The Coen Brothers: Serious Men?

High seriousness and the Brothers Coen do not an immediate marriage make. The first ten minutes of Joel and Ethan Coen's latest effort A Serious Man, far from altering this impression, rather shocks the viewer into remembering how effectively the Coens utilise the mechanics of horror in their best films. Joel Coen started out as assistant editor to Sam Raimi on the comic-horror masterpiece The Evil Dead and the brothers have maintained some of the horror aesthetics on display in that movie, in their own most effective nightmarish visions, such as: Blood Simple, Barton Fink, Fargo, O Brother, Where art Thou? and No Country for Old Men. Alongside their undoubted love for film noir, the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett, screwball comedy and the pointed satires of Preston Sturges, the Coens have frequently utilised suggestive imagery, horrific violence, supremely eerie camera angles and lighting and the unsettling soundtracks of Carter Burwell, as only true pioneers of horror, such as Jacques Tourneur, Tod Browning and Georges Franju, could. Where the Coens excel yet further is in the quality of their writing which, whether focused on the verbal or physical, unerringly hits the right mark of wry humour, or encroaching menace. In A Serious Man the Coens are intent on using Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle' as the filter through which all dialogue and action must pass, thus making the movie their most unsettling experience to date.

The movie opens in the 19th Century, in a Polish Shtetl, with a husband returning to his wife to inform her that he has met a Rabbinical relative in the snow, who helped him fix his cart. The wife is certain, however, that the person in question, Treitle Groshkover (yet another fabulous Coen Brothers character name), died three years earlier and therefore her husband must have come across a Dybbuk (a troubled spirit, either kind or malevolent, that cleaves to an individual in a time of difficulty, or crisis). The husband has unfortunately invited the relative to eat with them and on Groshkover's arrival the wife sets about proving her suspicions. This opening section of the film is shot in Yiddish, with English subtitling, and plays fast and loose with the commonly held Jewish folk mythology of a Dybbuk. That aside it is a wondefully atmospheric and chilling exordium that sets the tone for the seemingly wholly unconnected events that follow.

The Coen Brothers display a frequent fascination with the visual depiction of orifices, as elaborated in the bowling ball sequences of The Big Lebowski, the schematics of the hula-hoop in The Hudsucker Proxy and the frequent lingering shots of various piercing wounds and punctures in almost every one of their films. A Serious Man actually presents the most startling of all such shots as part of its impressive credits sequence. Jefferson Airplanes 'Somebody to Love' (a recurring joke throughout the movie) is played over the opening credits which end upon a black screen. Gradually a small speck appears and expands in the centre of the black screen, taking on the metaphorical import of a birthing canal, or yet another hole in a Coen character’s head. For the briefest of moments it is suggestive of the central spoke on a spinning record deck, but is revealed to be the direct passage from the dark emptiness of the head, down through the ear canal and into the earpiece of a portable tape player, being listened to by Danny Gopnik, the errant pot-head son of the film’s protagonist (although not the earnest man of the title) Larry Gopnik. Danny is in Hebrew school and it should be considered as to whether the nightmarish opening sequence is in fact no more than the overactive imaginings of an otherwise bored teenage boy.

Much like Barton Fink, the Coen Brothers evocation of another earnest Jewish male, A Serious Man appears to be primarily concerned with the questionable state of mind of its central protagonist, when placed under the unremitting trials, stresses and strains of external forces. Larry Glopnik, however, unlike Barton Fink, has no airs or pretensions. He is a Professor of Physics in Minnesota, a family man, living in a predominately Jewish community in the suburbs. The audience first encounters Larry undergoing a regular checkup with his doctor, a sequence that is brilliantly and disorientingly cross-cut with Danny's classroom mischief. The film already seems hell-bent on reinforcing uncertainty as its primary theme through its formal choices. How does the audience connect the parallel events portrayed? Are they even meant to be connected? How should the pre-credit intro be regarded in relation to what is now being portrayed? All of these questions, and many more, are left hanging, some to be answered, others to have no such luck. The Coens would appear to be positing early in the film the premise that is later espoused by the rather sanctimonious Rabbi Nachtner, namely that our questions are not raised to be answered and that Hashem (God) has no responsibility to his creation, to reveal the methodology of his actions.



Larry Gopnik is such a benign presence within the movie that it seems almost masochistic on the part of the Coens to hang the framework of the narrative upon his unassuming shoulders. Whereas other 'nobody' Coen protagonists, such as Jerry Lundegaard in Fargo and Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There, however reluctantly, allow their survival instincts to force them into decisive action, Gopnik throughout A Serious Man strongly decries his ever having done anything. To some degree this is true, as the things that befall him seem primarily to be as a result of his inaction, rather than any impulse, or volition, on his part. In talking about this project the Coens have described it as their take on the Book of Job and Gopnik seems to endure his fair share of torments with quiet torpidness. First of all he is confronted by the inscrutably direct deviousness of a dissatisfied Korean student, who seems to have thoroughly understood how Heisenberg's principle should be applied to actual human interaction, even if he sucks at the maths. Then there is the small matter of Sy Abelman, a widower of three years (another source of wry Coen humour), who appears to be far more aware of the condition of Larry's marriage than Larry is himself. Gopnik's living purgatory is fleshed out by the persistent and unrestrained selfishness of Larry's son and daughter, the indefinite stay of Larry's mentally unstable, goiter-draining, maths whizz of a brother (wonderfully portrayed by Richard Kind), the surly gun-toting NRA survivalists who live next door and seem to be under the impression that more of the lawn is actually theirs than they are truly entitled to, the tongue-tied yet recklessly verbal Dean of the faculty who creates a pervasive sense of paranoia in every reassurance of tenure, the rather too liberal, middle-aged housewife whose recreational activities involve pot-smoking and naturism, the friendly, but high-fee charging legal representation that Larry takes on initially to help with his unwanted divorce proceedings, and most disturbingly of all the Columbia Records Store that Larry's son has joined and whom now hound Larry for the cost of records that he has no idea about.

Intriguingly, throughout the movie Larry is heard to be asking questions. Questions of his family, questions of his work colleagues, questions of Rabbis, questions of his legal representation, yet not once in the entire film does he actually receive, what he considers to be, an adequate answer. More often than not his family ignores him, leaving him in a seemingly perpetual state of catch-up. Whilst the Rabbis, lawyers and work colleagues merely give him an assortment of convoluted avoidance statements. The only people in the movie that ever really get to grips with Larry's enquiries are the various portly, middle-aged, slightly owlish secretaries he comes into contact with, who offer contrite and frequently rebarbative responses, that fail only in the fact that they do not answer Larry's questions in the manner that he would wish them to be answered.



The smug platitudes and odiously false understanding that Sy Abelman (the 'Serious Man' of the title, as designated by Rabbi Nachtner at his service) foists upon the reluctant and unwilling Larry are by far and away the most comic of all the sufferings he is forced to endure. The esteemed voice artist Fred Melamud is superb in the role of Abelman, turning Larry's cuckolded situation into an opportunity for them to bond, yet proving unwilling to listen to Larry's suggestions for how the divorce from his wife, Judith, should go ahead. Abelman's death is yet another of the moments in the movie where the Coens deliberately cast doubt on what the viewer is actually seeing, cross-cutting between Larry and Sy driving to work and the golf course, respectively. The expectation is that they are driving toward some literal or metaphorical collision with one another, however this is simply not the case, although Larry later sees some signifigance in the fact that both Sy and himself were involved in car accidents at almost the exact same time.

Curiously, the Coens seem to take the theme of uncertainty to unprecedently subtle extremes. The frequent Coen Brothers collaborator Carter Burwell creates a musical score that is often incongruously unsettling and sinister. Furthermore, it proves to be yet another layer of uncertainty to those fans of the Coen Brothers movies, as it strongly resembles the score of their debut work Blood Simple, a film that evokes comparable dread from the most mundane of situations. The score is most significant in the way it isolates sounds such as the scrolling of the yad during a reading of the Torah, or the soft squeaking of a leather chair, by surrounding them with a suspenseful passage of music that breaks into silence. The score is also used to full horrifying effect when underlining the sections involving the Rabbis, denoted visually by a title insert.

The Coens seem to take a certain cruel glee in depicting the domestic horrors of 1960's Jewish-American life, which lacks the affectionate ribbing of Phillip Roth and strays into the territory of profound disgust. The Gopniks all sit around the kitchen table greedily and noisily slurping their soup. The wise old Rabbi Marshak is seemingly so bored by his own congregation that he refuses to see any adults and only speaks with the Bar Mitzvahed sons of the congregation (leading to the at first sinister and then hilarious cross-examination of Danny about members of Jefferson Airplane). Nobody seems to know what a 'get' is, including the Junior Rabbi. The Hebrew school is staffed by an assortment of aged, crusty men, who seem wholly out of touch with reality, let alone their students. The decor and fashions are suitably flock and pastel, whilst the community Larry lives within seems to very much operate along the lines of a modern-day Shtetl. The characters are fundamentally loveless people, with even the seductive, yet almost catatonic, Mrs. Samsky (surely a Coen play on the Dybbuk author S.Ansky), married but seemingly alone. Perhaps the most sympathetic character in the entire film is the most troubled, with Larry's brother Arthur being unable, or unwilling, to find work and accommodation, getting busted for gambling and also for the solicitation of a rent-boy at the hilariously entitled 'North Dakota' club. Yet this sympathy for Arthur, is surely based on nothing more than pity for a fundamentally wretched existence. At times A Serious Man ascends far beyond the misanthropic view of humanity that the Coens detailed in No Country for Old Men. Whereas in that movie the shocking revelation was that Javier Bardem and Tommy Lee Jones' characters are only divided in the reasons they have for deploying authority, power and violence, here the shocking revelation is perhaps that the Coens see absolutely no revelation to give. The Gopniks aren't cursed, Hashem has not forgotten them, it is simply that there is either no Hashem worth considering, or perhaps more distressingly Hashem, like the Rabbi Marshak wants absolutely nothing to do with all the Gopniks’ inane questions.

The wonderfully self-contained piece of silliness that Rabbi Nachtner tries to fob off on Larry about a dentist in the community who sees the hebrew letters that spell out 'help me' written on the back of a goy's teeth, seems an almost perfect summation of this stylish exercise in disconcertion by the Coen brothers. Rabbi Nachtner offers this, what we later understand to be pat, tale as an answer to Larry's straight questioning of what 'it' all means. However this answer only provokes the need for further answers to new questions, the last of which involves what happened to the 'goy', to which Nachtner responds 'who cares about the goy'. With A Serious Man the Coen brothers appear as truly serious men, who are more than aware that the most profound and unsettling of topics are most often best approached through the prisms of humour and horror. The rough ride that faith, religion and tradition seems to superficially take in A Serious Man is undermined somewhat by the consideration that if we are to take 'uncertainty' as the only truth of existence, then we either have to accept faith as a 'rational' reaction to such circumstances, or we have to consider the implications of 'uncertainty' as a constant, as surely oxymoronic. This thought should return the viewer to that wonderful piece of pop wisdom that is used as a motif throughout the movie, the opening lyrics to Jefferson Airplane's 'Somebody to Love': 'When the truth is found to be lies and all the joy within you dies'. This is perhaps sound advice to bear in mind when considering the full import of A Serious Man, alongside its questionable prefaced quote from Rashi: 'Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you'. The Coens are afterall serious about one thing in particular - namely, misdirection.

Where the Truth Lies, lies the Truth: Peter Carey’s ‘True History of The Kelly Gang’

It’s perhaps the most significant lack of that three letter article in recent literature. Carey in dispensing with ‘The’ in the title to his slippery, metafictional reworking of the Kelly history and mythology, demonstrates slyly his approach to that most overly lauded virtue - ‘truthfulness’. This avoidance of the definite in the title of the work, is echoed in the manner by which Carey constructs his narrative of the Kelly Gang in fragmentary form, gradually suggesting the ways in which Kelly’s supposed testament could have been altered, edited or generally influenced in an attempt to adjust the ‘reality’ of events – not to forget that the testament itself is Carey’s fictional creation.


The very fact that Carey chooses to focus his undoubted narrative talents on what, for an Australian at least, is a particularly familiar story suggests that Carey is perhaps concerned more with how the story has been told, than in presenting any definitive and accurate summation. A legendary figure such as Ned Kelly is too embroiled in the story of the birth of the Australian nation, for an accurate picture of the person to emerge. The author is aware of this and in subsuming his own voice in the carefully crafted nuances of Kelly’s intelligent, yet uneducated diction, Carey embraces the legend while diminishing the distance between us and the bushranger outlaw.

The novel is presented as a collection of journals - of various size, colour and paper quality - outlining the chronological history of Kelly from his early childhood, to the birth of his daughter and the Glenrowan massacre that saw the police finally bring him and his gang to justice. These journal accounts are presented as the direct voice of Kelly, the man’s testament to his daughter, written presumably as he awaits his execution. The fact that this work is written with his daughter in mind suggests why it is that Kelly erases the curse words and foul language from the text and why he also cloaks the carnal nature of many of the family shenanigans behind a number of sanitised euphemisms. Also present in these journals is a carefully cultivated persona of Kelly as an upright man of slightly muddied morality, who feels himself the victim of a pernicious and conspiratorial police state and to this end it often appears as if Kelly is either wilfully ignorant of events, or extremely slow to register them. The personality that comes off of the pages of these journal entries runs counter to the images presented by the media accounts that are dotted throughout the text and constitute a significant part of the final third of the book. Supposed source material is referenced in the prologue account of Ned Kelly’s last stand and in the return to this event at the book's close. As well as that we also have the testimony of Thomas Curnow, which conflicts drastically with Kelly’s summation of events within the journals. There is also the insertion of Mary Hearn’s (Kelly’s lover and mother of his daughter) voice into the text in the form of annotations redressing the newspaper accounts of Kelly. Finally the way in which the journals are presented, the fact that they are not present more importantly, brings us back to the divining voice of Carey the author. The journals are artefacts described for us in short paragraphs under each successive chapter heading. The extraneous material has also been sourced from somewhere, or at least made to appear as if sourced and in closing Carey presents a series of acknowledgements thanking various academics, historians, friends and family for their contributions in the research carried out. Is Carey really trying to get at the truth, or is he indulging in a subtle deconstruction of the Kelly mythology which is so bound up in the birth of his homeland?


It is of great significance that Kelly, when not being a lawless brigand and general black sheep, is found to be writing his story. Early in the gang’s enforced outlaw status Kelly shows himself to be keenly aware of the importance of image and also the importance of telling a good story well. On at least three occasions he writes a testament only to place it into the hands of those who side with law and order. At the end of the text we are led to believe that Curnow is actually acting as editor of the grand Kelly opus, despite his role in the Glenrowan massacre. The presence of so many narrative attempts within the actual narrative itself allows Carey some leeway when it comes to presenting Kelly’s voice as intelligent and relatively articulate. The references to R.D. Blackmore’s ‘Lorna Doone’ go some of the way to informing the texture of the exposition – an adventure story straight out of the early 19th Century. In many ways the book is in a similar vein to those other rabidly egocentric and equally serpentine first-person narratives, such as Banville’s ‘The Book of Evidence, or Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’. In particular it shares with the latter a supposedly academic origin, that subtly reveals the massive discrepancies between the narrator’s account of things and those other accounts of things that the narrator in his arrogance refers to and dismisses. So convincing is Carey’s narrative ventriloquism that it is quite easy to accept Kelly at his supposed word. But are these really Kelly’s words? Are they not actually authorial approximations of Kelly? Just more layers of mythmaking, beneath which the person himself is left suffocating. After all, Kelly the person ceased the moment that Kelly the legend began. What is perhaps interesting is why it is that our various national cultures require the presence of figures like Kelly? Are nations built from these projections of lawlessness and moral reordering? Cormac McCarthy’s novel ‘No Country for Old Men’ focuses on this notion, as does Scorsese’s movie ‘Gangs of New York’. Myths are cultivated from the excess of culture within a given society. Everything that authority wishes omitted from society is comfortably exercised in story, in narrative, in fable. The myths of the American West, the Australian Outback, Sherwood Forest and the lawless Highlands of Scotland are perhaps expressions of the initiatory impulse that a society in construction must excise to become governable.

Being Charlie Adam

Why are so many talented Scottish footballers so bloody enigmatic when it comes to displaying their talents consistently at the highest levels? Despite the greats of the 60's, 70's and 80's, such as Laws, Hansen, Bremner, Jordan, Souness, Dalglish and Robertson, there has been a steady stream of untapped, or not fully realised, talent frittered away before a generation of Scots' fans teary eyes. Think of the sublime gifts of Jimmy Baxter, or Davie Cooper, that, due to the traditional Scottish disdain for healthy living, were so infrequently shared with the Rangers, Raith and Motherwell fans who worshipped them. What about the myriad talents of Giggs' contemporary Eoin Jess, a player that back in the early 90's had many Scottish football journalists predicting a similar career trajectory to the Welsh wizard? Aside from his all too brief halycon years at Pittodrie there is now as little to admire of Jess's career, as there are trophies on his CV.



In recent years the youth teams at Motherwell, Kilmarnock, Hibernian and Hearts have developed a number of promising young talents, only for the Old Firm to come-a-calling and set their development back a few years at best (Kevin Thomson, Steven Naismith), or leave them cryogenically frozen at worst (Derek Riordan). Part of this is down to the players themselves, groomed in the goldfish bowl that is Scottish football, they nowadays tend to have an over-inflated opinion of their own talents, achievements and self-worth from a ridiculously young age and quickly fall into all the extracurricular traps their relative affluence allows them. Often it is only on descending down the Scottish League that such players begin to realise a fraction of that potential that initially got them the big pay cheque (just take a look at where some of the journeymen assembled by Derek Adams at Ross County this season started their careers).

One of the most glaring details about talented Scottish footballers' habits (much like many young English players) in the past few years has been their relative inability to seek out better opportunities in leagues other than their own. Since the tail-end of the Merseyside duopoly of Everton and Liverpool in the 80's and the likes of McClair and Strachan at United, successful Scots' players abroad have been an endangered species. Gary McCallister was perhaps the last truly great Scottish player to achieve tangible success abroad, although the mercurial gifts of James McFadden helped David Moyes settle into the Goodison hotseat and perhaps Manchester United's most consistent performer of the last few seasons has been the tenacious midfield dynamo Darren Fletcher. There really is though no comparison between the current crop of Scots' players parked in mid-table Premier League and Championship outfits and the greats of the Leeds, Liverpool, Everton and Forest teams of old, not too mention the continental pioneers like Souness, Jordan and Archibald, unless you harbour an ironic soft-spot for Holland's favourite Scotsman Scott Booth.


Amongst the current crop of Scotland players, I would argue that only McFadden clearly has more natural skill and ability than the former 'Ger Charlie Adam. Darren Fletcher has grown into a truly world class talent more through ferocious willpower and sheer, Ferguson-implanted, single-mindedness than by dint of being blessed with fantastic football skills. Adam, much like his former team-mate and club captain Barry 'pass-back' Ferguson, comes across in interviews as somewhat lacking in the verbal skills to adequately discuss the weather, let alone his footballing ability (since when has that been an issue for English, French, or Spanish footballers and there bland, airbrushed platitudes), yet unlike Ferguson he seems to have an awareness of these limitations. In his most recent incarnation for Championship outfit Blackpool, Adam has literally been following that tired old cliche and doing his talking on the pitch, orchestrating Blackpool's frenetic brand of attacking football from the centre of the park, turning into a box-to-box midfielder in the Steven Gerrard mould.


As manager Ian Holloway's club captain and Blackpool's most expensive signing (at a paltry £500,000 pounds), Adam has embraced the tough fitness training sessions and pass'n'move offensive play of his new club and in the process has blossomed into the player that Paul Le Guen considered to be one of the most promising youth products coming through the Ibrox ranks in his short tenure at the club. It is somewhat troubling to consider that Adam has clearly performed for the likes of Gus MacPherson, Le Guen and Holloway, all managers who demand high fitness levels of their players and yet frequently throughout his time at Ibrox was the object of terrace abuse and derision, due to his ballooning weight and propensity to jog, or waddle, after the ball. He would not be the first player, nor the last, to let Glasgow living get the better of him. I seem to remember Peter Lovenkrands having similar weight issues in his time at Ibrox, as well as Riordan, Caldwell and Boruc in more recent times at Celtic.

Despite being given his first Scotland cap by Alex McLeish, at club level Adam clearly did not win Big 'Eck's trust on the football pitch, being farmed out first to Ross County and then to his successful stint at St. Mirren under MacPherson. Le Guen succeeded McLeish in the summer of 2006 and after a pre-season goal blitz by Adam the Frenchman regularly selected, and got the best from, him. However, Le Guen's brutally short reign at Ibrox saw Walter Smith takeover in early 2007 and gradually the dynamism of the last 18 months drained from Adam's performances. By 2009 Adam was a peripheral figure at Ibrox, seemingly resigned to never quite making the grade for Rangers. It was at this juncture that Adam initially took up a loan option with relegation threatened Blackpool, a move he would later make permanent under the stewardship of Holloway in August 2009.

Adam in the few, mostly dull, football interviews that he has given, has frequently alluded to his need to 'feel wanted' and his willingness to 'play anywhere' as long as it meant playing regularly. Being a natural left-footer with a thunderous shot, he frequently found himself being asked to play out on the wing at Ibrox, cutting inside when necessary. Yet under Holloway at Blackpool Adam has found himself being utilised in a more demanding central role, where he can show-off his full range of passing and his previously much-maligned capacity to intelligently link up defence and attack with well-timed charges from deep. As a result his goal ratio has also swollen, acceding the near-double figure tally he clocked up in that excellent season in Paisley. A look at some of Adam's more outrageous finishes against Stuttgart, Celtic, Queen of the South and West Brom, demonstrates his inherent strengths: a precision delivery from dead-ball situations, an excellent first-touch, the ability to turn defenders with intelligent movement and a rocket left-footed finish. Why is it then that it has taken Adam so long to fulfill the potential observed by MacPherson and Le Guen way back in the 2005-06 season?



Adam's personality in the past has seemed to be a fairly benign one, that demanded the strict motivational abilities of a hard task-master to get the best from it on the training pitch. Adam also seemed previously resistant to playing a strict role within a tactically disciplined side, which both McLeish and Smith frequently demand of their charges. Under MacPherson and Le Guen, Adam seemed to blossom by being given a degree of freedom to run at defences and utilise his strength and balance to break teams down from a number of different positions across the midfield. Holloway has seemed to encourage this with his own preference for open, attacking football, played through the midfield, yet he has also managed to harness Adam to a stronger work ethic by placing the responsibility of the captaincy squarely on his young shoulders. Adam has certainly risen to the occasion this season, dominating a number of key matches for Blackpool with his ability to pick the right pass and his set-piece expertise. In fact Holloway, often derided as a clownish figure in the past, has managed to imbue Adam not only with the confidence to take his abilities to the next level, but also the willingness to sacrifice for the team and also to demonstrate a strong streak of loyalty that few had previously thought possible once Adam's Rangers dream lay in tatters.

Ominously for Blackpool their captain's revitalisation has won him a new group of admirers, including McFadden's former mentor/nemesis David Moyes at Everton. If rumours are to be believed Adam has a tough choice to make this summer between the comfortable existence he has established for himself at the Premiership's newest club, or pushing himself to achieve further success as part of Moyes robust and competitive Goodison midfield. He would do well to look at the example of a former team-mate who has excelled since arriving on Merseyside. Mikel Arteta had a miserable spell at Rangers in the early part of the decade and yet has become one of the key creative influences for Moyes' team. Adam may yet become a proper Big Time Charlie.

Towards the End of the World

Awoke upon that fog bestraddled road I always seem to ride along, all the way till Jamno. There is something Wellesian about this geography. These cadaverous trees line my way, on either side, like that last boulevard Joseph Cotten walks, alongside Alida Valli, in Reed's The Third Man. No cemetery awaits me at its end though, and this morning the road ahead seems to have no end at all, revealed to me, as it is, in creeping increments reclaimed from this hungry fog.

Jamno is a serpentine village a few kilometres to the north of Koszalin. Its winding main road branches off into two possible directions at its northern end. One way will take you round in a loop toward Labusz and the main road to Koszalin. The other way, aptly named ul. Promowa, takes you out onto an increasingly desolate high road, resembling that lonely stretch of dirt and tarmac from A Touch of Evil, where Charlton Heston fatefully deposits Janet Leigh in the second weirdest motel, besides the Bates.

At the end of ul. Promowa is the wide, open water of Lake Jamno, a stretch of water so perpetually filthy that it has come to resemble a kidney in renal failure, polluted with the detritus of the surrounding towns of Mielno, Uniescie and Osieki. Screened off behind this amorphous wall of whispy whiteness, the lake, for once, seems almost magisterial, as if in haughty isolation.



Last year they built a paved parking area, pinewood pier and timbered shelter for all those tourists who, during the hectic summer months, would rather take the short twenty minute foot passenger ferry to Mielno, than wait hours in backed up traffic along the single-lane road. At this early hour, with no other person here but me, or at least no other person I might be able to see, the pier in its perfectly symmetrical T seems to stand alone against the water and the white wall beyond.



Somewhere a demented cuckoo trumps all the other cracks, rattles, chirrups, cheeps and whirples, with its repetitive two-tone call. Ducks burst into and out of view, skimming close to the surface of the mindlessly motioning water. From the head of the pier the ripples of the water run like the steady spiralling progression of grooved, waxed vinyl under a needle. I can see the flat side of a dead fish, its silver scales no longer glistening, its one visible eye an empty grey hole.



To the east the sun is a whiter hole in the thick heart of the fog. Underneath this hole a line of trees seem to stand upon the exact frontier between the present moment reality and those less tangible workings of memory and imagination.

All around the far perimeter of the lake the pale horizon line is aglow with the hazy ascendancy of the whiter sun. It appears as if, stood upon this pier in the early morning damp, I am being approached by an unfathomable number of silent on-rushing cars, headlights glaring out from the mist.

A black, white and brown plumed wagtail follows me all the way back to my bicycle, relaying information back-and-forth to its nestbound neighbour about my present movements. I have no intention of disrupting the quiet mutterings of the bullrushes. Instead I sit upon the clammy wood of the bench under the shelter and feel the cold grow claws and dig itself into my bones. Last nights pizza boxes and beer cans lie recovering in the rubbish bins. The sun, now blazing high in the sky, cannot stop me shivering. A moment ago I felt as if I was approaching the far frontier, the furthest shore, the very edge of the world, the road beneath my tyres materialising momentarily only to fall away. The only thing telling me I'm not inside the most narcotic of dreams, the pungent salt-kissed air that now infuses my lungs.

I glide past the tasteless new-build bungalows and villas, back into the small centre of Jamno, on ul. Posagowa, where the barns are dank, dull and dilapidated and the early-morning rooster has right of way.

A FEAR OF DYING

APPROACHING DEATH IN WIM WENDERS 'LIGHTNING OVER WATER' AND TAMARA JENKINS 'THE SAVAGES'

At an early point in Wim Wenders experimental documentary on the death of Nicholas Ray Lightning over Water Wenders puts forward the idea that one should confront one’s fears head on. Wenders perpetual paralysis when confronted with his visibly failing friend, and cinematic mentor, Nicholas Ray, establishes his motivation for coming to Ray’s New York apartment armed with a camera and flanked by a small film crew. Wenders is undoubtedly confronting his own fear. The uncomfortable opening exchanges between the iconic Hollywood maverick and his European protégé, are partly a result of Wenders placing a physical barrier – in the form of a partition wall – between himself and the coughing and spluttering, cancer-ridden, walking corpse that Ray has become. Ray here is a wraith-like spectre, almost always caught with his cigarette coolly dangling between skeletal fingers, or hanging louche (just like Jimmy Dean) from his wafer thin lips. The partition wall allows Wenders to remain blind to the physical decay of his idol. Yet the camera he deploys so mercilessly does not waver in its depiction of Ray’s deterioration – in looking over the day's rushes Wenders ruminates over the exposing nature of the camera, as it insinuates itself into every rigid muscle and protuberant bone of Ray’s cracking carapace.



What is it that keeps Wenders film stock rolling? Continually, Wenders refers to the inability to find a film among all of the material, or simply the fact that he must carry on making the film. Yet as the fear grows closer and Ray’s vitality ebbs ever further away from the camera’s inquisition, what prevents Wenders from turning away, turning the camera away and thereby turning us – the audience – away from this process of dying? In amongst the chopping between aesthetic film (the cinema quality scene-setting) and guerrilla film (the revealing process shots of the film crew working the set) Wenders asks Ray what he wants from this film. Ray is bent on realising a dream-story he has had involving an art-dealer forging his masterworks and deriving his greatest pleasure from trying to place his own forgeries into the revered public spaces that have canonised the works in which he deals. Wenders calls Ray on his narrative idealisation. Why a painter Nick, why painting? We know it’s you, why not film. Nicholas Ray then verbalises the burden he is placing upon Wenders. He is asking Wenders to assist him in completing one last film – this film Lightning over Water (in itself a beautiful visual metaphor from the credit sequences). Wenders keeps filming because Ray needs to complete this film, as he says while addressing the Vasser College students, he needs to bring himself back to a sense of the whole man, he needs to feel whole again. Trying to bring Ray out complete and intact from the midst of his own deterioration is then Wenders' task, his promise and is what fuels the films intense final third, in which Ray fragments before the unflinching lens of the camera allowing Wenders to discover the ‘wholeness’ demanded of him by his co-auteur, a dying man’s ‘final cut’.

The degree to which Wenders goes deep into that reservoir of fear and captures the death of a man and thus the life of a man, is partly because of his resistance to the cathartic emotional release, most often supplied to the viewer through a play of grief, or the shock of a moment of comedy. In Tamara Jenkins recent release The Savages the neurotic middle-class mores of a dysfunctional family triumvirate (erstwhile father, cerebral brother and extrovert sister) are the alienating glaze that deflects the penetrating stare of the camera just enough to keep the death process apart from the life process. The living, in dying, will not yield up to the quiet distancing and necessary erasure that allows them to move seamlessly into memory and away from the residue of ownership over the self.

Lenny Savage is becoming consumed by dementia and he wears the haunted mask of confusion and horror that is the mark of his disease and its brutal propensity for emptying. Philip Bosco is acting, but inhabits that messily defined area, previously inhabited by Henry Fonda (On Golden Pond), Jason Robards (Magnolia) and Richard Farnsworth (The Straight Story), where life’s completion is closing in fast and he appears at that finely balanced moment before the inexorable decline. Having alienated himself from his children, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Wendy (Laura Linney), when his long-term girlfriend dies, he finds himself exiled from their Sun City retirement bungalow and suddenly in need of the support of two strangers. Jon, a theatre Professor, and Wendy, a wannabe writer, exhibit two different manifestations of the fear of death, suddenly thrust upon them by their father’s mouldering presence. Jon retreats from his father mentally, while keeping a constant physical proximity. His response is akin to that of Wenders when confronted by Ray, a glacial rationalism, poorly masking the palpable fear bubbling away just below the surface of that pale white flesh. Wendy on the other hand attempts to delude herself into an intimacy with the father she never really had, that she has never really known. She compensates for their lack of a sense of deep kinship by throwing herself into a strange attempt at proving her love. Her fear is bought away from her in the little knick-knacks (such as the red pillow) she festoons her befuddled father with.



The two films are completely antithetical and yet when viewed in close proximity begin to migrate toward each other. Wenders film can be viewed as a careful fostering of a father-figure’s failing energies for one last exhibition of mastery. Yet the stress inherent within Wenders' and Ray’s relationship also at times gives way to a struggle for ownership of the movie. Wenders brings out the key elements of Ray’s back catalogue, his work with actors (almost theatrical and given theatrical voice in the Kafka sequence), the sense of Homecoming that follows Robert Mitchum’s return home in The Lusty Men (as commented on in his Vasser lecture) and the radical fracturing of film narrative and form that was the hallmark of Ray’s return to directorial duties after a decade-long hiatus, in his SUNY Binghamton student project We Can’t go Home Again (which both features in and heavily informs the style of Wenders' own film). Yet the centre focus of the production itself is Ray and despite his deteriorating condition he seems reluctant to go quietly into the night, forgetting lines, trying to force awkward narrative projections onto the movie's structure and attempting to make a sentimental death-bed sequence that sends Wenders to sleep.

With no such film-within-a-film framing the straighter narrative concerns of The Savages plays brother and sister off one another for ownership of the estranged father neither of them can now hope to know. What is so successful within the narrative contrivances and distancing devices (all so very Brechtian) of The Savages is the sparing use of back story, the deliberate manner in which the exact details of these three people's familial relations are withheld. We never get to know how bad a father Lenny was, or what was the cause of the split from his wife. All we have are the poor, and deeply individual, memories of the adult-children, like the brace-removal incident, or their mother’s sudden flight. At the centre of the movie is Philip Bosco’s dispensed Lenny Savage, a porous cipher figure that eludes the misplaced struggle of his children by making himself disappear in all but physical frame. A poignant scene in which Jon and Wendy’s antagonism towards their relative coping methods overspills into an all out slanging match sees the camera carefully pull away from the interior of the vehicle and drift across to the passenger seat, where Lenny sits with a suggestion of rage struggling to break through his otherwise confused countenance. He is framed behind the frosted passenger-side window pane and mutes their squabbling by pulling the hood of his ridiculous Parker raincoat (an inappropriate purchase by Jon) up over his head, encasing himself in yet another protective layer, removing himself a little more from the movie.

The Savages manages to leaven its despairing look at the human inability to cope with the dying process by placing an emphasis on the barbed wit of its protagonists, or their awkwardness within certain social contexts that they deem inappropriate (the sequence in which Larry requests the 1927 version of The Jazz Singer as his film in the respite home, staffed, as it is, by an almost exclusively African-American group of nurses and carers is a perfect example of the comedy of anxiety that the likes of Ricky Gervais and Larry David have mined so well in recent years). It also deploys pointed truths as one of its many distancing devices, so that when Jon rails against the hypocrisy of a society that makes profit from people’s descent into old age, it is concluded by the punchline of him offending the family members who are walking their loved ones in the grounds of the retirement home. Within the limitations of its conventional narrative framework The Savages goes a long way down that road that Wenders is driving in Lightning over Water, in fact if you take Jenkins, as director and writer, and place her in the Wenders role then in her own circuitous fashion she is approaching that primitive fear. The seeming benignity of her final throwaway epilogue sequence proves to have a great deal more resonance when you consider how much easier it is to give up on a human being, particularly when they will not play ball, than it is to give up on a beloved pet.

Wenders also deals with an epilogue as the conclusion to his (or Ray’s) film and there is once more a sense of ambivalence in the seeming triteness of this closing sequence. Having wrapped the film, having ventured to the harrowing point of human completion that is death (or in this case Ray’s ‘Final Cut’) Wenders and his crew dig up the dirt and gossip of the shoot and have a Saki infused wake onboard a yacht, replete with the kind of self-obsessed narcissism of a party for ‘creatives’. Gradually the stories and snippets begin to move onto Ray’s volcanic and electric personality and a wonderful cinematic metaphor is presented to the camera when one of the crew performs a trick in which he burns a match down to his finger and thumb, then wetting the finger and thumb on his other hand inverts the match and lets the flame consume what remains of the matchstick and in the process extinguish itself. Amidst all of the discussion Wenders sits beatifically smiling, having carried the burden of another’s death successfully and thus assumed the mantle of the mentor, facing down his fear.