Letter

A lot of filmmakers started out as painters.  Maurice Pialat seems to’ve been more tormented by his failure at it than most. But then nothing is easy in his world if his movies are to be believed. Others like David Lynch and Julian Schnabel have found ways to continue with both mediums. Pialat said if you can’t be a genius at something, then why bother. It’s an extreme position, but given the movies he made, I’ll take his word for it. 

I wrote about Pialat a few times before. Most recently, a year and a half ago. He’s again front of mind because I recently bought a crummy European DVD of his last film, Le Garçu. It’s the only one of his features unavailable in this country. According to Wikipedia, he was unhappy with how it turned out and wanted to reedit it, but never got to. It came out in 1995, four years after Van Gogh; he was dead a few years later.

It’s an older man’s story about the insecurity of being a late-in-life father, involved with a far younger woman. The little boy in the film is his own son. Pialat’s stand-in is played by his frequent leading man, Gerard Depardieu, a few years before that actor’s slide into full-on lunacy, typified by his friendship with Vladimir Putin. It’s a movie that would pair well with Abel Ferrara’s recent Tommaso. Whether this is your kind of thing, I can’t say, but it’s definitely mine. Few filmmakers portray the wars between women and men more accurately than Pialat. What keeps him from sliding into misogyny is that he’s at least as hard on the men in his movies as the women. The man Depardieu plays in this final film is a real monster. Takes some courage to show yourself that way.

There are very few references to Pialat’s time as a painter online. The pictures in this letter are the only ones I could find. There’s also a shitty untranslated video of a memorial exhibition. What sticks in the memory are the hideous oversized wooden frames on all the little paintings. A bad frame can destroy a picture. Even in the sloppy camera pan of the video, I can tell that whatever quality the work has is obscured by its presentation.

Pialat made my favorite Van Gogh movie partly because of his own intimate experience with oil painting. There are certain things that can only be related from firsthand experience. 

Unlike the raging, crystal-clear power of his films, Pialat’s paintings look a little tentative. He was still feeling his way toward a way of working that was his own. He never made it, but that’s all to the good, because otherwise we would not have his movies. Looking at Schnabel’s non-film efforts, I think more painter-filmmakers should follow Pialat’s lead. There are only so many hours in a day and so much creative energy one has to expend in a life. It’s probably best to choose one and give that your all.

This, coming from someone currently attempting to do three things at once, so maybe I’m talking out of my ass, giving out advice I can’t follow myself. It’ll all shake out in the end, and the lesser things will be forgotten, one way or the other. As much as I love movies though, the idea of making one never got past the daydream stage. The level of collaboration and compromise necessary made it a nonstarter. I’m just not a team player.

Would Pialat have been better off as a painter? Unlikely. Know any happy painters? His paintings only matter to his friends and family, whereas his films are for at least a few others. Those who want to see what people are actually like rather what they want others to see or how they wish they could be.

—Listen to my talk with Gil Roth and look out for one with Emmett Kelly on Wednesday. Subscribe to hu u no at Apple and all the other places.

—I reviewed a new Jim Broadbent flick.

You say you hope I find what I’m looking for, on your way out the door. You tell me you can’t be what I want you to be. That I’m in love with love. I don’t understand half the things you say. They seem like ideas you throw against the wall to explain to yourself why you’re leaving. They don’t have much to do with me or my feelings.

I don’t mean to say you don’t care about me. You do in your self-involved way. Can anyone actually see or feel into anyone else? We have relationships with projections of others for the most part, I believe.

By making yourself the bad guy you feel better about ditching me. You think you’re softening the blow. If anything, you’re making it worse. Because now, not only am I alone, but if I believe you were shit to begin with, that you don’t deserve me, or whatever, I then have to admit I’m a bad judge of others. If I’m so great and smart and cool, how could I make the mistake of getting involved with someone like you?

You left all the stuff that wouldn’t fit into that little yellow car here with me. I have to wake up every day in this graveyard of our marriage. Some days I want to throw all your shit out the window into the backyard and make a bonfire. Would that exorcise the demons you’ve left in your absence?

Then you call and say you miss me. But you don’t want to work things out. You just want to wallow in the sadness of failure. The way you describe failing again at a relationship, this time with me, after a series of failures with other men, sounds like a setback on a resumé or your goal/career arc rather than a human interaction with someone of your own species. This failure is like a work project that didn’t turn out the way you’d hoped. You’re taking responsibility. The buck stops with you. Like no one else on ‘the team’ could do anything to salvage the thing in the end.

I’ve never worked in an office so I don’t have the language or training to make sense of my life in corporate terms.

Daniel Knox put on a David Lynch retrospective at the Music Box last week. I was just gonna see Lost Highway, but I got done with work early, so I decided to catch Eraserhead as well. Lynch’s movies have been with me nearly forty years. My memory for dates is suspect but I’m pretty sure I saw Dune in the theater in 1984. Whether I saw Eraserhead or Elephant Man before, I can’t say. The thing is time goes haywire in all his movies, so a linear chronology’s kind of pointless anyway. Better to peg his movies to biography.

True art will change with you. Whenever I first saw Eraserhead, it was too soon. I know it scared me. But as a teenager I had no inkling what it was about. As I aged and had experiences with others, the movie came into sharper and sharper focus. Last week at the Music Box, it struck me as much funnier than I remembered it. Also, note-perfect in the way it showed bedtime for a couple about to break up as a kind of battlefield.

Daniel Knox came into my life a little later than Lynch. He was the opener for my friend, Azita, at the Hideout sometime around 2007. He was a big man who sat at the piano and belted out twisted tunes in a booming baritone. I found out soon after that he was a projectionist at the Music Box. We became sort of friends. Sort of, because Daniel held people at arm’s length. Yet, for whatever reason, he respected my work, and thus considered me worthy of his acquaintance. He liked to let me into the movies for free. We’d chat in the lobby of the theater. He was always good for an odd ugly anecdote about a nasty neighbor or a detailed description of whatever dead crushed animal he happened upon in his nocturnal wanderings about the city.

I remember sitting at the Harvard Square Theatre in 1986 next to a woman having a full-on panic attack as Blue Velvetrolled. I loved every second. Later, when it was released on VHS, I stayed home sick from school one day and watched it three times in a row, back to back.

Daniel kept working at the Music Box, but his star slowly rose. I’d catch him whenever he performed in town. His records became more accomplished, elaborate. He composed a great score for a production of The Glass Menagerie. His girlfriend bought him my first book for Christmas.

David’s movie, Lost Highway, came out on a Friday in March, 1997. I caught a matinee at a theater in Boston, then got into a U-Haul van and drove west to Chicago, to stay for good.

In 2006, David brought his latest, Inland Empire, to the Music Box. He invited Daniel to accompany his presentation before the screening on the theater’s organ. I missed out on tickets but went to see the movie the following afternoon. Then returned the next afternoon to see it again. I bought the DVD and watched another four or five times over the years. It’s David’s crowning achievement, a summation of everything he’s about, and perfect bookend to Eraserhead.

In the late ’90s/early ’00s, my next-door neighbors, Anthony and Lisa, held a Lynch-themed Halloween party. The Log Lady, Laura Palmer, several Lynches, an Audrey, and assorted Dune creatures were there. Several years later, I married a Dorothy Vallens for a short spell; ten years on, I shacked up with a Radiator Lady.

I introduced her to Daniel’s music and she was hooked. After we broke up, he asked her to help him find a new record label after the one he was on went kaput. She wondered aloud why he chose her for the task. When I told a mutual friend about this, she laughed and said they were fucking. It had never even crossed my mind. I hope they both had a good time.

One time, Daniel showed up at the Skylark. I put on one of his records—a thing I often did when recognizing a musician who’d come in. He looked around suspiciously from the table where he was sitting with his friends. Then he trudged up to me and asked whether I was playing a prank on him.

Before Eraserhead on Monday, I spotted Daniel and came up to say hello. He told me he’d recently moved to Portugal—the only country his music is truly appreciated. The theater was packed and he was in his glory.

I soaked it in, thinking back all the while about David, Daniel, and me.

Listen to my playlist on Apple Music.

—I wrote about the Bob Thompson retrospective, one of the best art shows of recent years. Then I talked with Mallory about Silence of the Lambs.]

—Listen to my talk with Adam Gnade posted last Wednesday. I sent out around twenty-five invites to people I wanted to record talks with and almost everyone said yes. This means that, even with a few cancelations, I’ll have a new episode up every Wednesday through the summer. Upcoming guests include Gil Roth, Laura Park, Christian TeBordo, Damian Rogers, Emmett Kelly, Kat Sachs, Scott McClanahan, and many more. I’m pretty excited about it, though there’s a shitload of work ahead to make it happen. Meanwhile, listen to the archive and subscribe wherever you get podcasts to hear new ones as they’re posted. Not sure if I’ll end up adding the whole back catalogue, but who knows?

Please spread the word if you like what you hear. It’s the only way these conversations will be heard and I believe they deserve to be.