"P-P-Please Mr. Kennedy
I don't wanna go (please don't shoot me into outer space)
I sweat when they stuff me in the pressure suits
Bubble helmet, Flash Gordon boots
Nowhere up there in gravity zero (outer...space)
I need to breathe, don't need to be a hero (outer...space) -- "Please Mr. Kennedy" (Inside Llewyn Davis)
"Without going out of my door,
I can know the ways of heaven.
Without looking out of my window
I can know all things on Earth.
The farther one travels
the less one knows" -- "The Inner Light" (George Harrison - via Lao Tzu)
"Never get out of the boat.
Absolutely goddamn right." - Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) - Apocalypse Now
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| Vinny Barbarino in the original |
Those poems are long gone. My mom threw them out, of course. But their exact existential ennui of is all over Gravity and Inside Llewyn Davis (both 2013), which in turn resemble the 2001 comedy, Bubble Boy (2001). The three might just as well be sequels, and the same overall message reigns: we're all of us trapped in the 3-D space-and-time-suit that is the human body, the egoic gridlock that is the mind, and the whims of an Old Testament warden that is the soul, all three relentlessly dragged back into our orbit of desk, car, couch, and bed no matter how high we fly outside the box; it is the penitentiary of our unrealistic hopes preventing us from reaching through the brass bars of expectations towards the gold ring. After all, we know that ring is an illusion.
Better we learn to love illusion directly.
"You know that story of the Russian cosmonaut? So, the cosmonaut, He's the first man ever to go into space. Right? The Russians beat the Americans. So he goes up in this big spaceship, but the only habitable part of it's very small. So the cosmonaut's in there, and he's got this portal window, and he's looking out of it, and he sees the curvature of the Earth for the first time. I mean, the first man to ever look at the planet he's from. And he's lost in that moment. And all of a sudden this strange ticking... Begins coming out of the dashboard. Rips out the control panel, right? Takes out his tools. Trying to find the sound, trying to stop the sound. But he can't find it. He can't stop it. It keeps going. Few hours into this, begins to feel like torture. A few days go by with this sound, and he knows that this small sound... will break him. He'll lose his mind. What's he gonna do? He's up in space, alone, in a space closet. He's got 25 days left to go... with this sound. So the cosmonaut decides... the only way to save his sanity... is to fall in love with this sound. So he closes his eyes... and he goes into his imagination, and then he opens them. He doesn't hear ticking anymore. He hears music. And he spends the sailing through space in total bliss... and peace." -- Rhoda (Britt Marling) - Another Earth
The ticking, man, Brit Marling, you must hear that all the time, by which I mean the clamor of your geekboy devotees: those of us in love with your heavenly hair but confused by your weird mix of self-serious grad school high conceptual sci fi and skeeved by the wussy hipsters you stock your films with. So much potential so unsatisfying, so ultimately anemic. Those shaggy dork boys need some sunshine, Britt! They're pale. They make the hipster boys in Ti West movies seem robust. They'd break like glass goblins with the gentlest of knuckle taps. I'd fight them for you, Britt Marling. You remind me of a girl I used to know in college. She's older now though.
Save us all from the beauty-remover that is age, Britt Marling!
But if you bear her ticking quote about old Yuri up in space in mind with the upper deck Llewyn Davis ditty atop, recorded in the same approx. early 60s time zone as Britt's Another Earth anecdote WOULD have taken place, you realize there's more going on here than either film quite grasps --there's a very real trepidation about being next in line to be shot into space for both these films, and for Gravity. Britt only wants to go up in space to escape the shame of having killed a kid in a drunk driving accident; Sandra Bullock goes in space to escape the pain of having a daughter killed in a drunk driving accident. Meanwhile I'd spoil the plot to explain whose drunk driving and who or what they hit in Llewyn, but either way, without shame or grief to propel you there seems no real reason to volunteer to be the next monkey shot into space (unless you're besotted by Tyler Durden).
But the Coens can't imagine what else folk singers were for if not to express trepidation about going off to maybe die for their country. And in 1961 folk craze there's still no Vietnam to name Llewyn's generation. Vietnam! The war that made Milwaukee famous, that made Walter crazy with PSD-by-proxy, that gave Dylan's protests songs resonance for a young male populace pinioned by American flag pitchforks at the border between Canada and Cambodia. Without a war to name them the 1961West Village scenesters of Inside Llewyn Davis can only float in the misty white smoke over the dark green corduroy; the color scheme and lighting like what it must feel like walking through an unlit folk museum in the middle of the day while slowly going color blind. Aurally, there's way too much quiet and too much resonance - old Llewyn can hike his guitar all over creation, whip it out and boom it's perfectly tuned and the sound resonates like you're listening to yourself in earphones with a good condenser mic, ne'er does he have to play over clinking cups or drunkards. Like Mad Men before it, and after it, this is a land where you can actually whisper at a bar and be heard from across the table.
But symbolically, it's the best film about elliptical orbits since The Werkmeister Harmonies!
Gravity has orbits too, and since there's nothing to slow you once you start moving, just bumping into someone can send you rolling along in an infinite terrifying somersault, until you're sure you're going to just hyperventilate up your remaining oxygen and die still somersaulting endlessly out into deep space, endlessly endlessly oxygen draining from your panicked huffing --until George Clooney comes to your rescue, time and again, and harrowing near death escapes and space station leap-frogging and immanent metaphysical evaporation come and go but your suits and pods always be pressurized. Sandra Bullock's incredible module hopping routine here has no correlation in any other film except, I think, The Swimmer, but it's just another orbit of cramped coffins--the average American's stations of the cross: bed, car, cubicle, car, couch, bed are interlocked space modules which she swims through in various space suits and in her underwear! But most of all she finds orbits --everything that goes past her is coming back around maybe twice as fast.
Such interlocking elliptical orbits are the Coens stock and trade, as folk musician Llewyn Davis says after "Hang Me Hang Me," the number that opens and closes the film and we have to wonder if it's the same night a, "it was never new and it never gets old." In Gravity, Ryan seeks a space ship or vehicle to escape her orbit, but Davis is the space ship, old and new and never getting old and it's a folk song around and around, just like any musician playing the same song night after night until he needs to suss out new ways to divert himself within it. He can't escape an orbit he doesn't admit exists, because it would mean acknowledging the ceaseless ticking of Britt Marling's spaceship's funeral clock. He's learned to sing over it.
"there's no success like failure,He'd rather quit than make any artistic compromise that might jeopardize his folk failure; the basement clubs he plays in resemble (no doubt intentionally) medieval dungeons, spotlights coming in from above and the side like stray rays of sunshine down into Poe's pendulum swingin' pit -- and Corman's adaptation made in1961 the year this is all set -- no doubt the Coens are champing at the bit for the days of Roderick Usher, I kept expecting Llewyn to catch a screening. Maintaining that allusion would have been nice, but instead the Coens cram in unlikable anachronisms like the dago red working class owner to rob the folk scene of every last ounce of solidarity, as if the Coens don't know the difference between a coffee house and a strip club.
and failure's no success at all" - Robert Zimmerman
But the Coens have never been even close to Altmanesque. People rarely talk in their films and certainly don't overlap like, so we must deal with the subject in isolation, ala Kubrick, forcing us to wonder: are they making movies about alienation BECAUSE they hate crowded ensemble cast naturalism, or the other way around. They make Llewyn into Susan Alexander Kane, driven by an inner Orsons seeking the bubble reputation even into the canon of indifference. There is, after all, only one Oscar Levant. So as Don Draper would say, what is the benefit?
But there are oases --the kindness of the bohemian 'Lovahs'-style Columbia professor academics is timeless, so is the existential aura of the Coen Bros-brand Old Testament god-playing which this time around is rather merciful. They are still finding ways to insert quotes and themes from O Brother Where Art Thou's source text, Homer's Odyssey into Sullivan's Travels-style deconstructions of the rich kid reverence for the poor working negro sick and sniffling at three AM dawn or whatever. Homer's gods note that men create for themselves "grief greater than the griefs that fate assigns”-- they also throw their proxy life lines and opportunities so he might throw them each in turn away, such as missing the chance for credit and royalties, cashing in on the cowardly claustrophobia of the above-quoted song for nothing more than a few hundred bucks which he quickly tosses away. For Llewyn, the fear of being stuck up above the planet utterly dependent on a pressurized suit to survive, i.e. famous, is very real because the sun never shines in his current world and he's terrified to find what not being enshrouded by dark clouds might feel like.
Hold on my brother, Paxil is coming!
Moving on -- Bubble Boy (2001) is a round planet onto himself, attracting satellites wherever he bounces. Why is he so much better with people than poor Llewyn? Innocence, man, the naïveté of sheltered bubble child Jimmy Livingston (Jake Gyllenhaal) makes an 'honorable' goal of breaking up an impending marriage between his beloved neighbor Chloe (Marley Shelton) and some sleazy rocker. It's a wish that brings him on his own Candide-like innocent abroad incredible journey -- his pleasant manner and is a rarity to begin with in comedy (it wouldn't be as cool if he was, say, Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider). It works because he's a gorgeous, sweet young fellow --the eyes, Manolo, they never lie. So the bubble is just the shell thrown up by any artistic extrovert who can't quite believe he could ever get a hot girl, regardless of how good he might look to himself in the mirror.
The mirror, Manolo, it a always lie.
In his sweet naïveté, Jimmy is really more like the Justin Timberlake character in Inside Llewyn Davis, the happy alive, gentle, kind fellow, open to the universe's giving because he is giving by nature, so earns the instant karma.Gyllenhaal's charm awe most everyone he meets -- and though sheathed forever--apparently--in his yellow plastic film, he liberates souls wherever he goes, excepting a few, like Zach Galifianakis ticket window, who remains all alone, trapped in his own bubble of a middle-of-nowhere bus terminal.
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| Deeper-reshing |
“A man who has been through bitter experiences and traveled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time” ― Homer, (The Odyssey)
"How his naked ears were torturedI have some problems with Alfonso Cuarón, as underneath his gift for sci fi lurks idealized reverence for a madre's love for her nina that makes John Ford seem like Sam Fuller. I had some deep fundamental problems with santa-de-madre core of Cuarón's Children of Men. Suicide kits made sense in Soylent Green (see my praise of same here) but if there's no more kids there shouldn't be any more overpopulation, just drunken parties. That patented Cuarón sentimental mierda de caballo comes through in the form of Sandra Bullock's telescope designer's haunted past, which enables her to have a few scenes of big emotional crisis and acceptance. It's tacked on baby, like a poster of Rita Hayworth in reverse.
by the sirens sweetly singing" - "Tales of Brave Ulysses" (Creem)
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| Salvation deferred (from top): Rita Hayworth (Bicycle Thieves), Carey Mulligan (Llewyn), Marley Shelton (Bubble Boy) |
What Bicycle Thieves has in spades is a deadpan analysis of the poor person sense of entitlement, oh woe is me, to the point the dad refuses the gifts and advice offered because it conflicts with his idea of himself as a martyr, for example brushing aside the offered ticket for a free spaghetti dinner only to then spend his last few coins on a far less nice-a meal for him and his son. It makes the rich feel better in a way, perhaps, seeing this poor financial planning as evidence of a will to fail --these peasants can't walk away from their conception of themselves as poor and so throw away their chances at wealth (such as the mother paying her lest centavos on a fortune teller, you know, to see if they ever are going to have any money). The Coens stack the deck Vittorio De Sica fashion, and allow for lots of scenes of scruffy Llewyn hitchiking and trudging across the barren landscapes to Chicago to hit up a hotshot owner of the Cape of Horn, a big dusky club bedecked, like the Lamplight, with posters and memoranda. There's a lot of that memoranda here, a sense that the winsome wand of folk history shall not upon poor Llewyn's shoulder tap, with good reason. He's a oglum tempo pony, destined for the two for a dollar bin underneath the good stuff at Princeton Record Exchange. So there's no emotion, only perfectly modulated voice and guitar, rich with the idea he's impressing his listeners with the ability to fake 'realness.'
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| Brave Ulysses. aboard spaceship Glum Folkie |
It's the body, in the end, that is the prison: its incessant whining for oxygen, its overreaction to desired stimuli in a self-sabotage loop; all the illusions of permanence it creates-- one magnificent gesture, unzipping the bubble to kiss the Chloe in BB; going over the cliff hand and hand rather than surrendering to the law, sticking your tongue out to receive that holiest of tab communions in HAIR, or throwing caution to the wind to rescue a cat, or even just preparing for your immanent death alone in an airless capsule, surrendering one's corporeality to get that last minute mirage of freedom, that's the one decision that actually makes a difference.
Egoic fear keeps us locked into our breathing patterns on instinct, huffing that oxygen shit down like it's water. Shit will fuck you up, man, get you addicted to the tree of woe like a masochist Conan. Become an oxygen junky and become a coward when death beckons. Why can't we all be like Jake Gideon and just float into the warm body bag embrace of Jessica Lange? Instead we're slaves to our lungs. We're descended via evolution from those who feared death, not the good dying young. We are the spawn of cowards who survived and procreated as a last ditch effort to stave off the reaper, and who reincarnate as soon as they can to try it again and again. Our genes themselves are afraid of floating in that clear black ether, you know, like a MAN would -- rejoining into the seamless endless lotus blossoming of the crown chakra like a cliff diver.
As I write this a rerun of SNL is playing on the TV behind me, it's Cee-Lo singing "Forget You." And suddenly the inescapable loop of karma clicks back in place like the revolution of the planet finally caught itself up back on the tape loop; any musician lucky enough to have a big hit (such as Cee-Lo's) is compelled then for the rest of his life to play that same song, the same way, stuck in amber, frozen in time to the one breakthrough moment, to let its original potency be distilled, pasteurized, for mass consumption. Let's Spend Some Time Together Now!
From there it's all downhill, to the eventual burying and VH1 resurrection. This is the brilliance of the digital tape. Even now we should be able to find Llewyn Davis' entire early 60s output with a few key words entered into Spotify, if he existed. We can recapture the feeling of those coffee houses through the countless live-in-the-West-Village recordings of the era, all remastered onto digital, a time when people could smoke indoors, were trusted to make their own decisions. But in doing so we see that Llewyn's world, where everyone waits in hushed reverence for him to finish his mundane songs, is strictly inside his own bubble, a prison of a thousand dimensions, one that paralyzes even Sandra Bullock's astronaut in a holding pattern rotation.
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| Reflections of / the way life used us. |
pulsing amniotic godhead, the orb, the giant egg of vibrational energy that is the sum total of all that is and has been and will be.
If you could look behind and ahead at the same time, you'd see that where you floated from is where you going to; it's not travel as we understand it in a 3-D space time context. You're on a different orbit now, a shorter one, the next track in on the holy mandala spinning LP wheel of life. That's all there is to it, you wind up right where you started. The track was always there, right next to the previous one, it's not like you ever changed albums, you just got conned into believing the first track was all there was. It's not like we die and go somewhere and come back, it's all the same life, because all this time you've just been sitting there in a lotus position, on a mattress or chair in your room, breathing and humming and that's all; you're just a vibration, a wave matrix. Chant long enough, resonate deep enough and you can untangle yourself completely back into the infinite AUM. The ultimate journey for Sandra Bullock's frightened astronaut is ultimately this. It doesn't involve having to be nice to external people; even George Clooney's fellow astronaut eventually seems to morph into the fabric of her psyche, animus as final gatekeeper to the divine; Bullock's real journey is the spiritual one, out in space no one can hear you whine, panic, argue, bargain, hyperventilate, or cast blame. There's no higher mom to cry to; the great thing about Bullock's master class performance here is that her gradual five stages process is so palpable we can almost feel the moments she begins to let go not just of her attachment to life but to her morbid attachment to death as well.
“History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.” ― James Joyce, (Ulysses)
There's only two beings who really wake up from history in this strange world, those in love or on drugs, and meditation-doers-tryers -- or even better, all three at once. Such a trio is a great armor -- Jimmy in Bubble Boy, a weird holy power is given as the ego's fear response is short circuited and it dissolves in a rush of pleasure and obsession and giddiness and loss of appetite that transcends all the concrete skies and yellow depressive bubbles that separate our senses from the fullness of the world. As the Coens seem more concerned with torturing their heroes it's up to us to instill the hope, to reach into the screen with our compassion in ways we don't have to with the holy Cuarón, or in the bouncing Bubble Boy. The difference is all within, baby --it's your perceptions alone... or in the words of Eliot:
"We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison"
The goal isn't to just not think of a key (almost impossible if you're told not to), but for us to stop thinking of ourselves as separate from the prison walls, the warden, the bars, the cot. You can still be yourself, but you are also your neighbor. You are also the world. Buenos Aires. is your right foot. Your urine stream is as Niagara Falls. Why not? That is letting go... that is what we mean, the obliteration of the phony separations... this is true peace.
And we will fall.
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