By the way:

chiaroscuro |kēˌärəˈsk(y)oŏrō; kēˌarə-|
noun
the treatment of light and shade in drawing and painting.
• an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on something : the chiaroscuro of cobbled streets.

Chiaroscuro, anyone? Emotional or moral?

Today: "...its nasty central character — the family matriarch Audrey Litvinoff — lacks the emotional development and moral chiaroscuro that made the equally nasty hero of “Everything You Know” such a compelling creation."

Sounds sort of familiar, Michiko.

• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Although this novel shares some themes with Alice ... none of the psychological acuity or emotional chiaroscuro of that earlier book. ...
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: October 6, 2008 ... As a result, the moral chiaroscuro and nuanced ambiguities that distinguished his cold war novels give ...October 7, 2008 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI - Books
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: Friday, December 12, 2003 ... it lacks the emotional chiaroscuro and effortless pacing of this author's best short stories ...December 12, 2003 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• Byline: By MICHIKO KAKUTANI .... The rest of the characters in "Songs in Ordinary Time" also lack the emotional chiaroscuro that Ms. Morris has lavished on ...
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: October 9, 2007. THE ALMOST MOON ... none of the psychological acuity or emotional chiaroscuro of that earlier book. ...October 9, 2007 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: December 7, 1993 ... smells and moods are all beautifully conjured, then painted over lightly with a chiaroscuro of menace. ...December 7, 1993 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani called the book ''a remarkably supple novel that gleams with the smoky chiaroscuro of familial love recalled through ...October 23, 1988 - By GEORGE JOHNSON
• By Michiko Kakutani. Published: Wednesday, August 27, 1986 ... Indeed, Roger seems almost irretrievably sunk in the dark chiaroscuro of middle age - he ...August 27, 1986 - By Michiko Kakutani
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: Wednesday, March 30, 1988 .... thriller and shaded here and there with the chiaroscuro of deeper and more ambitious fiction. ...March 30, 1988 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: Tuesday, September 14, 1993 ... from the lyrically described world of Hawaii rendered in a shimmering chiaroscuro of soft , ...September 14, 1993 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: May 17, 1996 ... they gather resonance and chiaroscuro, immersing the reader in an imaginative world that's located ...May 17, 1996 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: October 9, 2007 ... this volume demonstrates none of the psychological acuity or emotional chiaroscuro of that earlier book. ...October 9, 2007 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI - Books
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: August 27, 1986. ROGER'S VERSION. ... Indeed, Roger seems almost irretrievably sunk in the dark chiaroscuro of middle age ...August 27, 1986 - By Michiko Kakutani
• Byline: By Michiko Kakutani Lead: SISTER AGE. By M.F.K. Fisher. ... and the portraits of people and places possess the subtlety of fine chiaroscuro. ...
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: November 2, 2001. FALLING ANGELS ... ''Girl'' was subtle; obvious and shallow where ''Girl'' was luminous with chiaroscuro. ...November 2, 2001 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. The hero of John le Carré’s clunky new novel, ... with none of the nuance or chiaroscuro that distinguished his cold war Smiley novels. ...September 26, 2006 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI - Books
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: December 12, 2003. OLD SCHOOL ... but it lacks the emotional chiaroscuro and effortless pacing of this author's best short ...December 12, 2003 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Skip to next paragraph ... As a result, the moral chiaroscuro and nuanced ambiguities that distinguished his cold war novels give way, ...October 7, 2008 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI - Books
• Last year The Times's Michiko Kakutani said the symbolism in the novel is ... on a pleasing emotional chiaroscuro, a deepening and darkening of ambition.'' ...May 13, 1990 - By GEORGE JOHNSON
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: July 13, 1988 ... Nancy, ratifies that portrait while at the same time giving it an added depth and chiaroscuro. ...July 13, 1988 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: March 30, 1988 ... late-night thriller and shaded here and there with the chiaroscuro of deeper and more ambitious fiction. ...March 30, 1988 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: February 26, 2002 ... made for fiction with a new depth and emotional chiaroscuro: fiction that demonstrated the author's ...February 26, 2002 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: March 27, 1998. THE PAGE TURNER ... ''Arkansas,' ' eschewed the rich emotional chiaroscuro of his earlier work to focus, ...March 27, 1998 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: March 28, 1989 ... but while it lacks the compassion and emotional chiaroscuro of his last book (''The Old Devils''), ...March 28, 1989 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Skip to next paragraph .... Indeed, “The Other” lacks the emotional chiaroscuro and genuine tragedy of “Snow Falling on Cedars,” and ...June 24, 2008 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI - Books
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: January 13, 1989 ... lends this story a delicate emotional chiaroscuro, there's something self-conscious and willfully ...January 13, 1989 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: February 25, 1987. LEAD: THE OLD DEVILS. ... Devils'' possesses a depth and emotional chiaroscuro new to Mr. Amis's work. ...February 25, 1987 - By Michiko Kakutani
• By MICHIKO KAKUTANI. Published: May 9, 1987 ... chapters later, takes on an even deeper chiaroscuro when it is related again from the point of view of ...May 9, 1987 - By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Well, you get the idea. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Full results of the search are here.

The, uh, naturalism.

More thoughts -- at the risk of belaboring the point -- on indie.

How does “indie” (remember, my definition of the term has more to do with a certain look and feel than with any particular independence from big money) get art and intellectualism so wrong so often? It was that facile “Oedipal Rage in Beckett” course taught by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in The Savages that got me thinking about it. So...academic-sounding! Of course psychological readings of Beckett’s works aren’t uncommon, but you have to wonder (well, don’t you?) if Jon Savage’s course would really be quite so Freud-centric, and also whether the connection “Oedipus” has to Beckett’s dramatic work might be theatrical than psychological. Just a thought, albeit one that, if I could come up with it for this dumb blog, Tamara Jenkins might have come up with it while drafting and redrafting an award-winning screenplay. Of course it’s parody -- isn’t it? That’s among the slippery mysteries of indie. When everything is presented in the same two dimensions, as if the world is ridiculous enough only to warrant two-thirds of a response from the protagonists who oppose its patent stupidity, we don’t really know whether it’s parody or not. Tamara Jenkins can hedge her bets: is Jon Savage’s shabby, disordered house a broad parody of the decorating inadequacies of academics? Is it intended as a realistic depiction of the way academics are supposed to live? Is it a symbol of a shabby, disordered mind, or life? Or are we just supposed to believe that the house doesn’t really signify anything at all, that this assertively scruffy dwelling is simply there? I’d guess that a single man working as an associate professor at SUNY-Buffalo could probably afford to rent a nice house and fill it with decent furniture. He might even have a cleaning lady.

I don’t want to go nuts about this house. I don’t even want to go nuts about that fact that Jon Savage’s course would likely be called “Plays of Samuel Beckett”; that “Oedipal Rage in Beckett” might serve as the subject of a lecture but not an entire course. But among the things we have to consider is the relationship between (adventurous, uncommercial, richly artistic -- right?) indie film and the work of Samuel Beckett -- that's the pitfall and promise of intertextuality, which incorporates by reference the work to which it alludes. The Savages offers the superficiality of a name-check, but little else. And why would it? The Savages doesn't want to go anywhere near Beckett, who was steadfastly uninterested in the theatrical golem of Motivation. Beckett was no enemy of cinema but surely he would have thought of The Savages and quite possibly the bulk of indie cinema as the sort of static little chamber piece that his own work so fiercely opposed. And while it’s hard to imagine Beckett admiring The Savages, it’s even harder to imagine Tamara Jenkins, who labels things more boldly than an obsesso housewife marking freezer bags, feeling any affinity at all for Beckett. It’s possible that Jenkins does see “Oedipal rage” in Beckett’s plays (his novels offer greener pastures if you’re seeking that, but never mind), and it's possible that she's simply poking fun at the obscure pursuits of academia, but it’s more likely that she sees in the pseudo-abstruseness of such a course title a parallel to Beckett's own unrewarding difficulty.

There’s endless fodder in The Savages for an exploration of its outlook on art, which it asks us to consider neither aesthetically (even if we take “Oedipal Rage in Beckett” at face value, rather than as a throwaway one-liner outlining how Intellectuals Think the Darndest Things, why would we want to examine it?) nor as a type of work people do, but as another way in which deluded people avoid reality. We see Laura Linney preparing her application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, apparently winging it: it’s made plain that she literally has no idea what she’s talking about (I won’t go into the film’s distortion of the process of applying for a Guggenheim, other than to mention, on the eve of being turned down for one yet again, that I think it would be nice if it were simply a matter of writing a cover letter, mailing it off, and getting your rejection within a couple of weeks). We see Hoffman offering a schematic of Brecht’s approach to drama that makes Brecht sound like a Yippie, or at any rate like a member of El Teatro Campesino. We see a tiny snippet of Linney’s autobiographical play (reifying childhood trauma, of course), and again are left to wonder whether Jenkins intends it as a gag -- though it does meet with Hoffman’s expert approval (“The, uh, naturalism with the magic realism...together. It’s, uh, effective.”). Art and the intellect are either a joke, or therapy.

But art and the intellect often take it on the chin in indie film, and in other productions (e.g., original cable series, anything on NPR, etc.) that borrow the appurtenances of indie principles, possibly because, unlike actual art, indie only feels comfortable when its own intelligence trumps that of what it attempts to portray. The otherwise excellent HBO soap opera Six Feet Under, for example, ran aground whenever it tried to depict the purported “genius” of troubled Brenda Chenowith (the script would usually have to resort to having a character tell us she was smart, or have her describe herself as smart), or when it sent Claire to art school to study under the aging enfant terrible Olivier, who was given candy-bar stuff to spout that ratified (while ridiculing -- don't forget the usefulness of the Indie Hedge) every dopey bourgeois mad-artist idea about telling the straights to get stuffed. The godfather of this contemporary trend is Woody Allen, whose invocation in his films of the Humanities 101 syllabus seemed to me the essence of intellectualism when I was in high school but now strikes me as weirdly arrested somewhere in the middle of sophomore year. Allen’s great trump -- leading the actual Marshall McLuhan over to the blowhard in line at the movies to tell him “You know nothing of my work” -- is a marvelously audacious punchline (and unimaginable within the context of a film like The Savages, which leads us to culture but refuses to let us think), so much so that we tend to forget that the opinions the blowhard has been airing for the preceding two minutes are indistinguishable from the incessant name-checking in which Allen nearly always indulges.

The Independent Spirit

I finally got around to seeing The Savages this weekend, which has been an on-demand offering seemingly for forever. One factor, having little to do with my anticipation of its actual flaws, that militated against my watching the film, both when it appeared in the theaters and since then, was the abundance of typically nauseating reviews gushing over Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance.

I’m digressing, but I think it’s a reasonable digression. I want to make clear, first of all, that I admire Hoffman as an actor. I think he’s versatile, convincing, and, most admirably, unafraid of being disliked. On the other hand, I’m made uneasy by the facile criteria employed to draw the conclusion that he is, as the New York Times put it recently, “the greatest character actor of our time.”

Character actors, first of all, no longer exist. Their last great heyday was in the 1970s, when a cadre of actors (Jack Warden, Ned Beatty, and Ed Lauter come immediately to mind, although there are dozens more) played supporting roles calling for the specific qualities offered by their individual screen presences. The necessity of character actors seems to have diminished around that time, which roughly coincides with the rise, in Hollywood, of the everyman star as personified by the likes of Walter Matthau, Gene Hackman, and Jack Nicholson, each of whom, not so coincidentally, first gained attention for their work in supporting roles. It strikes me, in fact, as a complete inversion of the definition of “character actor” to describe an actor as flexible as Hoffman as one. The viewer knew what to expect when, say, Jack Carson came onscreen. The function of the character actor was to ground a given film in a set of familiar conventions. Jack Carson (or Thelma Ritter, or William Demarest, or George Sanders) was a specific idiom in him- or herself, not the all-but-irrelevant embodiment of a cliche. This is very different from the function of today’s supporting actors, who are called upon to enact the simple traits of the clip-art caricatures posed against the background of a film. It doesn’t even rise to the level of impersonation. I have often felt that one factor in Hollywood film’s self-impoverishment as a popular art is the current formula that seemingly obtains (in all but deliberately conceived “ensemble” films), where two or three name actors are supported by dozens of interchangeable nobodies -- a budget exigency, no doubt, but also a tacit acknowledgment of the fundamentally schematic function of most supporting characters.

This apparently all-too-successful scheme -- supporting roles as cartoon foils, leading roles as the sum of whatever contingency motivates them -- leaves a lot of space for movie reviewers to operate in. Commercial Hollywood cinema is mostly review-proof, now, and while movie reviewing is perhaps guiltier than any other genre of popular criticism of the self-indulgent sin of taking potshots at poshlost, indie cinema is granted a lot more space in the papers than, say, small press books or other "independent" artistic productions. Quirky flicks and actors like Hoffman are given ample room to wow us, and so they do. I am, however, deeply suspicious of the blinder-driven superlative. He’s the greatest? Recently, of course, our greatest actor also has been identified as, in addition to Hoffman, Liev Schrieber, Sean Penn, Robert Downey, Jr., Stanley Tucci, Johnny Depp, to name a few, all of whom share some of the same interesting traits: (1) Enormous talent, (2) unusual looks (even the beautiful Johnny Depp is hardly a conventional leading man), and (3) a career marked by frequent appearances in quirky “little” films, hereinafter referred to (correctly or incorrectly) as “indie.”

This leads me back to The Savages. One thing that has become grating, to me, about indie film is the way that it privileges cliche. Hollywood at least surreptitiously suggests that its embrace of cliche is the acknowledgment of necessary impedimenta -- our rogue-cop hero cannot wreak havoc without first overcoming the obstacle of the weary, hostile-but-friendly, lieutenant, who has long since abandoned the dangers of the street for bureaucratic etc. Indie, meanwhile, mounts its cliches in a setting of putatively profound truth, and then gilds them. And so it is with The Savages. Laura Linney’s character doesn’t merely have an unfulfilling job, she has a hellishly deadening job as an office temp, surrounded by drones too benightedly foolish to know that they are soulless slaves. From her cubicle she stages her self-deluded (we think!) sorties against the impregnable and insensitive Guggenheim Foundation. Despite this self-delusion, we are given to understand that she is superior in her self-awareness of her unbelonging in this fluorescent purgatory (NB: in the course of supporting myself for over two years as a temp, I never once met another temp who found the work to be rewarding). She doesn’t merely have an unhappy love life, she has a dismally unsatisfying affair with an older married (bald, schlubby -- can we be cued any more blatantly as to what a disastrous interlude this is?) man who seems, if anything, more pathetically desperate than she is. Again, Linney’s longing for something better, her heroic if so-far-ineffective resistance to the limitations inherent in her affair with the married nebbish, ennobles her. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Professor of Dramatic Literature lives in a ramshackle house badly in need of paint and refurnishing. His books and papers -- in the time-honored manner of “intellectuals” -- are scattered haphazardly throughout the house. "There's a system," he protests, when Laura moves some of his stuff. Ah, the life of the mind! An aesthete, he is deeply engaged by the emotional and political implications of the theater (one of his courses is entitled “Oedipal Rage in Beckett”; the book whose composition frustrates him is a study of Brecht), while completely blind (we think!) to the richness and potential of the Real Life that surrounds him.

What is unsatisfying about all this is that, ironically, it’s one’s schooling in the vocabulary of the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster that leads one to expect more of the ostensibly more adventurous “indie” film. The blockbuster teaches us that the kernel of the film -- once we’ve gotten past the barrier of the cliches that serve as our grounding in the normative state that the film establishes and then explodes, often literally -- is the venturing beyond. The world freezes. The world is populated by vampires. The police training officer is a bigger criminal than anyone on the street. The world does not exist at all, it is a digital simulation. Aliens arrive to destroy the planet. The conspiracy extends from the highest levels of authority all the way down to that trusted individual one has let into one’s heart...

This isn’t to say that these variations aren’t deadening in themselves. I’m not actually making the argument that these films are any better than indie. I’m making the argument that they’re no worse. At least in invoking catastrophe and chaos as the incentive for its heroes to venture beyond the normal, commercial cinema is hardly demanding our complicity in making of stuporous lack of affect a heroic virtue. And indie film, or at least a certain species of indie film, posits that the zone of no-conflict is in fact the biggest conflict of all. It is the pressure of the stupid old world itself that exerts itself on the “special” heroes and heroines of these movies. How stupid is it? As stupid as the dumb insurance job Jack Nicholson is given to retire from in About Schmidt, as stupid as Thora Birch’s uncomprehending peers in Ghost World, as stupid as the absurd suburban family, led by its dying matriarch, that is forced to accept the alternative life choices of Katie Holmes in Pieces of April. As existential drama goes, it’s a winner, because -- unlike in the genuine Beckett, as opposed to the Oedipally enraged Beckett of the imaginings of Tamara Jenkins’ fish-in-a-barrel academic -- rather than there simply being life, there is always the promise of life-plus. We are conscripted into the position of ratifying the self-conception of righteous exceptionalism that the lead characters maintain. So it is that Laura Linney succeeds at last in writing her play, and staging it in New York. Life-plus is attained, and every mindless office suite retreats into the cabinet cold storing the record of every true artist’s travails.

Wright's Disdain

Today, Michiko Kakutani reviews T.C. Boyle's new novel, The Women, which is based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. Speaking of the book's "complicated narrative structure," she offers the following:

Unfortunately for the reader, this inorganic, needlessly complex architecture -- of the sort that Wright would utterly disdain in a building -- serves no discernible purpose.

There's much to pick at in this assertion (indeed, as always with Kakutani, in the entire review), but I'd like to focus on Kakutani's use of the word "architecture."

We can speak of a book's "structure" because the word is sufficiently general. It's moved beyond its metaphoric function so that whether we speak of the structure of a corporation, or of a building, or of a book, we are speaking literally. It's true that the word "architecture" has multiple applications as well, although in my opinion its principal and preponderant meaning has to do with the design and construction of buildings. It is, as well, a highly specific word, so that while we might refer to the design of a bookshelf, or a furnished interior space, or a car, we would only awkwardly refer to the architecture of such things. We can more easily refer to the architecture of a book, because although the inaccuracy of the word is evident when applied inappropriately to the physical, the word slips effortlessly into metaphor.

So what is especially egregious about Kakutani's portrayal of Boyle's "architecture"? Well, aside from her pegging it as "inorganic" -- organic architecture being a specific philosophy of architecture (named, as Kakutani perhaps knows, by Wright himself) -- and "needlessly complex" (organic architecture is, of needs, complex architecture. The description might be accurate if Kakutani intended for us to believe that an "inorganic architecture" requires simplicity to be beautiful; clearly, though, she is positing "needless complexity" as an inherent condition of the disagreeably "inorganic."), Kakutani pushes her metaphor back to the realm of the actual by invoking Wright, the architect, and his likely "disdain" -- she hypostatizes The Women, suggesting that if it were a building it would be the sort of building that Frank Lloyd Wright would be likely to scorn. This is a neat trick, but dishonest criticism: Wright, whose opinions about literature are wholly unknown to me, is enlisted to offer his endorsement of Kakutani's negative opinion of Boyle's book.