Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Somewhere in Alejandro’s Inarritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) lurks a decent short story. Maybe not a great short story like the Raymond Carver story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,”which in Birdman is the subject of an stage adaptation by Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton)—a Hollywood actor who has made his reputation as a superhero. Birdman is a play within a movie and at the end, the lead actually shoots himself. The movie’s bevy of theater row critics eventually tout the self-mutilation as a form of super realism and it goes hand in hand with the film’s surrealist birdman doppelgänger. Added to this are the self-consciously post-modernist elements infusing the director’s whole concept. Michael Keaton was naturally famous for Batman and within its own closed universe the movie continually continually usurps art for reality. Mike Shriner (Ed Norton), a famous stage actor is the loose screw in this regard. Remember the Actor’s Studio, method acting and creating the role. Shriner attempts to fire up a scene in the stage motel, by actually having sex with Lesley (Naomi Watts), his real life wife, on stage. He gets an erection in front of the audience though he’s incapable of having one at home. “I pretend just about everywhere else, but I don’t pretend out there,” he says about the theatre. Birdman is an unruly mess. Riggan says about the work which he hopes will legitimize him,  “this play is like a deformed version of myself that keeps kicking me in the balls with a small hammer.” The same might be said for the plight of the viewer watching the movie. Embellishing Carver’s original creations with the backstory of the actors who play them only serves to upstage once powerful narratives and emotions. The fatuousness of artistic ambition infuses the movie. But it was not a major theme in Carver’s work. Inarritu has inadvertently stumbled onto Chekhov territory, but the irony and simplicity of The Seagull, which introduces a similar cast of dreamers and bombasts, is a hard act to follow.

Shame Sliding

 

     There is a school of thought claiming that Gordon Lish ruined Raymond Carver by making him an unwitting minimalist. There is another school that says Gordon Lish made Raymond Carver. George Saunders is what Raymond Carver lovers who like the unedited versions of his work unconsciously crave, though Carver unedited never soars to the glory that is Saunders. The best line in “Home,” the Saunders story in the summer fiction issue of The New Yorker is “I was on a like shame slide.” But there are all kinds of wonderful locutions in this narrative about a returning Iraq vet that are reminiscent of the violence that hangs over early Pinter plays like The Caretaker and The Homecoming. This interchange between the vet Mikey’s mother and her lover Harris takes place early in the story:
 

     “I love him like my own son,” Harris said.

     “What a ridiculous statement,” Ma said. “You hate your son.”

     “I hate both my sons,” Harris said.

     Renee is Mike’s sister, and she is married to Ryan. Ryan’s parents, who are visiting their grandchild, share their opinions about the well-to-do Flemings, who have flown in planeloads of harelipped Russian babies. “Those kids went from being disabled in a collapsing nation to being set for life in the greatest country in the world,” says Ryan’s father. As the dialogue continues to its morbidly hysterical climax, the father adds, “A truly visionary pair of folks.” Saunders then provides his own Pinteresque caesura.

     There was a long admiring pause.
     “Although you’d never know it by how harshly he speaks to her,” she said.

     “Well, she can be awfully harsh with him as well,” he said.

     “Sometimes it’s just him being harsh with her and her being harsh right back,” she said.“It’s like the chicken or the egg,” he said.

     “Only with harshness,” she said.

  

     Mikey’s wife has walked out on him, and when he comes to see his kids, her new husband, Evan, won’t let him in. The two men try to take an attitude of equanimity. Saunders’s characters live in a state of physical and emotional dispossession, but they are acutely aware of their own language. “One way we were playing it reasonable was to say everything like a question,” says Mikey.

     Mikey utters the story’s best line as he pulls up to the house of the family he is no longer a part of. He imagines his wife Joy explaining it all to his kids thusly: “Although Evan is not your real daddy, me and Daddy Evan feel you don’t need to be around Daddy Mike all that much, because what me and Daddy Evan really care about is you two growing up strong and healthy and sometimes mommies and daddies need to make a special atmosphere in which that can happen.” On the way to his former wife’s house Mikey also has a memory of being hired by “this guy” to “clean some gunk out of his pond.” He ends up killing tadpoles with his rake, and when he tries to save them it only makes matters worse. So he keeps on “rake hurling,” which in turn reminds him of his behavior at Al-Raz, where he was stationed. “It wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm that it was normal was to keep doing it over and over.”

     I was on a like shame slide. Saunders is what people have in mind when they criticize Gordon Lish for taking the guts out of Carver, but no one, not even Lish, would have gotten rid of Saunders’s guts—a self-reflexive cartoon that is pure genius.

Towering Words

Wells Tower is Raymond Carver minus the specifically lower-class settings and the minimalist language. It’s fun to think about what Carver’s editor Gordon Lish would have done if he’d gotten his hands on Tower’s work. Would he have proposed the same kind radical streamlining that has generated such controversy in the recent considerations of Carver’s oeuvre? Would he have tried to limit the palette, turning Wells into the equivalent of the 12-tone composer he made Carver into? Would he have eliminated the din and fashioned the prose into something spare and metallic to reflect the theme of dispossession? On the basis of the recently published New Yorker story, “The Landlord,” Wells deals with dispossession as Carver did, only in a different arena and with a broader scale, showing that it’s not merely the province of those who occupy modest digs in the Northwest. Significantly, the story is about someone who owns something, rather than a Carver character who can’t pay the rent. But the ownership itself is jeopardized by the kind of desperate and unruly tenants you might find in a Carver tale (both Armando Colon, the tenant, and Todd Toole, narrator Coates Pruitt’s foul mouthed maintenance man, fit the bill neatly). Sociologically, Tower’s characters fit beautifully into the era of sub-prime mortgages, which helped some members of the middle class leverage themselves into a state of economic oblivion. Pruitt’s 31-year-old daughter Rhoda is a sometime artist who has come back to live with him. She had an accident “while getting the hang of a radial-arm saw” and “the shock of the injury caused some of her hair to fall out.” Here is the manifesto for her latest artistic project: “To some extent, your problems with the real estate stuff, and my parallel humiliation at having to move in with you. But in a broader sense it’s about our collective lack of integrity and total fucking childishness in the wake of the financial crisis, i.e., the national epidemic of petulance and bratty outrage over the fact that poor people don’t get to buy castles on credit anymore, that execs don’t get G.D.P.-size bonuses, that not just any housewife with a real-estate license gets to be a millionaire, and that you can’t stick a chopstick in a dog turd and sell it at Gagosian for the price of a yacht. ‘A Pestilence of Petulance’ is what I’m tempted to call it but probably shouldn’t.” Even Lish might have been tempted not to edit that.

Swells

Every red blooded American boy needs to experience dispossession. It’s what makes America great and it’s what creates the dynamic quality of American life, to the extent that this country has no real hereditary aristocracy (as De Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America). The downstairs of one generation can become master of the house in the next. Joseph Losey’s The Servant (with screenplay by Harold Pinter) brilliantly captured the potentiality for such role reversals in the British context. In America, Raymond Carver was the poet of dispossession. Latter-day incarnations, like the short-story writer Wells Tower, whose work has received a great deal of critical attention, wear dispossession on their sleeves, but Carver exuded what Henry James called “felt life.” In one famous passage, a garage sale becomes an emblematic act of self-revelatory excoriation.

 

After the stock market crash of l929, many of the entitled saw their fortunes fade, and more recently many great families who had invested in blue-chip firms like Lehman Brothers saw their fortunes turn sour overnight. There are undoubtedly support groups for super wealthy individuals whose net worth dropped from hundreds to tens of millions in the market turmoil. What would it be like without Aspen and Palm Beach, without the Connaught and the Hotel du Cap, without Gstaad and Cortina in the winter? Everything in America occurs at such breakneck speed that there is really no time to accommodate a leisure class. By the time one generation has accumulated enough wealth to live like royalty, the wealth is already gone and they are writing memoirs, or, like the Beales of Grey Gardens fame, they're the subjects of documentaries about the decline of yet another age of swells.