cross my heart

Two of my earliest memories involve lying. I can't be any older than five in either of them, and already I'm compromising truth for convenience. In one case, I lifted a dollar bill from my mother's purse and claimed I'd found the money behind the Christmas tree. In the other, I pocketed a keychain -- it had a small boat that floated from top to bottom as you tilted a transparent plastic tube -- I found while my family was visiting friends. In each case I was caught out, and in each case I lied like a trooper to cover the crime.

I'd like to say this is proof that lying comes naturally to all people, but it's probably closer to the truth to say that it came naturally to me. I'd also like to say that I learned my lesson from these formative busts, but if I did it was that to learn to lie more effectively. I simply needed more practice.

Throughout my life, I've lied in a manner I like to think is consistent with the way most people lie, but maybe that's just a rationalization. Not that I lie a lot, just that I do whenever the circumstances seem to call for it, and those circumstances have changed over the years. As a kid, I tended to lie to get something I wanted, to keep something I took, or to protect myself from getting into trouble, which was only frequently made worse when the lie was exposed.

As an adolescent, I lied about missing classes, about why I was out so late, about whether I was high, and in order to convince people, girls usually, that I was a better person than I was. Part of my lying was about status, and the rest a cowardly extension of the old self-protection racket.

As an adult, I tend to lie less than ever, and I wish I could say that it's because I've now got the moral fabric of an army surplus pup tent, but the truth is it's just easier not too. If age has taught me anything about situational ethics, it's that you should only lie if you're prepared to keep lying to protect the first lie. That's work, and who needs more work when when your hair's already grey and every good night's sleep is a blessing worth weeping over? The conscience is a formidable adversary, and only gets more so  as you grow older. Why feed the bastard? Besides, the game is up when you realize the only lie that really sticks is one one you tell yourself.

I still love lying, just not my own, and not so much in real life. I'm fascinated by it, and to me there are fewer more inherently gripping spectacles than watching someone attempting to navigate their way through life on a tank full of unadulterated bullshit. In itself, lying may be the most revealing form of social discourse. It reveals the limits of our sacrifice to the greater good, the limits of our comfort in just being ourselves, the shape of our fears, anxieties and desires, and the exact point where the interests of society lose out to pure self-interest. It's humanity distilled, that is, and the very struggle to stay honest may be the single most important process defining how we live. It's the leash on our animal instincts, and the tether by which we're tied to all those other bamboozlers, hustlers, snake-oil pedlars and conscience-strugglers we share this big dirty ball with.

I think this explains why I can't get enough of characters -- in the fictional sense -- who lie like rugs. Over the past few years, I've been glued to certain TV series, like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Dexter, who have at their centre people whose lives are so steeped in bullshit they can't even smell it any more: it's become the medium of their existence, the default mechanism for even the most basic forms of human interaction. They lie because they can't live without it and because they feel they'd cease to exist if they told the truth. They're the liars who need to buy their own pitch.

As some of the best TV always has, these are series that inhabit the zone between public and private life, or the chasm separating the public persona from the domestic one. Tony Soprano is a struggling suburban dad whose psychopathic tendencies serve him well in business and at home, even if these same tendencies tend to permit more honesty in the former sphere than the latter. At work, he can kill, steal, fuck and terrorize with impunity because that's the job description. But at the end of the day he's got to pretend, and it's in that act that the real guy is revealed. The contradiction is what gives the drama its heat, freight and fascinating ambivalence: you root for this guy because he's really just trying to be as decent a dad as his world permits, even if the cost is the spiritual integrity of everyone in his orbit. If there's a real bitter tragedy at the heart of Sopranos, it's Tony's wife's gradual acceptance of the lie on which her marriage is based.

As an advertising man, Mad Men's Don Draper is in the bullshit business, and no small part of the reason he's so brilliant at it is because he himself is the product of one big lifelong sales pitch: he's not what he seems, and when he goes home the very thing that has made him a star in the soap-selling game is what makes his otherwise idyllic suburban family a pure wallpaper job. His normality, or its appearance, is entirely erected on a foundation of smoke. That his business rewards what his personal life condemns is the program's structuring irony: Mad Men is as much about the role of institutionalized bullshit-making in American society as it is anything else, and the historical setting of the early 1960s allows it to track the transformation of American culture from idealism to cynicism in the decade that dawned on Kennedy and died with Nixon. (Incidentally, both these men are proven liars. The difference lies in the fact that no one wanted to know that Kennedy lied and everybody knew that Nixon did. What a difference that decade made.)

The saga of Walter White in the extraordinarily ballsy Breaking Bad is the story of how a good man slowly turns bad, but how the incremental process of lying gradually renders him incapable of returning to the life that his lying ostensibly served to protect. A family man who turns to methamphetamine cooking as a means to provide for his family once he's diagnosed with cancer, Walt ultimately succumbs to a disease far more aggressive, voracious and incurable. His is a kind of spiritual cancer that kills far more than the body of the diseased, it poisons everyone around him. Like Sopranos and Mad Men, the real story here is the madness incurred in the process of protecting some ideal image of domestic harmony: these guys lie because they think that's the only thing that will maintain family stability, a suggestion that renders the very idea of family stability a kind of cancer at the heart of a desperate normality.

Dexter Morgan is a killer who's learned to behave normally because that's what it takes to keep on killing. In this program, the psychopath thrives on the contradiction between normality and perversion, and the means by which he surfs so gracefully over the gap is his lifelong skill at the art of bullshit. And he's our hero for it. It's not so much Dexter's "Dark Defender" code that makes us root for him -- he's a killer who only kills the deserving -- it's the constant process of having to conceal himself. What we love is watching him continue to function not only undetected but loved: he's a terrifically magnetic guy with a boyish kind of idealism, and we accept not only his murderousness but his dishonesty because it serves in the interest of protecting someone we've really come to like. And that may be the program's most subversively seductive achievement: it reminds us how much lying and bloodshed we'll forgive provided it's in the interest of likability. In that alone lies a helluva tale: how we came not only to live in but to love our own bullshit. It's the story of advertising, politics, consumerism, celebrity, virtuality, cosmetic surgery, spin and everything we currently call culture. It's said that honesty is its own reward, and that's certainly, um, true. The catch is that lying pays out in cash.

some kinda fun

There is no band I saw as often or as avidly as Teenage Head. Between 1978 and '81, years I also saw Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Stranglers, the Stones, Simple Minds, Peter Tosh, UB40, The Vibrators, Bruce Springsteen, The Pretenders, Iggy Pop, Ultravox and a very green U2 in an Ottawa bar (where they played 'I Will Follow' three times for lack of encore material), I must have seen the Head nearly twenty times.

There were nights when they might have sloppy, and nights when the rowdiness in the crowd threatened to turn ugly, but they were never less than full-on smokin'-hot balls-out  fun. Certainly the most consistently fun band I ever saw, definitely the most fun Canadian band since Confederation, and maybe one of the most fun rock bands ever.


I'm not just talking good time here. Because 'good time', especially in those days of collegiate pretension, import-only record collecting, NME-reading, punk authenticity stand-offs and general post-teen white middle-class seriousness, there was something very close to uncool to just having a good time. Music had to be somehow important,  confrontational, ugly and stripped to the sinews. Fun was something much less committed music listeners had, something the new music that mattered had a kind duty to oppose. It was Costello singing of radio's mass market suckage, The Clash roaring about class warfare, Talking Heads' cerebral East Village minimalism, U2 bleeding the Irish Troubles all over the lip of the stage, Springsteen's lonesome highway howl.

God what dreary gits we were. And hypocritical -- at least I was. While my public music appreciation persona was all about the punk purity, in private I was just a suburban rec-room riff rat, every bit as likely to air guitar to Tom Petty, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC or The Cars as soberly shred my ear drums to 'White Riot' or 'Holiday in the Sun'. Secretly, I deeply dug The Eagles.

So along comes Teenage Head and completely gives the game away. Because they looked just punk enough to pass -- at least lead singer Frankie Venom, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Transformer-era Lou Reed, did -- they easily infiltrated the domain of skinny ties, Marlboros and spiky hair, and because they generated a thunderous runway take-off noise, they passed muster as agents of misrule. But the ruse was exposed by the dance. Within just a song or two, say the foundation-shaking You're Tearing Me Apart or Top Down, these Hamilton high school rejects never failed to get even the most statuary of punk poseurs on the floor and full-on frantic.

Inevitably, they got called punk, and just as inevitably, they got called on being called punk. I mean Frankie Venom might have a suitably threatening moniker and death's-head glare, and he might make a nightly habit of leaping from the stage onto teetery, beer-soaked tables (at least one of which I happened to be sitting at), but where was the anger? And, despite the fact these guys were from Steeltown, the country's toughest working class burg and smokestack capital, where was the revolt? But that was to theorize well out of earshot of the propulsively catchy 'Picture My Face' or (the best-named Canadian rock song of all time) 'Teenage Beer Drinkin' Party'. If you were anywhere near the songs themselves, you were probably having way too much fun to give a shit.

Besides, there might be something in this propensity for joyful ass-shaking noise that is the purest expression of bona fide Canadian punk, if such a categorical conceit really even matters. What I mean by that is that the most enjoyable Canadian rock music has always been rather proudly brainless and solar plexus based, party music for the heedless hoser. I'm thinking of much of The Guess Who here, all of BTO, the best of April Wine, the melody (if not the lyrics) of 54-40 and The Tragically Hip, Sloan at their power pop goofiest, even the early pocket-Springsteen Bryan Adams. It's music drink beer and barf too, or play so loud in your car the dashboard vibrates and your smokes fall on the floor. This is the Great Canadian Sonic Release (and I suppose I'd best include Rush, despite the fact their music is about as danceable as the sound of an old internet dial-up connection), a ready-for-the-weekend assault on reason and responsibility that's only really as dangerous and revolutionary as losing your wallet on the way for an after hours all-dressed slice.

(It's probably not coincidental that the worst shellacking I ever took was on Bank St. in Ottawa following a Teenage Head gig. We were jumped by four guys exiting a country music club -- Ottawa was not exactly a punk-positive place at the time -- and I didn't even know until the next day that my nose was broken. Picture my face, indeed.)

In other words, Teenage Head -- whose named was derived from a classic power pop anthem by The Flamin' Groovies -- allowed you to play punk while really and truly just rocking the fuck on. Their songs, which were insanely hooky garage-rock nuggets derived from Eddie Cochran, The Troggs, the New York Dolls, The Ramones, The Archies, Slade, the Groovies and all manner of chewy electrified bubblegum, rang through your head in such an insistent manner that you had to go back and hear them again, if only to dislodge them your skull. (It never worked, not even with a broken nose.) And they never, ever let you down. Even if you saw them on a Wednesday night in Barrie which, come to think of it, I probably did.

I remember I bought their first album (Teenage Head) in 1979, which I purchased from Sam the Record Man at Yonge and Dundas in Toronto on the same day I got the first Police album. (Which I still love and listen to, despite everything Sting has done subsequently to compromise the legacy.) I rushed home and put it on, ready for a sonic boom that never happened. The production on the record was so crappy that even Picture My Face sounded enervated, and heralded a prolonged spotty studio career that plagued the band throughout their recording career. Indeed, up until the Head re-recorded a number of their vintage shit-kickers with ex-Ramone Marky in 2003 (released on CD four years later, and within a year of the death of Frankie Venom in October, 2008), nobody seemed to know how to bottle that lightning in a studio. Which only meant you had to be there, now more than ever: you had to see them live to know what they were capable of, and to let people know that that sorta so-so Hamilton band you heard now and again on the radio was only a pale whisper of the real live thing.

In 1991, I was working for CBC Radio as host of show called Prime Time. We did a week long series on the legacy of punk music, and one of the show's producers managed to track down Frankie. At the time, he was working as painter on a construction site in Toronto, and he showed up in the studio in splattered overalls. He was a lovely guy: articulate, funny, smart and seemingly devoid of regret. The band might  not have attained the heights it deserved, he said, and it might not have ever done in the studio what it could on a stage, but it had a pretty amazing time while it lasted. And he was genuinely touched that I was still such a slobberingly devoted fan. "We never got much interest from the CBC," he said.

The band I saw more times than I can remember formed in 1975 in Hamilton. It consisted of Frank Kerr (Mr. Venom in embryo), Gord Lewis, Nick Stipanitz and Steve Mahon, four guys who had met while slacking in the halls Westdale High in Hamilton. It worked hard, played (musically and, I'm guessing, otherwise) hard and, maybe because it was Canada, never really got the rep it deserved. And on it rolled: past the brief instant of infamy precipitated by the so-called "Punk Rock Riot" that occurred at Ontario Place in 1980, the near-fatal car crash of Gord, the departure of Frankie, the ill-fated makeover (to "The Teenage Heads") by a dumbly cautious American record label, and all the endless dissolutions, reconfigurations and rumours of imminent -- and this time, this time, proper -- recordings.

Which happened, actually, with the Teenage Head With Marky Ramone album. A collection of re-recorded songs done right -- yes, this is the Picture My Face I always wanted to hear -- it's easily the closest thing you'll ever hear to what the band once sounded like in the flesh. And thank god they got the chance, despite the fact the album's release was, to say the least, muted. Indeed, I didn't even know it existed until October 2008, when I returned from a weekend in New York and learned that Frankie had died, at age 52, a few days before.  I instantly downloaded the thing and played it. Over and over and over again. Fuck, I thought, somebody finally got it. Before it was too late, but too late to get the punks up off their asses and dancing again.

Apropos of nothing but fun -- big fun, serious fun, sublime fun -- I guess what I need to say is this: all hail the mighty Head.

thumpa thumpa

My wife and I like to watch TV in a large black leather chair. It's not quite a double, but big enough for a cozy squeeze. We were into the second season of AMC's Breaking Bad -- brilliant, nasty fun -- when the episode called "Grilled" came up. I won't tell you what goes on, because getting there is considerably more than half the fun, but suffice to say a very, very unpleasant character finally gets his in a suitably unpleasant and deeply satisfying way. ("Let him bleed," is what's said afterward.) It doesn't happen quickly, but then again nothing in Breaking Bad does. It may be one of the most glacially paced all-stops-out TV crime thrillers ever, but make no mistake: when it comes to thrills, Breaking Bad kicks like the methamphetamines the show's lead character cooks.

"Wow, you must have really enjoyed that," my wife, who had been leaning against me, said when it was over. "Your heart was racing."

It was. And this is nothing new. My reaction to movies, at least of a certain kind, has always been as much physical as emotional or intellectual: my heart pumps, my body shifts, my limbs twitch. Sometimes, during an especially satisfying fistfight -- as in, say, the climactic bare-knuckle brawl of Walter Hill's Hard Times (1975, seen at age 17), my own clenched fists move in a kind of dopey mirror pantomime.

(Only boxing has ever a similarly limb-twitching effect, and then only boxing practiced by Muhammad Ali during the '70s. Never before and not since. I'm still working on that one.)

I can't help this. Pure motor response. But I do know one thing. Nothing will get the body going in unconscious response to what's on screen quite like a particular kind of violence. Note I did not say violence, for it isn't all violence that sets the kettle a-boil. In fact, most violence passes by me with all the impact of scenery flashing by through a car window, with no more discernible impact than the vague subliminal thump of Lady Gaga on a shopping mall muzak playlist.

What does the trick is payback. The kind of violence which is perpetrated on somebody who themselves have perpetrated unspeakable acts of cruelty, torture and gratuitous bodily harm, and who finally get what's coming to them in a suitably gruesome, elaborate, meticulous and ritualistically drawn-out fashion. This is what pulls my body into the act.

I wish I could remember more specific scenes than I currently do, but hopefully a generic description will suffice at least to let you click to what I'm talking about. It's a scene where the protagonist finally, after a number of failed near-attempts and near fatal encounters, turns the tables on the psycho-killing, puppy-torturing, sexually-sadistic, shit-eating grinning and usually under-shaved antagonist and makes him suffer a little dose of his own medicine before drawing last breath. And sometimes it is just a tiny dose, just enough so that the bastard knows he's fully aware of the fact he's being cooked before the job is done.

It's a scene you'll see in quite a few crime movies, especially if they feature Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood, a fair number of horror movies -- although, for some reason, these never jazz me the way other payback scenes do -- and it's pretty much a hot-branded staple of the western.

Revenge is the western's primary source of narrative horsepower (more, much more, on that in future posts), and it's never sweeter than when perpetrated under a big sky on someone who kicks up a cloud of dust as they go down. But sweet and satisfying it must be, because that's a sign that a western has done it's job: it has not only justified the act of violence but made it necessary to satisfying narrative closure. It's made you root for it, and it has successfully convinced you that the only reasonable way of settling things is by righteously kicking some  high holy ass.

Could part of this be sexual? Jesus, it probably is, but I wouldn't want to go to far with that. Because I do believe that it truly is cathartic, and therefore probably usefully so. What I get is a sense of release during these sequences, and this is what, if they're working properly, they're engineered to do: to open the valve that has been slowly tightened for the preceding ninety or one-hundred some minutes, and release with a long sigh of escaping tension -- or bursting hiss of psychic steam -- the deliberately compressed emotional material built up so methodically in the process of getting there. Come to think of it, a cigarette would sometimes be nice under the circumstances.

(A thought. You know what would have made Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ an immensely more fun, satisfying and, dare I say it, honest movie?: if Jesus had rolled away that stone after three days and gone to beat holy crap out of a Roman legion or two: "I'll be right up, Dad. But first I've got some business to take care of..." I mean, you just know Mel's got that movie in him.)

But then it's done for me. I don't walk out into the streets spoiling for a fight or ready to pile heaping servings of whup-ass on anyone, and I never have. If anything, I'm as conflict-averse as a monk (although motivated less by religious principle than sheer cowardice), and a truly do believe that ultimately revenge is not only pointless but poisonous. The desire for it pollutes the soul and saps it of spirit, and usually produces nothing more effectively than its own blowback. In life, and eye for an eye just ends in blindness.

But on screen? It's the best. Thrilling, satisfying, stirring and almost transcendentally transporting. And physical. It gets my body going. So call it what you will: sick, sad, dubious, disturbing, or just plain weird, but there it is. There may be nothing I enjoy more, on the sheer level of vicarious joy, than seeing somebody deserving get theirs. This is probably why I have an unusually overdeveloped appreciation of Charles Bronson movies, and why the western has held me in thrall for so long: it takes me to the frontier of my civility, where the wild things are only the desires dare to go. However, it is probably a good thing that I never got into video games. My heart probably would've given out years ago.

the rubber burner

I took a break from work my usual way the other night, by pulling a movie more or less randomly from my shelf. (By the way, when I was a kid, my dream was to have a home movie theatre. In this regard anyway, the future's been okay by me.) It turned out to be a British DVD I bought a few years ago, a 1967 movie called Robbery.

Funny thing is, Robbery was directed by Peter Yates (born in England in 1929), and Mr. Yates is somebody I've given more than a little thought to over the past few years. (Don't ask. That's me.) It began with my modestly epiphanic viewing of Bullitt a few years back. It was probably the fifteenth or so time I'd seen that movie since my father took me (at age ten) back in 1968, but this time something clicked that hadn't before: that movie is all about Steve McQueen's eyes.

It's true. Just watch it. Apart from that monumentally perfect car chase sequence, very little happens in Bullitt. A police-protected mobster appears to be killed at the beginning, and McQueen's Lt. Frank Bullitt ventilates the real mobster at the San Francisco airport at the end. In between, apart from that game-changing Mustang rubber-burner, it's mostly McQueen laying back and looking. No part of McQueen's body moves nearly as much as his eyes, which survey crime scenes, people's faces, the corner store frozen food section, and the road ahead with equal degrees of probing intensity. Yates understands this. Note how much of the movie consists either of close-ups of McQueen or shots where McQueen is standing slightly out of centre just looking on. And here's the thing, at least if you really want to understand why Bullitt is the movie most often cited as the one defining the McQueen Cool or how to direct a movie around a true star's persona: even when he's just looking, even though he may not be saying or doing anything, you can't take your eyes off his. The movie is anchored in the man's silent gravity, the result being that just about anything he does -- and he really doesn't do much more than his job -- becomes a dramatic event of transfixing interest. Everything about him is detached and cool but the eyes: they burn with concentration. The thrill of watching Bullitt is watching McQueen watch.

A year or so after that, I watched Yates' 1973 adaptation of George V. Higgins' The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a movie I'd seen parts of on TV some years before. It was recently released on DVD courtesy of the dangerously reliable Criterion Collection label, and this time I was welded in place. Once again, not a whole lot really takes place in the movie, at least not if you consider 'action' to consist of events involving objects moving at great velocity toward some kind of collision. Indeed, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is damned talky, and almost Europeanly so: people speak in restaurants, bars and cars, on telephones, street corners and windblown parking lots.

The guy doing the most talking is Robert Mitchum, age 55 at the time of shooting, who plays the title role: a guy out on parole who doesn't want to go back to jail, and who is providing information, in exchange for leniency, to the Boston cops about the wiseguys Eddie is a street-level gunrunner for. So talk is embedded into the ritual and routine: the movie's all about negotiating angles and playing your best game face, trying to lie effectively while reading the lies you're being told. So, once again, Yates is making a movie about faces, and while the movie is packed with some of the period's most seedily expressive -- Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco -- none comes near the creased, leathery elegance of Mitchum's. He's heartbreakingly good. Doomed from the gitgo as you know he must be -- it's 1973, after all -- he slouches from scene to scene with a final-inning, faint hope determination that he might actually thwart the fate he knows in his bones will probably prevail. But it's all he can do.

This is another astutely-directed, 20-20 sharp movie about star persona, but where Bullitt pulled the various strands of prior Steve McQueen-ness into the ultimate expression of the star's singular cool -- something Don Siegel would do, in the same city and with another lone wolf cop, with Eastwood in Dirty Harry -- Eddie Coyle draws from Mitchum's formidable iconic noir gravitas and pours it into the battered existential receptacle of this sadly stale-dated smalltime crook. Watching this guy come to terms with his own impending irrelevancy is almost unbearably sad, and it make you realize how much of the Mitchum aura has always been steeped in doom. Eddie Coyle is another unassumingly stunning movie from Yates, fully in command of its atmospheric eloquence and unspoken undercurrents, and so quiet and seemingly incidental in its execution you barely notice how tightly engineered the damned thing is.

Then comes Robbery -- at least to my attention, it was actually made before Bullitt and Coyle -- and it's very nearly as good. Opening like the other two movies with a crime in process -- a heart-thumping daylight robbery-and-car-chase on London's teemingly crowded mod-era streets -- Robbery then gets down to its real business, which turns out really to be, well, business: how the heisting of a Royal Mail train is planned, architectured and executed by a conspiracy of thieves led by the falcon-eyed Stanley Baker (in another mostly silent, largely glance-based performance) who almost get away with it.

Perhaps because it was based on the notorious 'Great Train Robbery' then so familiar to British audiences, Robbery largely disavows character, context or motivation -- but with that kind of cash, who needs it? -- in favour of pure, methodical process. Like some of the best crime movies of Don Siegel, Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot and Michael Mann, it's really an exercise in observing men at work: how plans turn on intricate processes of concentration and collaboration, and how you can get to made to root for anybody provided you're fully sympathetic with the seriousness of their dedication and skills.

It's interesting that both Robbery and Bullitt were criticized for the seemingly lackadaisical nature of the way they handled their few moments of heterosexual interface. Both feature sequences in which the protagonists go home to their woman (Joanna Pettet and Jacqueline Bisset respectively), only to be implored once again to give up the dangerous life and settle down. These passages have both been dismissed as half-hearted, obligatory and sexist, but there's another way of looking at them: they underscore just how supremely comfortable, in control and natural these guys are when they're working -- the ultimate measure of a certain kind of man's worth -- and how the domestic realm leaves them feeling like strangers in their own skin. If these scenes feel awkward, that may be the point: home is not where men like this belong. But then look at Mitchum's at-home moments with his wife (Helena Carroll), a woman he clearly loves, aches for having hurt and is willing to risk his increasingly worthless life to bring some -- any -- degree of peace and comfort.

Peter Yates, who's now 81 years old, made other kinds of movies than crime dramas -- Breaking Away, The Dresser, The House on Carroll Street -- but his crime dramas were so good you're kind of left wishing that's all he'd made, or wonder what he might've done if he'd come along earlier and, like Siegel, Sam Fuller or Anthony Mann, cut his teeth on hard-as-nails studio B-movies. This trio of crime movies are especially impressive for their restraint, their vivid sense of location, their immense sensitivity to action-as-character, and their formidable respect for the pure getting-done of jobs.

I think that, as much as anything else, is why I love -- L.O.V.E.: love -- a good crime movie. (By that, I include film noir and gangster films.) What compels me is the subtle luring to the dark side: the understanding I can get of men doing things I'd never dream of doing, the sly seduction of my affinities toward solipsistic pragmatism and purely situational ethics. And, if I was compelled -- let's say at gunpoint -- to make a categorical thematic distinction between crime movies and westerns -- my other favourite kind of movie -- it would be this: crime dramas are about ethics, and westerns are about morality. Crime dramas are about the codes of professionalism by which you conduct your business no matter what that business may be, and westerns are about what you're willing to do -- i.e., kill -- in the name of what you think is right.

In their own ways, all of these movies are ultimately about cool. Not so much in the sense of style or attitude as in the sense of doing what must be done and, without compromise or second thought, doing it as best as you can. That's a pretty good description of what McQueen, Mitchum and Stanley Baker are up to in these movies, as well as the approach taken by the guy who's directing them.

the accidental memory

This is how it goes sometimes.

My friend Fred came by the other night for dinner. Fred's about a dozen years older than I am, and he likes to talk about old movies, TV shows and radio tunes with me because I'm one of the few people who gets what he's talking about. But what he likes best is when I do his remembering for him.

"I remember there used to be this guy," he was saying, "who was on all the old variety shows. He was sort of dumpy, had a really low-key delivery, and always talked about how shitty his life was."

"Jackie Vernon," I said.

"Who?"

"Um, Jackie Vernon?"

"My god, that's it." Fred said. "I've been trying to remember that guy's name for years. Jackie Vernon. Christ. How in hell do you remember that?"

It's a really good question, and the answer is I really don't know. But it happens every once in a while. Somebody says something about somebody they saw on something years ago, they begin to describe that somebody, and boom! I come up with the name.

Often it's just as surprising to me as it is to the person struggling for the name. I've done that with songs, band names, TV theme songs, comic characters, Saturday morning cartoons shows, and more TV and movie actors than I'd like to admit. The weird thing is, the answer tends to come rolling out of my mind and off my tongue like ping pong ball at a bingo game. Most of the time, I'm not even aware that I remembered the name until I blurt it out. It's like I forget I remembered, if you know what I mean.

A couple of thoughts occur about this. First of all, the fact that it's always otherwise useless pop cultural ephemera that suddenly springs from my mental vaults probably says as much about those storage facilities as it does what they store. How is it I can remember stuff like the theme from Top Cat cartoons and the entire cast of Petticoat Junction and not my parents' wedding anniversary? (That, by the way, is not a joke. The very same week I coughed up the Jackie Vernon nugget my father reminded me that the next day was his wedding anniversary. "I figured I'd tell you so you could call your mother," he added.)

What kind of brain prioritizes the retention of half-century old junk TV over family milestones? Or remembers the specific theatre in which it first encountered Count Yorga, Vampire but not how many years its brother has been married? Mine. My kind of brain.

I mean, I realize that this stuff has a power to insinuate itself deeply in the pliant human cortex, but my brain sucks it up like Bounty ("The quicker picker upper!"). I can't tell you who my best friend was in grade two, but I remember what time Crusader Rabbit was on. Leave me alone for a while and I'll come up with the channel.

For reasons that probably qualify as psychotherapeutically treatable, my mind has always glommed onto the most insanely trivial pop cultural effluvia. Some it is stored, remembered and summoned consciously -- like all those directors, bands, comic artists and TV shows -- but a lot of it gets stored away without any conscious effort. These are the things that lay like little data-mines in my memory, waiting for somebody like Fred to come along and detonate them. They just lie there, waiting to be tripped. And when they are, I always wonder the same thing: "How much stuff is there that will never be sprung? That just sits there like unfertilized milkweed seeds? And why, why do I remember that shit?"

But I do, and when I do it usually leads to this: I not only remember Jackie Vernon, I remember what he looked and sounded like, the little trumpet he used to carry as an odd little prop, the low whiny New York monotone he used to affect. And I remember laughing. I remember I used to love Jackie Vernon, and that I'd always perk up when I heard he was going to be on somebody's variety show. My dad loved him to. We'd both laugh like crazy.

I looked up Jackie Vernon on Wikipedia, and the entry included some typical Vernon stuff, like the story he used to tell about his sad campaign to make a house pet of a watermelon, the time he went to the Grand Canyon only to find it was closed, and how he once went to a fistfight that broke into a hockey game.

Pained self-deprecation was Vernon's schtick, but unlike, say, Rodney Dangerfield, he wasn't frantic. Where Dangerfield always struck a spark of righteous resistance against the forces marshalled to make him miserable (that's why he sweat so much), Vernon was way more philosophically resigned to his fate. He was part Eeyore, part Borscht Belt existentialist, and part Jackie Gleason on downers. He'd walk on stage like a man who'd just been hit twice by the same bus, look out at the audience, and begin: "To look at me now, it's hard to believe I used to be considered a dull guy..."

Like I said, the guy cracked me up. And I almost completely forgot about him until Fred came along and dislodged that particular pebble from my mental asphalt. And then I remembered a lot, and I got to wondering, you know, whatever happened to Jackie Vernon? I mean, he was everywhere in those days when standup was as much a fixture of variety shows as folks who spun plates, women who sang in sparkly evening gowns, circus acts, and thick-banged teen acts "for the youngsters". Along with George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, Henny Youngman, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, the Smothers Brothers and dozens of others, Vernon was part of that constant rotation of comedians who passed through prime time in those days.

(And I must say this: it served a comic much better to be in variety show context -- say between the Dave Clark Five and the June Taylor Dancers -- than one of those wall-to-wall standup shows you see today. That much standup comedy just makes you feel how aggressively, nakedly needy most comics actually are.)

Anyway, Vernon stood out from all these by playing it so quietly. (Newhart was close, but Vernon was way more schlubby and miserable.) When everyone else was whooping and hollering for your attention, he just sat there with his trumpet -- which, as I recall, he almost never played -- and waited to fill the silence with the wheezy sound of his own grief. And it was a riot.

Anyway, Jackie Vernon died in 1987, and these days he's best remembered as the guy who provided the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials that still get annual holiday rotation.   There's a part of me that wishes he was remembered for more than that, but there's also a part of me that remembers that I forgot too. But at least my mind stored the memory in that bizarre pop cult time-release capsule manner it has, and along comes Fred to flick it loose. It's the next best thing to remembering.

magnificent obsession

A conspicuous number of my favourite movies are about men driven, usually over the brink, by obsession: James Stewart in Vertigo, Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, Lee Marvin in Point Blank, Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then there's John Wayne in The Searchers, a movie which is kind of the Moby Dick of movies about obsession. (And what's Moby Dick about? Yup, you go it: a guy completely crazed by that white whale.) With Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese made what is perhaps the ultimate movie trilogy about obsession: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The King of Comedy.

Going back much further, you can trace the damp footprints of movie obsession at least as far as Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, Dana Andrews in Laura, Glenn Ford in The Big Heat. Nabokov's Lolita. Just about every western than James Stewart made with Anthony Mann -- The Man From Laramie, Winchester '73, The Far Country, The Naked Spur, Bend of the River -- is about a man driven to the frontiers of sanity by the need to get even. But those are westerns, and since westerns are largely about rationalizing violence, there's no motivator like revenge, and nothing primes the fuel pump of obsession quite like the desire to see your enemies -- who have shot you, beaten you, stolen your horse and left you for dead -- choking on the dirt they're about to be buried in.

But revenge is obsession boiled to its essence, and there have been some terrific movies -- not all of them westerns -- about men who unhinge themselves to get what they think is justified. This is Lee Marvin in Point Blank. Sprung from prison and hellbent on getting those who double-crossed and set him up, he'll stop at nothing, including the gradually dawning realization that he's never going to get the satisfaction of fulfillment. But here's the thing, by which I mean the thing that makes obsession so compelling in the first place: he keeps going anyway. He's got no choice.

That's what I find so deeply, irresistibly, seductively compelling about these movies. They're ultimately about passion pushed to the point of insanity. Think of John Wayne's thunderous racist anger in The Searchers, Dreyfuss's lunatic, family-shattering pursuit of an extraterrestrial vision in Close Encounters, Brando's seething pain in Last Tango, or the gradual psychotic storm brewing inside Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Aptly then, it was Martin Scorsese who once said something about moviemaking as the art of making your audience every bit as obsessed with a story as you are. Once you've done that, you can take them anywhere.

The best movies about obsession take us way out of our comfort zone. They do this by permitting us to experience the protagonist's drive from both the outside and the inside. So while we grow quite naturally nervous as De Niro's Travis Bickle begins to take on more and more indications of imminent internal apocalypse in Taxi Driver, you're still more than a little sympathetic toward this sadsack, maladroit loser -- and Vietnam vet -- who's really just trying to find a way to fit in. Same thing with Stewart -- whose consistent brilliance in borderline nutjob roles is way too under-appreciated -- as Scotty in Vertigo. At first you feel for the guy -- I mean, he's Jimmy Stewart for chrissakes -- but then a crack starts to open between us and him, and it only widens as the movie goes on. His pursuit of a dead woman, and his re-making of a living one in her image (both played by Kim Novak), is hardly the stuff of conventional romantic love. It's delusional, cruel and flat-out, full-on crazy.

By necessity if not by nature, these movies are all about loners, or at least men who become so as their particular pathology entrenches itself more deeply in their being. Although he's managed to bring the girl, kidnapped by Comanche warriors he despises so intensely, home without killing her -- which remains a highly likely possibility right up until the last moment -- Wayne's character in The Searchers turns back toward the frontier before the door closes on him. You can't let him and he knows it. This guy is fundamentally dangerous and beyond domestication, and must be sent back into the wilderness from whence he came. That smile on Brando's face at the end of Last Tango gives away the relief he probably feels at being gutshot. After all, we've already seen the depths of his rage, resentment, misathropy and self-loathing, and it's been a whole lot more riveting than pretty. When Maria Schneider's gun discharges into Brando's stomach, he's saved the bother of killing himself.

So it should come as not surprise that I loved David Fincher's Zodiac a couple of years ago. Not only was it about the pursuit of a real-life serial killer -- in itself a rather obsessive sort of hobby -- but it focused on the ultimately bottomless vortex of clues, rumours, riddles, tips and dead end alleys the killers' pursuers are ultimately, irreversibly and fruitlessly pulled into. The further they go with their investigation the more obsessed they become, despite the fact, and very likely even because of it, they're never going to catch their killer. Zodiac is about professional dedication as a kind of pathology, the endless pursuit of the un-capturable prey. They're chasing a ghost.

Bleak? Well, I guess so, but bleak is as bleak does. I happen to love these movies, and what I love about them is the way they follow the dead-end logic of their characters as far as they do. Because that's what separates real obsession from just a passing spasm of intemperate fascination or fleeting infatuation: it takes you beyond reason and it cannot be fulfilled. It ultimately becomes the thing itself, far greater and more powerful than its object. It takes over, adjusts the rearview, and begins to drive.

It helps, of course, that I'm an obsessive type myself. Always have been, probably always will be. For better or worse, my relationship to most things has tended to fall in one of two categories: they're either entirely transfixing or of no interest whatsoever. There is no in between. Well, there is -- and that's what keeps me just this side of crazy -- but you get the point. Because when I do get fixated on something, it simply will not let go. It's all I think about, all I want to read about, all I want to write about. Indeed, it's why I do what I do, and what has given a weird kind of direction and momentum to my life. So when I watch these movies they have a built in, doubly irresistible allure: by identifying with the obsession of these characters, I immerse myself in the films' depths like someone sinking into a warm pool. Glub, glub, glub...

Here's just a random list of some of things I've gone overboard for -- and by that, I mean totally preoccupied with -- over the years: The Monkees, Batman comics, Peanuts, Pogo, Planet of the Apes, the Rolling Stones, W.C. Fields, Mad, Planet of the Apes, David Bowie, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Frank Frazetta paperback covers, The Godfather I & II, records, cd, videocassette and DVD collecting, Hank Williams, Converse high-tops, Muhammad Ali, motorcycle jackets, Miles Davis, Richard Nixon, the JFK assassination, the Black Donnellys, Alvin Karpis, Ted Bundy (and other much written about serial killers, who are the creepiest obsessives of them all), Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, punk, soul, funk, country and western,  '60s garage/psychedelic comps, Warner Brothers cartoons, power pop, film noir, Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, The Wire...


So I get these guys, and god knows they get to me. Obsession movies are a magnificent obsession, but only if they follow the logic all the way to the only possible revelation: you never really get what you want, and it doesn't really matter. The desire, the hunger, the appetite, the drive, the need itself. That's the thing.

who's your daddy, luke?

I saw Star Wars a second time the summer of 1977 because I didn't get it the first time. I also wanted to give the movie, which was quickly gaining on full-blown phenomenon status, a fair shake. After all, the first time I'd seen it at a drive-in, and everyone I knew who loved it told me it must be appreciated in a theatre.

I doubted that. The reasons I was underwhelmed had little to do with the venue, which after all had facilitated precisely the kind of pharmaceutical indulgence that one might expect render the movie amazing under just about any circumstances. No, it was the vision of the future -- or past, or whatever it was -- that bugged me. It just seemed, well, dumb.

Let me step back here. I had actually been kind of cranked to see it. Some months previously, Star Wars had been featured in a science fiction/fantasy/horror magazine called Cinefantastique, and the production images and drawing boards included in the story made it look amazing. As technologically ravishing as 2001, it seemed, but with way more violence. How could that go wrong?

But here's what, under a starry sky that summer of '77, I saw: a movie with a Saturday morning cartoon plot, a riot of bad costumes, blow-dryed hair jobs, dorky-looking fuzzball aliens, cardboard-thick performances, Flash Gordon-level dialogue and some of the most asinine character names I'd heard of this side of a Mel Brooks movie. A lone wolf rebel hero named Han Solo? A golden boy space hero named Luke Skywalker? A heavy-breathing black-caped intergalactic death-dealer named -- I kid you not -- Darth Vader? I mean, what the christ was this?

What made the whole thing seem even dumber was the fact that it was, especially for its day, so technically ravishing. It was as though somebody had given Stanley Kubrick's vision-making toolbox to a twelve-year old.

To hopefully bolster my case, we also must consider context. If you were, as I most indisputably was, a movie-fixated nineteen year-old who had just dropped out of journalism school to study film full time -- not all that common an academic pursuit in those days -- you probably would have seen a lot of the movies I had that year. Annie Hall was also released in '77, but so were New York, New York, William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Don Siegel's Telefon, Eraserhead, George Romero's Martin, John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday and Altman's 3 Women. Cassavetes released Opening Night, Alain Resnais made Providence, Satyajit Ray finished The Chess Players and Wim Wenders sprung The American Friend. The Taviani brothers' Padre Padrone arrived, and so did Andrzej Wajda's Man of Iron. And all of these -- I mean every single one of them -- opened and played at commercial theatres. I'm still kind of stunned to think about it.

However snobbish though I may have been, I should stress that I wasn't averse to taking in, nor enjoying, anything simply because it was a success. Far from it. I thought Saturday Night Fever was terrific (and still do), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind was sufficiently mesmerizing to me to qualify as a kind of obsession. (I've probably seen that one about twelve times since.) No, I was perfectly okay with popular provided it was also interesting. And that, when you get right down to it, was what Star Wars wasn't -- at least not at the time. It just wasn't interesting.

But everybody loved it, so I went again.

The result was the same, so I stood by with more than a little amazement in the coming months as George Lucas's movie proceeded to pretty much change the entire game. People were going multiple times, merchandise was selling in stratospheric numbers, anticipation for sequels was surging, and just about every studio was scrambling to produce its own version of a blockbusting space opera. The fuss simply eluded me. For the life of me, I could not understand why people were getting so worked up.

The rest of the story you know, at least the George Lucas vs. Hollywood version of it: Star Wars goes on to break all existing box office records, spawn equally record-breaking sequels (which I dutifully but unenthusiastically went to see). It re-writes the books on merchandizing, rollout strategies and opening-weekend numbers, signals the ultimate last gasp of the studio era (it was, after all, an independent production), and generates the most rabidly keen fan base anyone had seen since Star Trek. Indeed, it was as much the success of Star Wars as the relentless lobbying of the Trekkers that ultimately led to the re-launching of the Enterprise. Most importantly, Star Wars confirms the action-fantasy future of the movies, and thus the end of Hollywood's brief spasm as a producer of author-driven art movies. In a word, it changes everything.

So let's leap ahead a couple of decades, and smack into the future Star Wars makes possible. By then, the first movie has become a kind of generational touchstone, perhaps the movie most often cited by an entire generation of moviegoers (and filmmakers) as the one that first planted the bug. In 1997, the trilogy is being re-released by Lucas with new footage, and my ten-year old daughter, who has already seen the movies on videocassette, is practically panting at the idea of seeing the movies on the big screen.

By this time, I'd already begun to reconsider. In seeing how my kid -- whom absolutely everybody knows is uncommonly brilliant -- had taken to the movies, I realized that, in a very simple and uncomplicated way, I was just too old for Star Wars to appreciate it. I had gone in with expectations of a grownup science fiction movie -- of which there was no shortage in the '70s -- and was predictably unimpressed by a high-tech Saturday afternoon serial for kids.

After seeing the re-released trilogy, my daughter's passion only intensified. She started reading Star Wars  books, playing Star Wars games, collecting Star Wars comics and toys, making her own Star Wars-inspired art. And she did so for years. She was deeply immersed in the entire culture of Star Wars and therefore qualified as something I never was and never fully appreciated: a fan.

Finally, I started to get it. Star Wars wasn't just a movie. It wasn't even three movies. It was, so to speak, an entire universe, and one's full appreciation of it also required a full immersion: in the books, in the games, in the comics. In the life. Eventually, I even came to appreciate that, for fans like my kid, the movies were really only a small part of the whole thing. An element of a much larger enterprise. The real Star Wars experience involved the whole multi-media shebang. It was all in or nothing.

When the franchise was finally revived for the CGI-era, I went with my daughter to see both The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. I found them almost unendurably dull, cold and painful. Funny thing is, my kid's feelings weren't all that different. But her disappointment was diluted by the then almost incidental nature of the movies. The fictional universe of Star Wars, which had well begun to expand into cyberspace, was much, much bigger than these moribund megaplex fillers. So when she didn't like the movies much, it didn't really matter. If anything, they at least introduced a whole cast of new characters and situations that, she knew, would be far more satisfactorily expanded upon and fleshed out in alternate official Star Wars fictional worlds.

So while I still don't really enjoy Star Wars, I've certainly developed a healthy respect and understanding of it. And I've also some to understand something about fandom that's only becoming more pervasive in the age of globally networked, actively engaged, multiply-mediated, web-circuited fandom. Fandom, like the things that ignite it, can take many different forms, and Star Wars fandom tends to take a form that's just different from my own. My enthusiasms tended to toward singular experiences: a particular movie, a particular book, a particular comic or band. Star Wars, like Star Trek or Lord of the Rings or Frank Herbert's Dune books, was about entire worlds. Same for Harry Potter, another fictional experience that otherwise completely eludes me. (It doesn't help, I've come to realize, that I also have absolutely no interest in games, which by now have become an absolutely key component of so many pop culture franchises.) The thrill came from their integration and connection, the incremental expansion of their narratives into every more complex epic dimensions. In this, it was visionary in much more than the industry-transforming sense. It anticipated the fan world of the digital era.

But I still think that movie's pretty dumb. But I thank George Lucas, whom I interviewed once and graciously autographed a Star Wars comic book for my daughter, for helping me understand there are other ways to get obsessed than my own. The Force may not be with me, but I'm just a speck in the universe anyway.