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.