Storytelling

Todd Solondz, 2001

I watched this last night.

I had been putting it off for years. I saw Happiness back in about 2003: it was really engaging, but there were one or two moments that were a bit tough to get through. Aronofsky has a reputation for making intense films, but Happiness was almost too much even for me. The scene with the father and son on the sofa, you know?

I bought Storytelling at the same time, but it remained unwatched for a long time. Eventually I figured ‘why not’ and here we are.

Storytelling is certainly lighter fare than the soul-sapping Happiness, but not by much. I knew when it came out that it was composed of ‘Fiction’ and ‘Non-fiction’ segments, and that a rather masochistic writing teacher was involved. That’ll be the ‘Fiction’ bit.

Before seeing the film, I had imagined it as being split into two equal halves. While both felt like they lasted an eternity, the ‘Fiction’ bit seemed to pass more quickly. The film could really have done without this segment, which Todd Solondz seems to have included both to fill time (even in two parts, it’s barely 90 minutes in the physical world) and to make you die inside a little more.

‘Fiction’ amused me, but I was in a funny mood while watching it. The writing teacher’s sadism in coldly pulling apart the feel-good short story that the student with cerebral palsy had penned was pretty funny. So was that student then dumping his girlfriend, who then started bitching about him in a bar to the aforementioned callous teacher.

The teacher then took sexual advantage of the girl. But Solondz plays it in a way that nobody is a good guy. Not the bitchy, self-loathing girl. Not the student with cerebral palsy who took his writing-shitness at out on the girl. Certainly not the sexually predatory writing teacher. And none of the ghouls who bit-featured in the class scenes. They were a combination of idiotic prudes, clueless hacks and a particularly attractive super-bitch. Nice vignette.

‘Non-fiction’ was about a pathetic shoe salesman, Toby Oxman (Paul Giamatti), masquerading as a documentary maker. We are introduced to him (and his neuroses) when he makes a phone call to a woman he knew from high school. She is something, and he isn’t. Despite that, we feel no sympathy. We even feel bad for her when she reveals he didn’t want to go to the school dance with her. In hindsight, he was doing her a favour.

Toby bumps into school student Scooby Livingston (Mark Webber) in the toilets, who is unfortunate enough to get involved in Oxman’s project. It’s ostensibly about the college admission process, and the stress it puts students through. It ends up being a protracted, malicious, smirk at Scooby’s life and family.

And what a family. He has two brothers: the middle one, Brady (Noah Fleiss), is a jock who isn’t bothered that Scooby might be gay, but wants him to pretend he’s not so Brady’s cache doesn’t plummet. The youngest is Mikey (Jonathan Osser), who is very intelligent but seemingly devoid of empathy. I guess he’s supposed to be autistic, though nothing is officially explained.

Throughout the film, Mikey is desperate to let his dad, Marty, allow him to try his hypnosis. Ever-busy with family and business affairs, Marty rebuffs Mikey. Nevertheless, Mikey continues. On and on, ‘can I try to hypnotise you, dad?’

I recall there being one adult character in Happiness that you could possibly sympathise with. Among a cast of kiddie-fiddlers and chubby stalkers was the young woman who seemed to be a massive victim. I forget the details – I repressed my memory of that film as you would any disturbing experience – but that seems to be how it went.

We only have Scooby to root for in Storytelling, even if he is utterly doomed from the start. Completing the main cast are the overweight, homophobic, conservative/Conservative Marty (played by the ever-fantastic John Goodman), the long-suffering wife/mother, and their aged immigrant cleaner Consuela (Lupe Ontiveros).

Scooby is perpetually lost, confused (sexually, psychologically) and stoned. He wants to be famous and successful, but has no idea how to go about it; he certainly doesn’t want to work for it. In him, Toby sees a microcosm of post-Columbine disaffected suburban youth. He also sees a photogenic idiot he can ride to the Sundance festival.

So Toby talks to Scooby, meets the family, and they decide to make a film. Solondz, being the misanthrope he clearly wants us to think he is, doesn’t even make Scooby sympathetic. Scooby is a cretin, who does want everything without putting any effort in. and he isn’t going to achieve anything, clearly. But, by default as the one actual human in an exhibition of grotesquery, we root for him.

I saw an Icelandic film in 2001. It was called Angels of the Universe (Englar alheimsins), and its soundtrack featured the first sign that Sigur Rós were getting boring. It chronicled one young man’s descent into insanity. Not only was his mind against him, but so too was the world. Catharsis came in suicide.

While Solondz must have wrapped on Storytelling by the time Angels… came out, it’s almost as if he had a subconscious urge to one-up the Icelandic wrist-slash-athon.

Led on by Toby during the making of the documentary (as with the short story in ‘Fiction’, it is irredeemably shit: not only are humans worthless in Solondz’ world, but so too is their art), Scooby eventually finds out there is to be a screening.

His car gets stolen, so he gets the subway to his destination. Once there, he sees Toby has set him up as the idiot he is. As with ‘Fiction’, there is a faceless audience of ghouls. Instead of pouring moral indignation on our protagonist, as they did in the first half, they laugh maniacally at this innocent fool.

Meanwhile, Mikey’s borderline-sociopathic conversational style has offended Consuela. Not only does she have to work her fingers to the bone (not literally – though I envisage that for the next Solondz film I see) for the family, but her grandson has been executed for rape and murder. Mikey is unsympathetic and tells Consuela her grandson deserved to die. Well maybe he did.

Eventually, after Brady has been rendered comatose by an unnecessarily rough (American) football tackle, Mikey is allowed to try hypnotising Marty. When he’s under, Mikey instructs that he will now be the most important thing in his dad’s life, and that Consuela – who snapped at him for the execution routine – should be fired because she’s lazy.

Incredibly, the hypnosis worked. Marty beamed whenever he saw Mikey, and he fired Consuela. True to her family’s style, she reacts by gassing the Livingston family while they sleep, and while Scooby is returning from his big adventure in New York.

Scooby returns to find his family dead and Toby present, with cameraman in tow. Toby is anguished at what’s gone down, but Scooby’s had enough. With blank stare, he merely tells Toby his film was a hit, and the credits roll.

This is not a bad film. Well, not in as much as it was proficiently constructed. It’s a bad piece of drama, though. Solondz presents nothing to hope for: humanity, generally and specifically, is horrible. I suppose one moral conclusion offered here is that bad things happen to bad people. But, as with Happiness, the worst things happen to the one decent person.

I recommend this film in the spirit it was made in: sadistically. Solondz doesn’t care about you, or your enjoyment. And, like a sociopathic chain letter, I’m passing it on to you. There is nothing to hope for, and we’re all doomed. What a message. There is no depth to the film, but the worst kind of hollowness. I dissed Garden State for its empty, cod-intellectual smugness, but this is empty, cod-intellectual misanthropy. I’ll let you decide which is worse.

Finally, I know I have committed a cardinal sin of reviewing in this post, but it was intentional given the inherent unworthiness of the film. What intentional mistake did I make? Storytelling. Ho, ho, ho.

Susumu Yokota – Mother

Lo Recordings (2009)

Another writer’s cut of a FACT review!

In the last month I have lazed on a beach under equatorial heat and braved the disappointingly feeble, yet perilously icy, British winter. With me in both scenarios (and a number betwixt) has been Yokota’s lovely Mother.

I don’t know how many memos, or albums, I have missed since Susumu was banging out hit after hit on the Leaf label, but I’m sure he used to be more ambient than this. You know the score: plaintive notes stretched over bone-white backgrounds that you listened to while your shaggy post-metal beard was in its philosophical goatee stage. You looked up from the current issue of Jalouse that you were idly thumbing in the Waterstone’s coffee shop as a certain sonic detail caught your attention. And then back to your consideration of minimalist orange chairs.

But things change, and so does Yokota. It probably wasn’t his intention to release a 1980s goth-pop album, but that’s what he has done. More precisely, it sounds like a collection of late 1990s goth-metal ballads. Like if Paradise Lost circa One Second had dropped the guitars entirely and hired the singer from The Gathering. (I hate those multi-band comparisons too, but this is so goth-metal ballads.)

If you’re not a fan of goth-metal – if not, why not? – don’t let this description turn you off. Mother just as quickly recalls a less crystalline, but equally stillness-of-winter Vespertine. It has the forlorn beauty of a crisp January morning; the kind where it seems the cold has become so pronounced as to freeze the moment entirely. The thinnest twigs on trees live-pause with semi-frozen droplets just begging to plunge to the damp floor below as the closest thing to a sound is your breath escaping you in condensation. That kind of winter stillness.

There is even a hint of Herbert’s relaxed jazztronica here. ‘Love Tendrilises’, in addition to an awkwardly poetic title, boasts keys and synth-string swells, as vocals sigh declarations of love in the daze of a thousand Sunday morning yawns. It’s the Independent, under the covers, in a city-centre flat. Keep the Eggs Benedict runny, darling.

Though I try to avoid such a damning statement, even don’t intend it as a slight, this is rather dinner party stuff. But you could level that accusation at Herbert, Frou Frou and Red Snapper, and they’ve put out some quality over the years.

Yokota avoids this with the Depeche-goes-doom of ‘A Flower White’ or ‘Suture’ with their respectively bizarre vocal melodies, percussion of distant approaching armies and the kind of general ambient menace that wouldn’t surprise you if it turned up on the next sunnO))) album. This kind of thing is certainly at odds with the pristine aesthetic the cover and Björkisms suggest. They certainly add depth and an element of surprise.

Occasionally the vocals grate, such as the too-high notes on ‘A Flower White’, but they are generally of such timbre to complement the synthesised naturalism, the warm romanticism, of the tones while never threatening to steal the show. They are a microcosm of Mother: a lovely – if emotionally confusing – way to spend an hour that edifies without changing your life.

Carcass – ‘No Love Lost’

I don’t tend to like YouTube embeds: they mess with your scrolling, links are a bit neater, and they seem ever so slightly messy. But, I figure, I’m writing about this song and you may as well get a chance to hear what it is I’m banging on about. It’s also a nice treat for Valentine’s day, no?

‘No Love Lost’ was the first Carcass song I heard. It was on MTV and everything. Granted, it was Into the Pit, the post-Headbanger’s Ball black metal/death metal ghetto. But MTV nonetheless. It was a mid-paced metal song whose only real concession to death metal (let alone the grindcore the band was recording only half a decade earlier) was the vocal and lyric.

At first I even considered it rather tame. Then the brilliance of the songwriting really came through. As with the other classic Colin Richardson-produced ‘singles’ of the time – like ‘Replica’, ‘Davidian’ and ‘Old’ – this was a pit-friendly combination of great riffs, under-rated arrangement and a steady tempo that lent itself perfectly to unwinding on the dance floor.

But I’ll stop referring to it in past tense, because it still exists. It took me a long time, after hearing this song, to buy its host album Heartwork (January 1998 was when I finally succumbed to curiosity). It took longer still for my appreciation of the album to peak (to date, that’ll be late 2008).*

I’ll be banging on about the album in due course. For now, we focus on the single. For a long time, this was pretty much the only tune I spent any time with on Heartwork. Nowadays, I prefer various other songs off the record, but ‘No Love Lost’ always has that special effect. And surprisingly for me, the effect it has seems to be the effect it is supposed to have.

It begins with the intention of making some kind of statement. There’s a beat. A single, solitary beat. The snare shot punctuates the sound of the twin guitars jerking into action, like the speeding car in Hollywood films screeching away from a dead start. It’s simple but effective.

It works as a perfect shift in gears from either ‘Carnal Forge’ (on the album) or ‘Incarnate Solvent Abuse’ (when I saw them last year). I love it when album sequencing can emulate that rush of a new song that you usually only tend to get during a great live set. You’re thrilling to the modernised thrash-death hybrid of 1993 Carcass, and you get thrown by the juddering intro of ‘No Love Lost’. And you never really get used to it, which is what’s so engaging.

Enough about the first split-second of the song, though. The rest of it’s not bad. It took me this long to realise it’s actually in ¾ time. I’m not a musical theory dude, see. In fact it might not even be ¾, but I hear it in threes. I know, I sound like a proper idiot at this point, but I’ve started so I’ll finish.

While sticksman Ken Owen isn’t blasting his kit on this one like he had been doing in the past, he is still full of great little tricks. On the verses he switches, from line to line, from hitting the snare on the one-beat to the three-beat, with a fill to punctuate each time. I’ve recently started just listening to the drumming on the song, because I’m baffled by how simple and complex it simultaneously is.

(Clue for those who think I might eventually, finally, switch to the dark side, to Necroticism, in the great Carcass debate: simultaneous simplicity and complexity is the key to why Heartwork is such a stunning album. I compare it to Metallica’s ‘black’ album, and I do consider Ulrich’s drum skills rather overlooked, but the Liverpudlians’ album is nowhere near the simplification its streamlined sound suggests.)

Carcass solos were always something a bit special, too. I mentioned in the Necroticism post that Steer and Amott had this great way of switching the rhythm guitar lines as they switched the leads, and this is no exception. In fact, they seem to take a leaf out of Pantera’s book by using a sped-up version of backing guitars ‘Dimebag’ Darrell used on ‘Cowboys From Hell’. But just listen to it, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s funny how I’m now fixated on what’s going on behind the solo, but love solos more than ever. Maybe that’s why I do.

I should also mention the video, seeing as it’s at the top of this post. Not only am I not a musical theory bloke, but I’m also not a video director. Correct me if I’m wrong, but they seem to be using the same ‘colouring in back and white film’ technique that everyone went nuts for in that Nirvana video. And this was the same year!

While ‘Heart Shaped Box’ was effective in the way it summarised the hyper-unreality of Cobain’s life and stature at that point, ‘no Love Lost’ makes its own point, though offering less opportunity to refer to Baudrillard. I have become vaguely fixated with early 1990s heavy metal culture in the north of England. Specifically Yorkshire.

Maybe it comes from a youth (mis-)spent at Bradford Rio’s, or from the fact that the scene must be the least glamorised in all of metal. Or maybe the music from that era is just growing on me.** But I’m fixated either way. Not fixated enough to like my fellow metal fan at the recent Damnation festival, but that was a bit too real. I mean I wondered where good old fashioned, pale, lank haired, skinny socially maladjusted characters sans post-metal beards got to. Transpires they’re still knocking about.

But that eerie Technicolor in this video imbues north-western vocalist Jeff Walker with a moribund paleness that sums up a scene in one frame. Especially set against the video’s too-lush greenery that figures in a Dales/Lakes/Pennines-metal nostalgia trip.

While the lyrics are the antithesis of romantic (‘without emotion, your heartstrings played / Strummed and severed to the tune of a tragic serenade’, Walker growls), the visual is nothing less than Romantic. 1990s English heavy metal’s tongue in cheek horror show was a modern equivalent of Gothic literature tearing away from Romanticism in a drawn out hysteria of self-spooking shrieks and giggles.

Not to say it’s comedy music, or even particularly ironic. This area of metal was as serious as any before or since. But there is that deadpan humour pervading the whole thing, a black storm cloud with the smiley face; looming, glooming, over proceedings. ‘No Love Lost’, a combination of visual beauty, sonic malice and grizzly humour, embodies an era in less than four minutes.

* Is it too late to finish writing that ‘fave albums in 2008 that weren’t from 2008’? I think not.
** Think I’m kidding? Just wait til I bang on about My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost and Anathema.