Letter

A charming rich asshole in Burning got called a Gatsby. After I left the theater I went to the Dial and picked up a copy of Fitzgerald’s book. I’d read it in high school, then again in my early twenties and hated it both times. I didn’t understand the characters, why they did what they did, the world they lived in. It seemed like a lot of fancy people living fancy lives, which had no point of connection with mine.

I tore through it in a few days this time. After having written a couple of books myself, I couldn’t help but admire the language and construction of the thing. A lot of it still rang false, but now it felt like commentary on America rather than a failing of conception. And the self-made swindler at the heart of it is right out of today’s news. Only the real one is old, charmless, and hardly self-made.

When I first read the book, I’d never been to Chicago. There are many references to the city and the Midwest in general. There’s a romanticizing of the region as lacking the pretensions of the East, which we here like to believe to this day. Jay, Nick, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan go east to feel more worldly and seek fortune, as many continue to do to this day.

In America, the eyes of god turn out to be a roadside billboard.

The car crash turns the story from satire to tragedy but it’s the book’s least convincing plot device. It’s the kind of heightened action which plays in operas and fairytales, less so in novels which take on a whole country’s culture. The violent end turns it into a potboiler but also lets Fitzgerald get off some beautiful thoughts about longing for a better world that never was. That false longing is all over our politics. An exultation of some better, purer past, which never was but which so many insist on believing in.

I finished the book admiring it more than loving it. It’s almost a hundred years old but nailed things about America that continue to haunt it to this day. The racism, the longing to be high-class while pretending that class doesn’t exist, the nostalgia, and the absolute worship of money. The hollow type and the center of the story is full of bullshit promises, rotten to the core but unaware of it, building himself up to nobility so convincingly he believes it himself.

It’s all too familiar.

I finished Linn Ullmann’s Unquiet a week or two ago, but it keeps following me around like a polite but persistent ghost. It’s a novel about an unnamed girl and her unnamed mother and father. But everyone knows it’s Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. By leaving them unnamed, Ullmann somehow manages to make them both particular and universal. I don’t know how she did that.

Last year was Bergman’s centenary, so the Siskel ran a months-long retrospective of his work. I saw many films I’d never seen before but will definitely watch again, like Sawdust and Tinsel and Scenes from a Marriageand got to revisit old favorites like Fanny and Alexander and Wild Strawberries. It was a great surprise to discover Paul Schrader’s great First Reformed from last year lifted most of its set up from Bergman’s Winter Light. It made filmmaking feel like a passed-down tradition the same way painting is. The only major misfire I recall was the dreadful English-language movie called The Touch. It stars Elliot Gould and Bibi Andersson and comes off as a Google-translate/Saturday Night Live parody of an Ingmar Bergman film. I lasted about half an hour. Overall though, it was a joy to spend time in Bergman’s comically serious universe.

I learned of the English translation of Unquiet soon after the film series was over. So, inevitably, I couldn’t help but see the characters and settings in the book as the actors and landscapes from her father’s films. You’d think that would be a problem, that it might make the novel nothing more than a behind-the-scene tell-all or celebrity tie-in. But Ullmann is way too good a writer to stoop so low. She obscures as much as she reveals and certainly doesn’t use the page to settle scores.

The book is an attempt to connect to a man and a woman who were totally wrapped up in their own dramas and rarely had the time or emotional generosity to pay attention to the very needy child that Ullmann portrayed herself to be. In this and many other ways, her childhood was like many others’. The world is littered with emotionally unavailable breeders who weren’t world-famous directors or adored actresses.

I wrote a more formal review of the book for Hyperallergic. It’ll hopefully be published soon.

Seeing Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning was kind of the inverse of my Ullmann/Bergman experience. It’s based on a Haruki Murakami story but transposed to present-day Korea. I haven’t read Murakami in a good fifteen years but Lee’s film brought back the magical cats, disappearing girls, fruitless detective work, detailed descriptions of meal-preparation, and half a dozen other favorite tropes of that celebrated writer.

Lee adds an emotional gravity to this story of a hopelessly lovestruck, lost young man that I don’t remember feeling from Murakami’s books. This guy’s aching need to belong and be understood is as loud as a neon sign even as he barely says a word to anyone. It’s the kind of movie that establishes its poetic universe from the first frame and doesn’t break its spell or internal logic till the screen goes black.

Both Lee’s movie and Ullmann’s book manage the tightrope trick of referring to well-known source material without being a slave to it or existing merely to capitalize from its fame. If I ever read another Murakami, I’ll be reminded of Lee’s masterful movie, and when I watch a Bergman film next, I’ll watch partly through his daughter’s eyes.

Rebekka asked for a drawing of her childhood home in Hyde Park. We talked about it over dinner. She didn’t want something that looked like a photograph, so we agreed I’d try to draw on site when it gets warmer. But Monday there was a movie I wanted to see at Doc, so I decided to check out the house and brought the camera along.

The freezing rain was just starting to come down when I snapped a few shots of the building from across the street. Then I went up the driveway to the back, to look at the staircases Rebekka mentioned. This was the view she remembered best. It must have meant a lot to her because she’d made a sculptural model of these humble wooden Chicago back stairs. You can see similar ones all over the city. I never asked her why they were so important.

I’m an idiot with a camera, so it took me several tries to actually get a few snaps saved, but I persevered eventually, then walked up 57th Street for some dinner before the movie.

I’ve been going to Medici for as long as I’ve been coming to Hyde Park. It’s one of those college hangout restaurants with graffiti etched into the wood and lots of unrelated tchotchkes and art. The food was never memorable, but this night, for whatever reason, everything was terrible. The girl waiting on me couldn’t have cared less either. It made the whole place turn ugly. I don’t know if I’ll be going back anytime soon.

The movie was from Peru and was called The Milk of Sorrow. It was about a young woman who took drastic measures not to be raped or abused by the men who ran rampant in the country during the conflict between the Shining Path and the government. It evokes the woman’s emotional state so intimately that it was often painful to watch. At the same time, it’s a beautiful, sometimes sprawling portrait of a society I knew little about. It’s the kind of thing which is all-encompassing enough to make me forget everything for awhile.

One of the things I forgot about was the weather. The walk north on Woodlawn to catch the first of two buses home was treacherous. I ended up stomping through the little squares of parkway, because these were covered in snow, rather than the thin sheet of ice coating the sidewalks. Even so, I kept slipping and had to move awkwardly, checking every other step. It looked shimmering and beautiful from the bus window, but I wasn’t looking forward to going back out into it for the short walk up my street.

At home I loaded the photos of the house onto my laptop. I’d try to make a drawing from them the next day.

I worked at it the rest of the week and came up with something acceptable. I’ve been doing it long enough and have enough muscle-memory that I can make a drawing look like something seen with eyes rather than lenses. I’ve gotten in trouble before for putting photography down, but the truth is I just don’t think much about it. I spend most of my time looking around so I don’t need a machine to record the glances for me. In the case of Rebekka’s drawing, I used photos as a shortcut. It was on my mind and I didn’t wanna wait till spring to work on it. But it still sort of felt like cheating.

So much of making art is beyond words or explanation. I don’t know if somebody looking at my drawing could tell it was done with the aid of a couple shitty digital photos, or that I’ve never been in this house, or even when exactly the drawing was done. Does it matter? I knew next to nothing about life in Peru in the 80s but was utterly enthralled and haunted by The Milk of Sorrow. It still comes back to me a week later, which is rare since I see so many movies.

The next day I made sure to wear boots rather than the smooth-soled shoes I had on the night before, but the ice rink of yesterday was replaced by snow. I didn’t have to watch my step and could walk like a normal person again.