Uncategorized: BarryBraverman BottleRocket Braverman byebyebraverman MargotTenenbaum OwenWilson royaltenenbaums Rushmore wesanderson
by mattbucher
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Bye Bye Braverman and Wes Anderson
Based on the book To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield, Bye Bye Braverman is a 1968 film directed by Sidney Lumet. In several places I had read that it influenced Wes Anderson so I wanted to find it and see if I could identify any specific references or influences. I really enjoyed watching Lumet’s film and felt like it was the sort of 1970s film that fits with Anderson’s overall aesthetic. If nothing else, it’s worth seeing Boss Hogg in a serious role and Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth) at the apex of her sultriness. Markfield also wrote a novel called Teitelbaum’s Window, which sorta echoes “Tenenbaum.”
Complicating matters a bit is the fact that a close associate of Anderson’s (and Owen Wilson’s) is named Barry Braverman. Barry Braverman met the Wilsons because he shot commercials and industrial films for Owen, Andrew, & Luke’s father, Bob (an advertising executive and operator of a public TV station), in Dallas. The Criterion Collection edition of Bottle Rocket in fact includes Braverman’s short film Murita Cycles. More on it from the Criterion Forum:
http://www.criterionforum.org/DVD-review/bottle-rocket/the-criterion-collection/493
The 27-minute 1978 short, which apparently served as a heavy influence on Anderson and Owen Wilson, is a portrait of Barry’s father, Murray, an eccentric man who runs a “bicycle shop” in Staten Island (though it’s become sort of a “junk shop” as he collects all sorts of junk and fills his house and even his shop, literally right to the door.) It isn’t exactly a flattering portrait (at one point you hear Braverman’s sister yelling at him for ridiculing their father) and it’s not always easy to watch, but this is such an interesting item to add to the DVD and I’m glad Criterion and Anderson felt inclined to include it.
Maybe Braverman’s film about his father influenced Anderson more than Lumet’s film, but visually, I believe both had an impact on Anderson’s evolving style.
Matt Zoller Seitz said at one point that Anderson is not the kind of filmmaker “who made references, but the kind of filmmaker who had influences” and I believe that Lumet’s Bye Bye Braverman had at least some effect on Anderson.
Jessica Walter, aka Lucille Bluth from Arrested Development, in Bye Bye Braverman (1968).
I’ll always associate Jack Warden with the film classic Problem Child.
The plot of Braverman does sound like a Wes Anderson movie. It’s about three friends in Manhattan going to the funeral of a friend (Leslie Braverman, the deceased whom we never see) in Brooklyn. It’s a movie about writers, death, friendship, and New York City. There are a few points where the elements from the film’s story seem to be reflected in Anderson’s work. But more apparent are several visual elements of the film that clearly influenced Anderson’s signature visual style.
Braverman opens with shots of the main characters as children, somewhat reminiscent of the way The Royal Tenenbaums begins with the main characters as children.
In fact, Anderson is often criticized for dwelling too much on childhood or trying to recapture a “lost” childhood that doesn’t really represent reality. The Royal Tenenbaums, with its reimagined version of New York City, also seems to fit best with Braverman‘s now-gone visual depiction of the city, although a flashback sequence from The Darjeeling Limited seems influenced by Braverman as well.
The name “Braverman” itself shows up in The Royal Tenenbaums when we learn that Margot, an aspiring playwright, “received a Braverman Grant of $50,000 in the ninth grade.” Hard to say if this is reference to the movie or to Barry. Almost all of the characters in Braverman are writers or playwrights or aspiring to such careers.
Braverman features a character named Holly Levine (played by Sorrell Brooke aka Boss Hogg) who is a writer and book reviewer and wears a beret quite similar to Max Fisher’s in Rushmore.
One of the best scenes in Braverman is when three of the friends are in Holly Levine’s new car discussing their competing knowledge of comics. Holly mentions that there is a chance he will be teaching a course on popular culture titled From Little Nemo to Lil Abner. His friends laugh and mock him, saying he doesn’t know enough about comic strips to be an authority, so they begin to quiz him.
“Who used to say in moments of angst, Golly, Moses, I got the whim-whams all over?”
Holly quickly answers “Rooney, Little Annie Rooney!”
This whole scene is taken almost verbatim from Markfield’s novel.
This old MTA bus scene reminded me of The Royal Tenenbaums as well.
In a later scene, we see an NYC city bus that closely resembles the Green Line Bus that Margot takes in Tenenbaums.
I love the little details like that.
The four friends on their way to a Brooklyn funeral recalls the flashback scene in The Darjeeling Limited where the three Whitman brothers (accompanied by Peter’s wife Alice) are on their way to their father’s funeral in Brooklyn–when Peter (Adrien Brody) decides to stop the car and pick up their father’s Porsche from the repair shop.
The climactic scene in Bye Bye Braverman ends with the friends finally attending Leslie Braverman’s burial at a cemetery in Brooklyn, which to me is similar to the closing cemetery scene in The Royal Tenenenbaums which of course ends with Royal Tenenbaum’s burial.
Because Bye Bye Braverman focuses on adults and adult friendships, it feels more mature and sophisticated than most of Anderson’s work. Though they share some visual style and aesthetic elements, Anderson could learn a thing or two from Lumet in terms of engaging deeper with the ideas he pursues between characters.
The Pynchon of Oklahoma
Desolation of Avenues Untold by Brandon Hobson
Civil Coping Mechanisms / $13.95 paper / 306 pages / August 25, 2015
The lost sex tapes of an aging Charlie Chaplin occupy the secret center stage in this wild, neo-futuristic page-turner. Set mostly in Desolate City (D.C.), Texas, we meet Bornfeldt “Born” Chaplin, who surely must be related to The Tramp. Yet, his last name is merely a coincidence. The Tramp’s grandson turns out to be a former punk rocker (somewhat similar to Bucky Wunderlick) named Caspar Fixx.
Hobson, author of Deep Ellum, revels in pulling all the strands of this novel together and then letting them run loose and then pulling them back together again.
Hobson mixes in a framing device similar to Nabokov’s Lolita, a character named “Brandon Hobson,” and various other postmodern features that feel less like narrative tricks and more like comfortable gears for a writer at the top of his game. This is American fiction at its Ray-banned, smoke-blowing, cameras-are-rolling coolest.
Throughout the novel there are several nods to David Foster Wallace and Infinite Jest: a lengthy filmography, scatological word play (Yushityu vs. Mishityu), and at the center of it all a riveting, cult film pursued by many. But, Hobson’s furious delight in naming characters, throwing them into surreal scenarios, and then expanding on the social problems of the day is less Wallace and DeLillo and more reminiscent of Pynchon in his heyday.
Another thing that separates Desolation from many other serious literary novels published these days is that it is actually fun to read. Just as one could picture Thomas Pynchon smirking when he wrote about erections, muted horns, Pig Bodine, and Doc Sportello, it’s easy to imagine Hobson taking utmost delight in creating Bleaker Street, naming a list of workshops available at a porn addiction conference, rolling a J, and listening to records with good old Dick Swaggert, professor of film studies at Thom Yorke College.
In the end, the question surrounding the hypothetical Chaplin sex tapes is one we must ask ourselves practically everyday now, a question about The Entertainment itself. With unfettered, instant access to pretty much every known human depravity, when a new spectacle or vice is revealed, when intense suffering can be passively consumed on a mobile screen, we must ask each other: Would you watch?
DFW Studies: Baudrillard Burn davidfosterwallace dfw DFWstudies Fogle InfiniteJest letters paleking ThePaleKing
by mattbucher
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A Few Trends in DFW Studies
There has been something like “David Foster Wallace studies” for a decade now, maybe longer. Stephen Burn’s reader’s guide to Infinite Jest was published in 2003. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies was published in 2013. The first academic conference on Wallace was held in Liverpool in 2009. The Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference was held last week, in May 2015, at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.
I didn’t get to attend half as many panels as I’d liked to, but I did get to read several other papers that I missed (in the past two years of conferences) after the fact and I noticed that there are some clear trends emerging in the scholarship, now in 2015. So what follows is just my own general impression of what people are doing at this point in time. It’s way more complicated and there are tons of mini-niches that I’m not even touching on here, but this is a broad-strokes overview of my own thoughts.
1. Fogle
My own paper at this year’s DFW Conference was about Section 22 of The Pale King (the story of Chris Fogle), so I was attuned to other mentions of Fogle’s story. In fact, there were at least two other papers that talked about Fogle’s conversion from a wastoid to a tax examiner. In previous years, I think it was Don Gately’s story that was used as the most common example of Wallace’s fictional project about redemption and adulthood. I was happy to see Fogle mentioned in so many places because I believe that section of The Pale King contains some of Wallace’s finest writing.
2. Baudrillard
Several papers talked at length about Baudrillard’s simulacra and the phases of the image. This is a rich subject for engaging much of the post-post-modern (or whatever) literature out there today and so it’s not too surprising that so many scholars have brought it to bear on Wallace’s work.
3. Theology/Religion
Wallace’s relationship to religion and the supernatural, both in his work and in his life as an artist, is fascinating because of how it evolves over time and how that belief or concept of the supernatural is reflected in his work. Current work in this area shows that theology / religion stands as a major element in Wallace’s fictional works.
4. The Letters
Stephen Burn’s keynote address at this year’s conference was centered around his effort to assemble a collection of Wallace’s letters on writing (rather than personal letters). Because of some difficulty securing permissions, it’s unclear when and if Burn’s manuscript will be published. It might take a couple of more years before we see this book, but it stands to be a major contribution to DFW studies. Burn separates out Wallace’s correspondence into three eras: The Apprentice Years, when DFW wrote to older masters; The Genius Years, when DFW wrote to contemporary writers; and the Emeritus Years, when DFW wrote to younger writers. The letters also reveal a lot about what Wallace was reading at each stage in his career.