Four Score and Five, Maurice

Today's Google Doodle celebrates what would have been Maurice Sendak's 85th birthday. A nice little piece, that prompts a click on Sendakian everyman Max, then follows him through the creative landscapes of several of his books. At the end, everybody shows up for the party. I'm guessing that Sendak would have been a handful at his own party. A prickly man.

A related subject: having complained about the pointless digital fakery in The Great Gatsby, it's important to note that CGI has its place in film. Particularly, when it's used to show us something that can't otherwise be shown, like fantastical characters (assuming good judgment about which ones).

The Spike Jonze feature film version of Where the Wild Things Are (2009) is a wonderful case in point. I loved that film!

Gatsby Lays a West Egg

Last night, I went to see an audiovisual presentation of The Great Gatsby, which some have mistaken for a movie. Seldom have I reacted so viscerally and negatively to a film. Rarely have I been trusted less as a viewer to put the narrative (and symbolic!) pieces together.

From the earliest moments, the film signals its contempt for the story–as opposed to What the Story Means. Ironically, Baz Luhrmann's film lacks a perspective on Fitzgerald's novel. It satisfies itself with spectacle and "updating," particularly musically. But for all that it's weak, because it leans too heavily on the text of the novel, read aloud to us by Nick Carraway from his sanitorium (a narrative conceit, marred by handwriting–then "typing"–superimposed on shots of the freaking sky). Really, I'm reduced to sputtering.

The pulsing green light on the Buchanans' dock is the very first thing we see, and between that and the maddening, crappy-looking billboard of the oculist, we are battered by symbols. That billboard

and the bleak landscape it overlooks are described in the novel thusly:

Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic — their irises are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

Leaving aside the heavy-handedness (which takes many forms, including mock-campy film tropes, like silhouetted men with shovels–leaden spades!–working on silhouetted mounds) I would like to say this: if you are going to spend this much time grabbing us by the ears and thrusting us before this billboard, for Christ's sake, would you please build the goddamn thing and paint and weather it? The synthetic crap in this film was too much to bear. CGI is a plague on the art of film.

Just find a mansion! A real mansion; not this ersatz digital Christmas ornament.

Oh, and the camera work. We zoom around like miniature drones in the pixelated falsity of this world. From the first moment, as the camera raced over Long Island Sound toward the Buchanans' mansion, I thought, I don't believe that water.

Weirdly, it recalled an extremely dim memory of a shot over water, skimming toward Miami Beach, in the opening sequence of The Jackie Gleason Show, circa 1964 or 65.

The best thing in the movie, by far, is Leonardo DiCaprio, who really is a persuasive Gatsby. (Joel Edgerton's Tom Buchanan is also very good, contemptible in-the-round; alas, Daisy and Nick are thinly realized.) Back to DiCaprio: I believed Daisy when she said he looked like "the Arrow Collar man," that actual, historical marketing franchise of J.C. Leyendecker outfitted with the visage of J.C.'s lover, Charles Beach.

The movie integrates the Arrow Collar man into its synthetic Times Square (top; complete with misspelled Ziegfeld Follies, though presumably that was corrected after this image got out, months in advance of the film.)

Leyendecker lived and worked in the 1920s illustrator's haven of New Rochelle, which hosted its own share of Gatsbyesque parties at the time. Norman Rockwell, then a successful up-and-comer doing business in New Rochelle, said as much. (I am mentally footnoting Laura Claridge's Norman Rockwell: A Life as I write that. Need to reread...)

Finally, the film makes a point of getting Tom Buchanan's racist musings about "the colored races" into the script, and then, despite the involvement of Jay-Z, makes no effort whatsoever to invest any humanity in the black house servants! Why not create minor character as a foil?

I could go on, but luckily for you (and me) the day has ended. (So I beat on, boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into this ghastly Gatsby...)

The Sloth from Outer Space + Girls Dancing!

I'm trying to stay focused on long form writing these days. Working on a manuscript for a book of essays. More to come on that. But it pains me to leave this space unattended. So I offer a diversion:

A cinematic treat from 1965: aliens, deformed astronauts, pool parties, a bald dude with pointy ears, a galactic breeding program, and some excellent onscreen typography. Directed by Robert Gaffney.

Hey, Mom!

In celebration of Mother's Day, a virtually-delivered card for our mom (previous tribute here). That's Cindy and David in the foreground, and Mark and me in the background (that is, the redheads). Now that I look at it, David looks sort of bummed out. (An intense child. But a well-adjusted adult.) 

I have a dim memory of playing a game in which we tried to ascribe animal identities to the various members of our family. It's actually sort of a dumb game, and its limitations were no more clear than in the attempt to boil down our mother's attributes to a creature. In some ways, the cat fits, in that she knows her own mind and carries herself with a certain noble reserve; in other ways, an ox, for her tremendous industry and endurance; finally, there's our standard poodle Schubert, with whom Mom shares inexhaustible devotion, a steady-eddie temperament, sharp intelligence and athletic grace. (Schubert wishes he had her vocabulary.) 

Again, a dumb game at heart: a metaphoric jumble, and a retroactive justification. Fact is, I woke up and saw this cat in my head. 

Our mother is many things, and we love her for all of them. 

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! 

Love, your offspring.

Like, Illustrated Grammar

A few weeks ago, Dan Zettwoch wrote a post that used sentence diagrams to explain illustrations and comic panels. A work of expository genius. In Dan's honor–and also to unburden my scanner of images that had been sitting on it, unprocessed, for some time–tonight I bring you the opposite. Courtesy of Reader's Digest, a series of illustrations designed to enliven the subject of grammar. They come from a set of pamphlets issued by the magazine, publications intended to aid teachers of composition on the college level. Published in 1944.

Clear, crisp expository writing is always in short supply. Truly, I applaud the effort, and would happily hand off such advice to students, who now as then who struggle to keep noun and verb in close proximity, etcetera.

Alas, the uncredited cartoonist who labored to serve the text was up against it. The dominance of text in these images is a clue to their insufficiency for abstract explanations.

But I am partial to the crime scene.

And the madcap sentence procession.

Illustrated heckling, of supposed variety. Clever, and true.

I'm not sure what this is, but I'm not persuaded by it.

Who is FC? His monogram appears in every image. Any attribution detectives out there?

The boating metaphor for the run-on sentence is a bit forced, but really, give the guy a break. Would you want this assignment?

And really, the advice is spot on. Never! Have you ever read Leviathan? Sentences that last pages. (Yes, I know, that's a fragment.) Today we have shockingly informal stream-of-consciousness chat-a-thon "texts" that pass as writing (as opposed to typed speech).

Here's a text page, to give a sense of how the pamphlet worked, and in what voice it was written. No-nonsense admonitions, leavened by visual wit. The illustrations' real job was to prevent textual glaze-over.

Re: 10j: or, alternatively, never use like as verbal junk. "I'm, like, at the mall." Or as a synonym for say or said. As in, "He was like, ..."

Long live 10j. 

Abraham Lincoln was like, "With malice toward none, with everybody like chill, I am like so ready to get this thing over with."

These pamphlets were scooped up on my behalf by the ever-alert Linda Solovic, whose estate-sale instincts are legendary. Thanks, Linda!

Totally NOT KIDDING!!!

Advertisement, Popular Mechanics, December 1954

In Pursuit of Variety

I'm working with students on one of my favorite projects in the two-semester Word and Image sequence: the cinematic narrative problem. I've discussed it in this space from time to time, because it's such an interesting teaching challenge. 80 to 100 shots, drawn with Sharpies or brush pens to keep things simple, strung like beads on a necklace to tell a clear story. Packaged and played with nothing more complex than iMovie. In a sustained post on comics and cinema a few years back, I described the sequential narrative that must proceed one action or unit of information at a time, sans narrator.

Unlike an illustration, which may present a central focus with multiple secondary foci, a filmic image must show a single [new] thing at a single time to communicate a story. We are easily overwhelmed by motion and spectacle, so the carpentry of the story telling must be rigorously simple. We must know who is doing what where, but we must learn those things one at a time...

In the last several classes, students have made progress on charting their stories one frame at a time. A welcome development, to be sure. But yesterday's session revealed a certain plodding quality to the image-making itself. "The lights are out," I whined. "I have my popcorn. I'm ready to watch a movie." But movies are dynamic; these things were highly static, more diagrammed than imagined.

And so. I grabbed a Sharpie and began to draw, to show some variety in construction. Specifically, kinds of variety. Knobs to turn. In our discussion, we identified at least four ways to vary images en route to a clear and dynamic story.

Most fundamentally, we can adjust point of view. From which perspective do we view the action? One of the prompts involves a spaceship. As it happened, we were looking at a decent number of straight-on views of two pilots (or two people standing around talking).

Well what if we move around vis-a-vis that action? My doodles show a single space pilot. (The rocket on the launching pad was a related example; what if we're looking down the fuselage, with our characters below and at a bit of a distance?)

Scale provides another opportunity to establish variety. That is, from wide shot to extreme close up is a big range.

Placement, too. If everything is centered in the frame (a bit of a problem) we miss chances to create interest, and even to heighten meaning. (That is, the runner at the far right isn't just running, he's accelerating out of the frame.) We also talked about orientation, or the angle of arrangement.

In the comics and cinema post, I cited Herge and Milt Caniff as examples; I'm returning to them here. Above, a page from Herge's King Ottokar's Sceptre adventure with Tintin, the tuft-headed young detective. The bad guys are escaping in an automobile; Tintin pursues them on a motorcycle; they slow down just a little to permit him to catch up; they brake suddenly, and he collides with the rear of the car. He's thrown over a hedge, out cold, as they speed away.

Love this shot. Er, panel.

Our point of view jumps all over the place. We're positioned to see the action in a clear and satisfying sequence which also remains interesting to us. We don't get bored.

But there's a temptation to see this as only a question of p.o.v. In fact, the page succeeds because the compositions are so good. All those issues noted above meet in the need for dynamic visual images. We had a few conversations yesterday about perpendicular relationships and perfect horizontality, in the classic second-grader earth-as-rectangular-strip-parallel-to-the-paper mode.

Above, I've made quick linear characterizations of thrust for the motorcycle chase page. Note: aside from the word balloon/boxes, there are almost no perfect horizontals. The lines are all diagonal!

As long as we're talking about diagonals, here's a nice page from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, a 70s revisiting of his famous manga and television vehicle. This page is perhaps a little less relevant to the problem at hand, but I include it to show the dynamism of the page.

Finally a quick look at a few Steve Canyon strips from 1948. Strictly speaking, talking of shots in comics is misleading. Panels differ from shots in two respects: one, (often, as in the chase scene above) they have variable proportions, unlike television (4x3) and movie theatre (16x9) screens. Two, they're really more like key frames, since there are missing spaces in time even when the scene is continuous. I make the point because the problem of visual variety is critical, but not quite as subject to continuity errors. For example, the silhouetted figures of the women in panel 2 yield to more even lighting in panel 3. We understand the shift as a formal device, not a light cue.

Above, a Sunday strip with a few panels of note.

The backlit silhouetted figure is a very useful device to create shape and establish mass.

Emphasis on figures alone as the compositional raw material, with elevated p.o.v. and manipulation of scale for dramatic effect. 

A single, secondary middle value can be a kick in the pants–that is, can be used to provide mass slightly less dramatic than the yes/no of the silhouette.

These last thoughts are just technical supplements to the overarching point of this post: clarity is important, but so too are athletic storytelling and compositional panache.

Images: Herge, King Ottokar's Sceptre, a Tintin adventure that takes place in an imaginary eastern European county governed by a purportedly virtuous but besieged monarchy, 1939. Osamu Tezuka, Astro Boy No. 1, by Osamu Tezuka. Mighty Atom (Astro Boy to American audiences) was created in the 1950s. The creation myth, “The Birth of Astro Boy” was a later addition by Tezuka.English edition published by Dark Horse Comics, 2002. Milton Caniff, Steve Canyon daily comic strip, February 3, 1948; Sunday strip, August 1, 1948.