The Compudrug Cocktail

The June 23^rd issue of The New York Review of Books ran an essay called “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why” by Marcia Angell. The essay is occasioned by three books: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic:  Magic, Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat. The same issue of the NYRB featured a piece by Sue Halpern entitled “Mind Control and the Internet,” which dealt with the following books: World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity Machines and the Internet by Michael Chorost; The Filter Bubble: What the Internet  is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser; and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier. Angell’s essay deals with the controversy about antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Celexa, and antipsychotics like Zyprexa, addressing findings from double-blind placebo studies. The first in a two-part series, the essay is a thoughtful review of axons, dendrites and synapses, and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in bridging gaps between neurons. Psychotics were at one point thought to be suffering from a flood of serotonin, while those suffering from depression were thought to be experiencing a deficit. Thus, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor would prevent the secretion of serotonin by the synapse. One of the issues Angell brings up is how neurotransmitters are affected by the introduction of artificial substances into the brain, a process that becomes particularly important when a patient goes off of a medication. What is curious is how Angell’s essay on mental illness and the interior working of the brain and Halpern’s essay on computers and the mind are linked. A significant development of advanced computational theory is the increasing connection between computers and the brain—the brains of disabled people are now able to manipulate computer cursors and computers are able to access the brain. In discussing Lanier’s theories, Halpern remarks, “The ‘hive mind’ created through our electronic connections necessarily obviates the individual—indeed, that’s what makes it a collective consciousness.” On the other hand, computer programs of the future herald a world of utter subjectivity. “Among the many insidious consequences of this individualization is that by tailoring the information you receive to the algorithm’s perception of who you are, a perception that it constructs out of 57 variables, Google directs you to material that is most likely to reinforce your own worldview, ideology and assumptions,” Halpern comments. The subject that unites the two pieces is really consciousness, a theme taken up by John Searle in his review of Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain in the previous issue of the NYRB. One thing that becomes clear in all of these pieces is that the human brain is inadvertently being fought over by both computers and drugs. It’s a struggle of Darwinian proportions, with the evolution of the brain ultimately mitigating the outcome.

The Tree of Life

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy might be the literary motif for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The movie looks at anything and everything through the lens of the eternal. It’s like being served a pizza with one slice containing a character-driven narrative and the other seven slices containing prehistoric creatures, the creation of the universe and the myths of Job and Mary Magdelene. The narrative slice is an odd contraption that starts out with the loss of a son in wartime and then circles back to the story of a boy and his two brothers, centering on a period in their pre-adolescence. The father (Brad Pitt) is an inventor with 27 patents whose greatest ambition in life was to be a concert pianist, a dream he never fulfilled. He is loving yet demanding and cruel towards his boys, particularly the oldest. The man blames his wife for not supporting him when he plays the disciplinarian, but it’s clear that this theme is secondary to the film’s organic and at times inorganic imagery (huge skyscrapers and the oldest son’s inventions), which place the ontogenic events in a phylogenic context. Several marvelous scenes dramatize this. For example, following the drowning of a child in the Waco town pool, we see the church where the service is held far in the distance in a vanishing perspective, with the families of the other children scattered through the foreground. Thornton Wilder used what was at the time an avant-garde dramatic style, with the Stage Manager in Our Town breaking the forth wall to present the story of an American town. In The Tree of Life, Malick’s device is to have his powerful story upstaged by the history of the world.

Leap Year

The Australian filmmaker Michael Rowe won the 2010 Camera d’Or at Cannes for Leap Year, which recently opened at Cinema Village. The film’s production values are minimal, walking the fine line between low-budget expediency and esthetic choice. But what may seem rough and unpolished to one viewer may feel like gritty realism to another. Laura (Monica de Carmen) is a business journalist from Oaxaca who is trying to eke out a living in Mexico City writing articles with names like “30 Tips to Beat the Recession.” She is a peculiar variety of voyeur who masturbates not while watching people in flagrante but while looking in on enviable scenes of domestic bliss, as when the couple across the way snuggles while watching TV. She also peers in on an elderly couple who live in the courtyard below. By night, she endures a series of seemingly joyless one-night stands. Things take a turn when, after being fired from her job, she picks up Arturo (Gustavo Sanchez Parra), with whom she begins a sadomasochistic affair involving, among other things, burning, golden showers, whipping, cutting and eventually a fantasy of necrophilia in which she invites Arturo to “come inside of me while you watch me die.” The leap year of the title refers to the fourth anniversary of Laura’s father’s death, and provides the etiology of her death wish in the same way that the death of the Brando character’s wife in Last Tango in Paris furnishes the essential bit of back story for the self-annihilating sex that film depicts. But Leap Year is more disturbing than Last Tango, Pasolini’s Salo, which features scenes of coprophilia, and most recently Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void, which vividly enacts an abortion sequence. What is most disturbing is the absence of artifice and invention. Films that feature extreme paraphilia can derange the senses à la Rimbaud, but what could be more disturbing than old Gloucester blinded and helpless or Oedipus with his eyes plucked out? Rowe’s film is clinical without being cathartic. Leap Year is definitely not porn, but it’s imaginatively constrictive, providing little room for anything resembling release. The claustrophic feeling is exacerbated by the intrusive quality of realism. We watch the character wiping herself after urination and picking her nose, but the intimacy is gratuitous and unrevealing. A therapist listening to Laura would have his work cut out for him—particularly since his patient’s bedtime reading is Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.

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.

Gunnar Fischer

Reading the William Grimes’s Times obit of Gunnar Fischer, the cinematographer who worked with Bergman on Smiles of a Summer Night, The Magician, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries, one passes through a pantheon of names that underscores the film-historical roots of Bergman’s craft  (“Gunnar Fischer, Cinematographer for Bergman, Dies at 100,” NYT, 6/13/11). Svensk Filmindustri—the very words send shivers down the spine of those who remember the credit sequences of the great Bergman films. (Janus Films was the other signpost, though now Bergman is distributed by the more prosaic sounding Criterion.) According to Grimes, “It was there [Svensk Filmindustri] that Mr. Fischer had trained under Julius Jaenzon, the cinematographer for the silent films of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller, and had developed his high-contrast, often expressionistic approach to lighting that suited Mr. Bergman’s intensely probing psychological films.” The accompanying image for the obit is the famous still from The Seventh Seal in which Max von Sydow plays chess with Death (a scene that Woody Allen would later parody in his “Death Knocks” New Yorker piece). Grimes goes on to point out that Fischer was “an admirer of Gregg Toland, the cinematographer on ‘Citizen Kane’”—a significant bit of cinema scholarship. More importantly at Filmstaden, the studio of Svensk Filmindustri, Fischer worked with the important Danish Director Carl Dreyer, whose The Passion of Joan of Arc (starring Maria Falconetti) is a classic expressionist work. The obit is an essay on what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence,” minus some of the anxiety. We tend to think of Bergman as a film director whose substantive provenance derived from Strindberg, but Grimes’s obit illustrates the cinematographic provenance that enabled Bergman to create metaphors for his vision.

The Untouchables, Starring Ayman al-Zawahri as Eliot Ness

In its story on Al Qaeda’s appointment of Ayman al-Zawahri as successor to Osama bin Laden, the Times quoted Defense Secretary Gates as saying that Bin Laden “had a peculiar charisma that ... Zawahri does not have” (“Qaeda Selection ofIts Chief Is Said to Reflect Its Flaws,” NYT, 6/16/11). With regard to the seven weeks it took to pick Zawahri, Gates commented, “It’s probably tough to count votes when you’re in a cave.” Gates also said that Bin Laden was “more operationally engaged” than Zawahri. During the Second World War, psychoanalysts were brought in to do psychobiographies of Hitler and other leaders. Naturally, a legion of experts has now chimed in about Zawahri. “Independent specialists largely agree that Mr. Zawahri is not an inspiring model for young militants, noting his lack of combat experience, his long history of ideological squabbles and his abrasive behavior and pedantic speeches,” the Times noted. In a nutshell, Zawahri has to work on his image, and in this global world of value-free social media, there is no reason that Zawahri can’t undertake the contemporary equivalent of what Madison Avenue did for politicians and entrepreneurs in the ‘50s and ‘60s. He needs the kind of makeover Ronald Reagan achieved prior to his political triumphs. In 1954, General Electric employed him to host a dramatic T.V. hour in which he chimed, “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.” Upgraded from B-movie actor to mouthpiece for a better future, appearing in homes across the country, Reagan parlayed his feel-good charm all the way to the California governor’s seat. The rest is history, or silence, depending on how you view his presidency. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, recall the Che Guevara posters that hung in college dorm rooms in the ‘60s. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that these were the creation of a young radical who went on to become CEO of Young and Rubicam. Zawahri needs to hook up with one of the utility companies in Waziristan, the Al Queeda stronghold or perhaps Abbottabad Power & Light. Instead of sending out pedantic messages, he should promote the clean energy produced by the company, which in reality probably builds components for Pakistan’s growing nuclear arsenal. With a little promotional spin, the utility company will be the vehicle to consolidate Zawahri’s following. He will never wear a beret like Che, but big PR companies all recognize the importance of signs, symbols and behaviors that we associate with public figures. Kennedy was a jogger, the captain of PT-109 and the lover of Marilyn Monroe. What will Zawahri’s mythology be?

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a monstrosity, proof that even a comic genius who also happens to be the Jane Austen of his age (to the extent that he is a great documenter of manners and morals) can still miss the mark. If we were to see the film with no knowledge of Allen’s oeuvre, we might summarily dismiss it as the work of an inferior artist. Could the meta-view of Paris that Allen presents be intentionally ugly and factitious in order to render a world someone might want to escape from? Gil (Owen Wilson) posits escape as a kind of brass ring when he says “the present is a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying.” He later quotes Faulkner’s “the past is not dead; it’s not even past.” But the intention of Allen's directorial disquisition is never clear. Parenthetically, Wilson is as unsuccessful in playing the Woody-Allen-type doofus as Allen is in portraying Paris. It is unlikely that F. Scott, Zelda, Ernest, Salvador, Gertrude or any of the Lost Generation would have been terribly pleasant company, despite their bouts of genius, but the film’s heavy-handed plot line, which transports our protagonist back in time, from the dreary materialism of the present to the Paris of the ‘20s and eventually La Belle Epoque, where he interrupts Toulouse-Lautrec while he’s drawing the Folies and makes the acquaintance of Degas and Gauguin, presents us with a series of gargoyles that would be booed off of a high-school stage. The movie starts with a Paris montage that aspires to Hemingway’s moveable feast, but instead of creative sumptuousness, it has the gastronomic and esthetic appeal of Leonard's, the garish Great Neck bar mitzvah parlor. It's a sequence that would have made Cartier-Bresson vomit.