The Players
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Norman Lear, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 101, was a veteran of the Second World War who wrote screenplays for a few moderately successful films before he reinvented the American sitcom with All in the Family. Shot before a live audience and set primarily in the living room of a modest home in Queens, the show pit Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), a bigoted blue-collar worker and frequent malapropist, against Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner), the hippie husband of Gloria (Sally Struthers), the only child of Archie and his flighty wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton).
“By January 1971, when All in the Family premiered,” writes James Poniewozik in the New York Times, “TV had been spilling a gusher of reality into living rooms—Vietnam, street protests, the Kent State shootings—but sitcoms had remained an alternative universe of goofy castaways, friendly witches, and lovable millionaire bumpkins.” Lear “designed All in the Family to air arguments audiences weren’t hearing . . . Its format was theater-like, its dialogue rough and real, its comedy smart but not highbrow. It was a lightning revolution, claiming the No. 1 spot in the ratings and holding on for five years.”
The show launched a few spinoffs, and two of them—Maude and The Jeffersons—were hits, but not every Lear project clicked with audiences. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a brilliantly off-kilter satire starring Louise Lasser as a television-obsessed housewife, lasted in its original form for just one season. Overall, though, as Poniewozik puts it, Lear “imagined popular, populist TV as a form of patriotic dissent, embodying a spirit of big-hearted twentieth-century liberalism.”
News of the mid-November death of Jane Wodening, who worked closely with her husband, Stan Brakhage, for three decades before coming in to her own as a writer, reached us only this week. Wodening is seen giving birth in one of Brakhage’s best-known works, Window Water Baby Moving (1959), and in the NYT, Penelope Green calls Wedlock House: An Intercourse (1959) “a kind of short horror film, with flickering images of the couple having sex interspersed with flickering shots of them having an argument.”
When Brakhage left her in 1987, Wodening hit the road for three years before settling in a mountain shack to write. Driveabout (2016), one of more than a dozen books she completed, is “charming, funny, and often quite profound,” writes Green, “like Thoreau but spiced with mild profanity and more drama.” Wodening was eighty-seven.
In the turbulent wake of the firing of Artforum editor David Velasco, John Waters has moved his list of the ten best films of the year, always a highlight of list-making season, to Vulture. His #1 film of 2023 is Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, “a laugh riot from hell you’ll never forget, even if you want to.” Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, in the meantime, has been named the best film of the year by contributors to Sight and Sound and the National Board of Review, while the Atlantic’s David Sims and the editors at Polygon have gone for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Both films make the top ten from the American Film Institute.
This week’s highlights:
- The New Yorker is running two terrific pieces on actors and acting. Isaac Butler, the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, observes that around twenty years ago, Nicolas Cage became “less an actor than a walking animated GIF, his tics cut and pasted away from the context in which they made sense.” Recently, though, his “comeback films vary in tone, style, budget, and quality, but they tend to share two things: at their heart, they are meta-films whose real premise is that they star Nicolas Cage, and none of them would be successful without him.” Isabelle Huppert tells Rebecca Mead that “I don’t believe in the idea of playing a character. I just believe in the idea of playing states—joy, sadness, laughter, listening, talking.”
- Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and Steve McQueen’s Occupied City “use indirection to make the Holocaust present in disturbingly detailed studies of routine extermination,” writes J. Hoberman for the Nation. “Neither fiction nor documentary,” these films “are essays, each in its own way attesting to the apparent ease with which humans can deprive others of even their basic humanity and exploring the dialectical relationship between banality and evil. Either film could have justly appropriated the title of Soviet director Mikhail Romm’s 1965 compilation of Nazi newsreels, Ordinary Fascism.”
- Before he adapted his 1988 novel The Player for Robert Altman, Michael Tolkin made his debut feature, The Rapture (1991). Sharon (Mimi Rogers) spices up the drudgery of her life as a telephone operator in Los Angeles by hooking up with strangers—until a series of portentous visions compels her to become a born-again Christian. “A louche erotic drama mutates into a psychological thriller, then finally ascends into a celestial parable,” writes Charles Bramesco at Downtime. “With that last drastic pivot, one type of movie turns into the other, its credence and ambivalence all the more affecting for their grounding up to that point. As Sharon says with the serene knowingness of those heeding the call, ‘Until you accept God into your heart, it’s like a fairytale, it’s like some joke you don’t get.’ Even cinema itself can be converted.”
- Among many other things, Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) is a portrait of a dying town, Anarene, an easily overlooked speck on the northern plains of Texas. When Scott Tobias, a cofounding editor of the Reveal, saw the 1990 sequel, Texasville, he found that “without Anarene as an imposing, allegorical presence as an American city on the wane, the whole enterprise felt rudderless.” But two years later, Bogdanovich released a two-and-a-half-hour director’s cut in black and white, and in this version, “the sincerity of Bogdanovich and his cast’s feelings for these characters give it real emotional punch, as they all recognize together that they are Anarene.”
- Alas, Poor Boro, I Knew Him Well . . . is Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin’s latest Thinking Machine audiovisual essay for Filmkrant and—fair warning—it makes for about seven minutes of NSFW viewing. Martin looks back on defending the work of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk in the pages of his university’s newspaper. A few years earlier, “between the impressionable ages of sixteen and eighteen,” Martin “slid from dutifully attending stately arthouses in Melbourne, Australia, to frequenting sordid porn barns with names like the Barrel, the Shaft and the Blue Bijou. And all for the sake of tracking an elusive, enigmatic, and remarkable filmmaker.”
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