationship between the desperation and the vitality with which this endows the characters that makes them undeniably sexually appealing. This desperation is, of course, quickly established to give us an understanding of the lengths to which these women will go in order to preserve not their lives, as would an animal, but their love and all the structure built around this conceit. Their actions become desperate, last-ditch behavior all too soon, as they are willing to throw away their (relatively speaking) domestic existences for the newfound structure of the love they share with these men. Ultimately, however, it is the love--and obsessive insistence upon it--that is the key to their downfall.

An interesting point is the thesis that Ray certainly held that Bowie and Keechie are innocent simply by virtue of being truly in love. He is certainly sympathetic to their social plight, as is Lang in You Only Live Once, but it is strange that either feels it necessary to “justify” the bad behavior of the lovers when the love itself should be sufficient to push the story forward. This is where The Getaway and Bonnie and Clyde fail: Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw’s real-life romance was more interesting than their characters’, and Warren Beatty just isn’t a good enough actor to credibly portray a man driven by love for such an archetypal ice queen as Faye Dunaway.

However, Tarantino returned us to form with Natural Born Killers, which at heart (even in the extremely deadpan original screenplay) was a media satire: Tarantino suggests that the media creates people like Mickey and Mallory, but they were certainly not “forced” into their behavior through circumstance. An appropriate analogy might be Tarantino's True Romance screenplay, where Clarence and Alabama put themselves into a terrible position through nothing more than greed and stupidity, but it is their love that redeems them . In the end, is this great and terrifying love—certainly few would argue that it is a “good” or “healthy” love--that appeals to us and draws us into the plight of these characters. Perhaps Ellroy is right and it is not love at all, but where is the romance in that?

Mayhem on Salisbury Plain

2009-06-21T22:59:00.016+01:00

Last night, which stretched long into today, was full of interesting experiences. The Summer Solstice celebration at Stonehenge was incredibly tame compared to years past. Blame the Unmanned Drone:

A warning from the authorities to you: if we're watching you from the air, NO SAMBA MUSIC IS ALLOWED. And seriously, folks, no one is allowed to accuse me of paranoia ever again when there are flying objects videotaping you from the sky. Jesus.

In any case, it was still lots of fun when I wasn't freezing my tits off. My enthusiasm is readily apparent:

In other news, I had to teach myself to drive on the wrong side of the road in order to actually get there and back. I would never have thought it possible.

Once there, the visual experience was very interesting. As usual, there were a few people who can't resist a camera. Of course people who beg for photos tend to pose like yuppie scum at some meat-market bar in SoHo expecting--nay, creaming their RTW cotton-poly trousers in anticipation of--flash-saturated, artistically bereft nonsense. But I digress. Voici l'exception qui preuve la règle. These people are awesome.

The other thing I forgot is that the countryside exists. Who knew?

Now to the real stuff:

Spontaneous Portraiture

2009-06-18T19:07:00.005+01:00

I love sunset light.

Des photos à la sottise

2009-06-16T23:14:00.007+01:00

One fine Spring Saturday a few weeks ago, "a pint at Broadway Market" with my buddy magically transformed into "five pints at Broadway Market." I was in no state to be photographing anything, but some people just can't resist a drunkard with a camera. This girl asked for a photograph and I obliged. Score one for the trusty split-screen focus.

Nikon FM2/Kodacolor 200/Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 at (estimated--hey, I was drunk) f/11.

Pumpkin

2009-06-16T01:50:00.000+01:00

Truth in advertising.

My First Nude Shoot (of Sorts)

2009-06-13T19:29:00.013+01:00

This afternoon I encountered members of the World Naked Bike Ride UK (http://www.worldnakedbikeride.org/uk/) storming London "in protest of oil dependency and in celebration of nudity." Or something like that. In any case, well played.

Some nice shots came out of it, thankfully.

I may have developed a new crush. This girl's face fascinates me.

Transvestitism: You're doing it wrong.

Where The Dude Learned his Tricks

2009-06-12T22:59:00.009+01:00

Robert Altman’s 1973 The Long Goodbye is an oft-overlooked masterpiece of film noir. Though heavily based on the eponymous Raymond Chandler novel, the film notably departs from the book. The novel represents Chandler at the end of his career, willing to grant sympathy to his downtrodden “White Knight” Philip Marlowe by giving him the opportunity for both lasting friendship and love at the end of the novel. Though this assertion might sound anathema to legions of Chandlerphiles, it nevertheless seems to me that the novel painfully misrepresents the hard-boiled storyworld that we have come to expect from a "proper" Marlowe story.

The formidable collaboration between screenwriter Leigh Brackett, director Altman, and Elliott Gould as protagonist Philip Marlowe renders the film darker, funnier, and more morally ambiguous than the novel. However, more than anything it is the humor that marks a complete departure from all noir films before it. The humor is dark and poignant, in no way taking the piss or detracting from the harsh reality of the intended milieu.

In many ways, Gould’s interpretation of Marlowe is lighter and funnier than the classic interpretations. Reinventing Humphrey Bogart’s signature character wouldn’t be an easy task for anyone, but Gould starts completely from scratch. He trades Bogart’s deadpan stoic for an awkward, openly compassionate smartass. Whereas Bogart’s Marlowe cracks jokes with the express purpose of wheedling response from an adversary, Gould’s Marlowe cracks jokes because he is incapable of keeping his mouth shut. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gould’s Marlowe finds his mouth shut for him on several occasions.

While the “classic” Marlowe is seen to be poor because he is too honest to make a good living, Gould’s Marlowe is portrayed as a shiftless schlub. One must wonder how he makes a living at all, save for his off-beat charm. The imprint of this film is evident on many revisionist films noirs since; the gritty realism of an unexpected Coke bottle delivered to the face is strikingly similar to the famous slitting of Jake Gittes’ nose in Chinatown. Furthermore, Gould’s Marlowe, distilled to absurdism, is doubtlessly the missing link between Bogart’s Marlowe and Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski.

While the archetypal film noir protagonist is of ambiguous moral character, he nevertheless exhibits a self-imposed morality consistent to his actions. By this statute, many find fault with Brackett and Altman’s rewritten ending, wherein Marlowe executes Terry Lennox in cold blood. At first glance, the murder appears to counter everything previously established about the character. Marlowe has traveled to Mexico with the intention of killing Lennox; he succeeds. The act is vicious, calculated, and thoroughly uncompassionate.

However, I suggest that perhaps it is the action most true to Marlowe’s personality that the film sees. Lennox not only shamelessly abuses Marlowe’s honesty and compassion for personal gain, but he also, time and again, places Marlowe at grave personal risk. Marlowe accepts this risk only by the steadfast yet ultimately misguided conviction that his friend Lennox was innocent of his wife’s murder. Thus, the only option left for Marlowe, in order to respect his code of ethics, is to destroy the monster that so mocked them. That is film noir.

Sound Advice from Professor Ludwig

2009-06-12T15:38:00.003+01:00

Indeed.

"[Wittgenstein] was very fond of 'hard-boiled' American detective stories, claiming that there was more philosophy in them than in academic philosophy journals."
--from Introducing Wittgenstein, by John Heaton

Singularity of Cute

2009-06-09T02:10:00.005+01:00

I happened upon the tiniest black hole of cute ever on the way to my office today. It almost sucked me in. Womankind's irrational hatred of me would be so much easier to handle if I had a puppy in my coat.

All Undead with No Place to Go

2009-06-09T01:57:00.013+01:00

Somehow, I was mysteriously separated from the group at Today is Boring's (www.todayisboring.com) All-Drag Zombie Walk 2009. A lone, 6'4" girl zombie on the loose, I decided to make lemonade out of the lemons (or pudding out of the blood, as the case might be).

I took some photos,

got some free shit,

made some new friends,

and fell in love with my reflection.

You can call me "Tits." Everyone else did.

Things to Come Home to...

2009-06-06T21:13:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you're stumbling home at inappropriate hours of the morning and have to find a bollard to balance the camera against. But it's worth it.

Curtis Mayfield's Sewing Machine

2009-06-04T13:17:00.000+01:00

Sews buttonholes, felled stitches, and bitch-slaps insubordinate hos.

Jimmy Stewart: The Bastard I Hate to Love

2009-05-31T18:32:00.000+01:00

In each of his film roles, James Stewart plays some sort of charming “everyman” character in a way that, for instance, a towering beast like John Wayne would never be able to pull off. However, as still waters tend to run deep, we see that Stewart’s characters—especially his post World War II films—are extremely complex and have turbulent interior lives despite their outward affability. That is, to use Freud’s metaphor, the ego of any of Stewart’s characters plays the rider in the saddle barely controlling the bucking horse of his id. While the ego is ostensibly in control, the character’s motivations are often of nebulous origin, if not downright unclear.

Furthermore, in the classic struggle between Stewart’s ego and id, he almost invariably finds a “superego” mentor figure: Frenchy in Destry Rides Again, Ronda Castle in The Far Country, and of course Midge in Vertigo. John Wayne's Tom Doniphan in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance does double duty by playing the true antagonist as well as the mentor figure. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of these mentor figures are women: even in Liberty Valance, Doniphan plays something of a mother hen to the book-smart, street-dumb Stoddard. The fact that women are willing to get close to him is perhaps an indicator of something more insidious: Stewart exhibits a subtle type of masculine stubbornness. He is an introverted independent who implodes on himself rather than taking out his aggression externally, and the lack of obvious red flags makes him seem "reasonable" to the careless viewer. In any case, these mentor figures all affect Stewart's moral compass during the film, effectively teaching his rigidity to bend, although certainly through different means in each case. Interestingly, in each case, Stewart is decidedly in conflict with the mentor throughout much of the film. Nevertheless, it is only out of this conflict that any true change in his character arises.

Highlighting this contrast, it is the illusion of emotional accessibility, and thought, that seems to separate Stewart from his diametric opposite, Wayne. Stewart doesn’t walk around with his dick swinging out for the world to see. He mumbles and stutters, he rarely carries a gun, and he thinks before he acts. He seems to be the “safe option,” the kind of man you would invite home to meet your mother. Yet it is exactly this over-thinking of every situation, from Destry’s hesitation arguably leading to Frenchy’s death to Stoddard’s insistence that Valance can be dealt with peacefully—until the point where Doniphan must take matters into his own hands--that leads him into trouble in almost every circumstance. This supposed standoffishness seems rarely more than selfishness: that is, the motivation for such behavior is rarely more than saving his own sorry hide. In contrast, Wayne’s characters are arguably more genuinely coy, cf. not only Doniphan but also Chance in Rio Bravo, and certainly more chivalrous.

John Ford was undoubtedly aware of this character flaw, but it was only Hitchcock who had the nerve to expose this it and play it up: Stewart’s two most loathsome characters ever, Jeff in Rear Window and Scottie in Vertigo, hesitate, waste time, and generally screw the pooch as concerns their personal lives—truly miserable specimens of humanity to anyone and everyone who cares for them--because each has obsessively fixated on a mess that could easily have been avoided. Not accessible in the slightest, they are some of the most selfish and hopelessly introverted characters to have ever graced celluloid. Fine, you might argue, but where would the film be without the respective obsessions? The answer is simple: the film wouldn’t exist. Ergo, Stewart is a bastard, and we love him for it.

More than 30 years after his last notable film role, we still love watching Stewart movies, and not because Mr. Smith went to fucking Washington. Why do we love him so? Because he’s the Robert Downey, Jr. of his generation: sensitive, deep, troubled, and with the brilliant--if perhaps unconscious--gift of enticing others to take care of him, grievous flaws and all. Except Stewart totally wins, because he did it without crack.

Mission Statement

2009-05-31T18:02:00.000+01:00

This blog is designed as a forum for me to sound off rampantly on various issues related to film, photography, and life in my adopted home of London.