Peiratikos

Ooh, it’s another quick note on translation and comics! There’s a great preview of Hope Larson’s upcoming graphic novel Gray Horses at the Oni website, if you’re willing to click the images to get a good look. Young, French Noémie arrives in the pseudo-Chicago Onion City (with an appropriately Rutabaga Stories name, even) and considers her new environment as she moves through it.

Her thoughts are presented in French with an English translation, not something I think I’ve seen represented like this before. I love the organic flow of the words, more frames than subtitles as they snake in pairs around the images. I’m interested to see how this works through the rest of the book (though I’d be interested anyway) because I can read both languages and do feel myself reading more consciously because both are there. I can’t pay attention to just one because there’s an interplay between the two, nuances on each side.

As a personal aside, I don’t think I can still speak French, come up with sentences on my own, but I can read it pretty fluently and I don’t exactly translate as I read, just understand. I remember asking my Greek professor during the semester I was taking Latin, Greek and French (and one day a week all three back-to-back, which left me unable to understand any language by the end of the last class) whether if I kept with the classical languages I’d ever be able to lie in the bathtub and just read the way I did with my French, and he doubted it. But I also do (I should probably use a past tense verb here, actually) better with Greek and Latin if I read the sentences aloud or at least subvocalized them before translating, which doesn’t seem as necessary with French. The other languages I’ve studied have been with a focus on speaking rather than reading, and I never had any true fluency there.

But back to Gray Horses, it’s fascinating that Larson has moved from the dialogue-free and nearly wordless Salamander Dream to what seems from the previews to be a less-than-wordy book but where what language it has is doubled. I’m interested to find out what the reading experience is like for those who don’t read French (Steven, a hint!) because they, too, will have an awareness that what they’re getting is translation but a different one, one where the “original” is inaccessible. I feel this way when reading manga, but my eyes gloss over the holdover Japanese letters in sound effects and so on. I’m not sure if it’s as easy when there are familiar or seemingly familiar words and letters as in this story.

But basically this post is just a beginning, a placeholder. Someday I’ll hunt down the author at a convention and ask what language came first (if any) and how the words grew out of that, but for now I get to wait to read what I’m even more convinced is going to be a fascinating book.

Today I was thinking about a conference I attended as an undergrad, Performing Aristophanes. I really miss going to conferences and lectures and talking to visiting professors, but that’s not really the point. What I was thinking about was how difficult it is to translate humor. How can I make a joke that was relevant nearly 2500 years ago funny now while still leaving it in some way intact? What’s cultural-specific and what’s universal? This is something I think about a lot when reading manga, and I wish more manga translators/adapters kept blogs themselves, because I’d love to hear about the process.

I have a few examples, though I’m not going to be a good enough blogger to look up the page numbers or anything like that. In the first volume of Genshiken, the club welcomes a new otaku member with the chant, “One of us, one of us, one of us.” Is this because there’s a big Japanese market for Freaks or was there something else there originally? Since Japanese isn’t even on my list of languages to learn, I don’t think I’ll be finding out. Then there was, I think, the first volume of .hack//Legend of the Twilight, in which the main character, Shugo, was told he wasn’t even qualified to be an “assistant pig-keeper” in the online roleplaying game he was entering. Is this a Japanese Lloyd Alexander shout out or is the translator remembering his (the Tokyopop site doesn’t list any names, but I remember blaming Jake Forbes, perhaps unfairly) own childhood favorites?

There’s more than this, though. When the character called Osaka, after the town where she most recently lived, talks like she should be on The Sopranos in Azumanga Daioh, is this to denote class and ethnicity or could it be any funny accent? When the Chinese student in Negima uses pidgin English (presumably originally Japanese) I do feel kind of awkward about it because I can’t evaluate the extent to which she’s playing on ugly stereotypes. (And in that case I’m tending to believe that’s what’s going on, given that apparently Ken Akamatsu’s more famous book, Love Hina, features some sort of fictionalized Polynesian girl who is also a sort of ingenue/airhead figure.)

So how do you translate culture and context and depth? I was left wondering about this when we saw Syriana last weekend. I didn’t find the plot confusing, but was fascinated by some of the language choices. As far as I can tell, the considerable foreign language portions were under-translated (Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, French that I recall), perhaps because American audiences can’t keep up with long subtitles. You can tell that when a long string of text doesn’t lead to correspondingly long translations, something may be up, but I noticed something even more striking. At one point as Wasim, a young Pakistani man who has been working as a day laborer in the fictitious Persian Gulf state where much of the action takes place, is being pulled on a radical Islamic path in the madrasa he attends, the man instructing him and his friends goes on a tirade about how, basically, globalization is not solving the problems of modern life. I’m trying to phrase this so that I’m not paraphrasing the Islamist slogan “Islam is the answer,” but I do think that’s left implicit in the teacher’s repetition of “Qur’an” as a counterpoint to everything that isn’t making the students’ lives easier. And then he says something that is rendered as (more or less, because I know I don’t remember the predicate of the sentence, though I do know the subject), “The Christian world doesn’t help you.” But he didn’t say “the Christian world,” or at least didn’t exactly say it. He said “al-Harb,” meaning “Dar al-Harb, the house of war. He’s saying in much stronger terms than just breaking the world into Muslim and Christian spheres of influence that there’s a war going on and there are sides to be chosen, that the dichotomy is real and comprehensible. It was strong enough that it grabbed me in the theater and I elbowed Steven and told him to bother me later for details, but I wonder whether the language was strong enough for other viewers who didn’t know even enough Arabic to notice this. Obviously they still knew that Wasim was being wooed into a system where he was still a pawn, but well-fed and literate, Arabic-speaking. They understood that this was a lecture about the state of the world and the imperative the teacher felt for his brand of Islam, but is it only because they knew what kind of movie this was and because of the America we live in that they could tell what brand that was, know that there was a war on?

I don’t know how to answer questions like that. You can call this a hypertext movie, but in hypertext there are more links, you can keep another tab in your browser open to google what you don’t understand. It doesn’t really work like that if what you don’t understand is in Farsi, because where do you start? How do you know?

Maybe Syriana is more interesting to people like me who already ask questions like that, who appreciate the necessity of incompleteness in communication. Certainly it may resonate better with others like me who will recognize that its corporatespeak is awfully close to the real thing, or those who pick up on more religious references than I do, or people who know more about the flow of oil and LNG. For me, though, it worked as a movie and as a parable of sorts about corruption and complicity. I was able to tell the characters apart even though they were virtually all men (an ongoing problem) and I think the complexity of the plot was overrated by a lot of the critics I read. However, as I’ve commented, the complexity in the story was perhaps more than I can know.

(I suppose I’m back and I’d like to stay this way, though such an absence felt surprisingly good. I’m quite sick, too, so weirdness will probably be a result of that more than anything else. I have tons more knitting to post and other things I’ve been thinking about, but perhaps we should finally take ourselves off the Comic Weblog Update Page.)

Steven and I watched Pride & Prejudice a few weeks ago now, I suppose, although I’d watched it on my own a week before that and I finished rereading the book this weekend. I’d read it first when I was 10 or so and it seemed so alien, less because of the social machinations than the love, I suspect. I may not understand what love feels like now, but certainly didn’t then when I expected I’d grow up to be a writer who lived alone with cats and perhaps foster children. The joke’s on me, I suppose, since everyone who’s dropped by here has seen how much writing I do, though at least there is now a cat.

At any rate, before seeing the movie or embarking on the novel again, I’d read Rachel Hartman’s lovely posts about the place of Romanticism and her detailed thoughts post-viewing. I haven’t seen any of the other Pride and Prejudice adaptations and don’t imagine I will. (The much-beloved Colin Firth seemed like such a square-headed, lumpy creep in Love Actually and made no impression in the dreadful recent The Importance of Being Earnest, the only two times I’ve ever seen him.) Oh, and I have to add that the North American ending wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t dialogue, but there decidedly is. Ack.

Where I’m going with this is that in Rachel’s second post she complained about some of the goofy, sappy choices in the movie, particularly when Lizzy and Darcy are dancing and all of a sudden ooooh, they’re the only couple in the room. And when you put it like that, yes, gag, but I was going to argue it’s something I’d accept in shôjo manga and that’s why I allowed it here. It’s been a progress for me, first allowing superheroes to work as metaphors for mundane life, then learning to see the angry scowls in Nana as perfectly normal and understandable, finally ending up not minding in my movie romances when the scene ends as the heroine blows out her candle. And while there’s probably something to the argument that Pride & Prejudice is a Bollywood film, I think I’d have been on equally strong ground explaining that it’s got shôjo elements, moments when emotions get so strong they skew reality. But then I remember that before I called that shôjo I called it focalization.

Rachel touches on this, too, that in the book (and, apparently, prior conversions to film) when Lizzy meets Darcy again after having rejected his unexpected offer of marriage (in part because she’d found him insufferably self-absorbed and antisocial) only to find him a changed man, open, generous, shy. It seems that many readers want this moment, want to see that love has changed Darcy, and that’s not quite there in this current version. While I wouldn’t say that’s not the case in the novel, what’s more apparent to me is that love has changed Lizzy and that she’s the focalized(/focalizing) character. While it’s not a first-person book, much of what we see is swayed by her eyes, which is part of the reason her father is a fuller character even though her mother gets more “airtime.” While the movie uses an even more distant third-person setup, I think the effect is the same. We get to see one of Lizzy’s dreams, including the reddish look of light from within her closed eyes, but less literal is the way the world melts away when she and Darcy dance or becomes an unchanging cage when she has rejected his love. If I were still 10, this might bother me because I’d doubt love was like that. I do doubt that a bit, I guess, but I think life is like that, with moments of excitement or pain we capture and turn into metaphors, and I thought the movie handled it beautifully.

And after all that is it still important to note that I covet Lizzy’s coats? I like Keira Knightley to begin with and I did believe her as Lizzy, giggles and raised eyebrows and lewd stares at nude statues’ privy parts and all. And while I don’t look the least bit like her and probably couldn’t pull it off, I keep hoping this is going to jump-start some sort of fashion trend and those boots and coats will be readily available (and maybe not too popular so they’ll end up on clearance and I can buy them myself). Then you could draw me with tiny dot eyes and a huge, huge smile.

I take off tomorrow for my grandparents’ home, so I’ll be gone for the rest of the week. It will be interesting to see how I get by without regular internet access! Steven will still be around and, I hope, posting some of the thoughts he’s been talking about with me lately.

In addition to being helpful, I should have some time for reading and I’m bringing a knitting project with me, hoping I’ll pass through airport security with my needles. When I come back, though, I can promise at least one comics post. Tonight I finally found the notes I’d taken for Art Spiegelman’s first post-9/11/01 lecture, which he discusses in the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers. (I probably shouldn’t have let Tom Spurgeon publish something so conversational and rough, but basically all that I said stands.) So that’s something I will accomplish, but I’ve accomplished more than just cleaning and packing this weekend.

I finally finished a shawl for my grandmother, Polly Outhwaite’s Kiri (free PDF format pattern). I had been working on this in early summer but put it aside when I was having trouble with my arm and only picked it up again in the last week to get it finished. The pattern was easy to follow and memorize and I think it makes a lovely shawl. This is yarn that my grandmother gave me, some sort of mohair blend I think in a pale, mottled brown. I think these cones I got are remnants from a closed knitting mill, but I’ll ask about them when I see her. She used to knit blankets from them and while I have the pattern she used, I’ve been sticking to smaller projects, shawls, scarves, and soon a sweater.

I used U.S. #7 needles and with such thin yarn the finished product is practically weightless when it’s worn. It’s about 58 inches along the top edge, 29 inches along the central spine that hangs down. I think each side has 11 points along the edge. I could have blocked it bigger, but my grandmother is not as tall as I am and I think this size will be sufficient. I blocked the shawl by soaking it and then pinning it out to the proper dimensions (I ran a piece of yarn through the top horizontal edge to keep it straight) and shape. Since I finished knitting at 11 last night, I ended up making adjustments until midnight and while exhausted, which probably wasn’t the best state of affairs.

I do think it’s a lovely shawl, light and delicate. I like the repeated leaf pattern that covers it, especially in a light, natural color like this one (although my striped tank top detracts from any simplicity). I think it will be a welcome gift and it has the added advantage of looking more complex than it is. I would recommend this pattern to a first-time lace knitter and it can be expanded to a variety of sizes, from a tiny kerchief to a huge shawl. Mine is midsized, about what you would apparently get with two skeins of Kidsilk Haze, but I think it’s a good size for my purposes, and by this time tomorrow I’ll know!

I bought Rex Libris because it seemed so rare to find a comic with a truly funny pun in its title. I should have read the fine print.

Rose Vess pointed out much of what I would have said about the labored whimsy of the story and its annoying commentary track. (I’m still sort of weirded out and excited that the comics blogosphere is big enough to sustain two Roses.) I mean, even “Rex Libris” stops being a funny name when it’s the name of an actual Roman. Steven didn’t make it through the parody letter from the editor section on the inside front cover because he was so annoyed by the inconsistencies and bad punctuation. I would have written that off as characterization or part of the joke except that it’s pretty clearly not.

And then there’s the front cover, from which I derive my title. See, this is a comic so portentous it even has an epigraph: Sapare Aude. And I looked at that and said, “Wait, shouldn’t that be Sapere?” and then didn’t trust myself because my Latin was inadequate well before it got rusty, so I went on with life. But it nagged at me and I googled it and sure enough you get some hits with their spelling, but that’s why using a dictionary is a good idea, because there’s plenty of information about the meaning and derivation of Sapere aude, “dare to know.”

And I know this is a rant I’ve gone into many times before, but I still think it’s sort of insulting to be expected to appreciate something on an intellectual level if the writers can’t bother to learn how to use commas. Why have a Latin motto if it’s not even in Latin? But more importantly, who’s in charge? I assume Slave Labor can’t afford to have someone proofread the comics before the script gets matched up with the art for the final project or even in large text areas like the “Barry’s Brain” segment. Despite the library focus of the title, it’s not clear that the creator wanted to spend too much time in real libraries or with real librarians in creating it. So here I am left frustrated again that there isn’t any expectation of quality or consistency in even the mechanics of writing. Sure, Brian Michael Bendis got to wherever he is on the current hot writers list without being able to string more than two sentences together coherently and without drastic misspellings, but at least Marvel can offer him an effective spellchecker. I don’t think I would have liked the story in Rex Libris any more had James Turner had this luxury, but it certainly would have made me less annoyed and bitter than I am now.

I started reading Hope Larson’s Salamander Dream as soon as it began online with the beginning of The Secret Friend Society and I’ve been wanting to write about it since it ended this summer. The story details the various trips a girl, Hailey, makes into the woods behind her house as she grows up and the interactions she has there with Salamander, a sort of magical personified salamander.

“Once upon a time,” the story begins, “there was a little girl very much like you.” And while I don’t know if all readers thought this spoke to them, I know it did to me. My parents moved a few months before I was born, meaning that these were not my woods and mine were more northern ones than North Carolina’s. My story would have had fewer pine trees, more limestone fossils, no chestnuts, but bigger ferns and King Solomon’s Seal. Perhaps because I think of Hailey as a girl very much like me, I don’t think this is a story about imaginary friends; I think it’s a love story. It’s a love story about stories and about the world and the way we can forget about those things as we get older and the importance of remembering them.

I’m still not sure if every story is in some ways a story about the creation of self through narrative, but seldom have I seen such a good example as the story teenaged Hailey tells Salamander starting on page 71. Her story swoops down through her body until subatomic particles make the same tracks that fireflies did in the outside world. (Or are they lightning bugs in North Carolina? This being a minimally wordy story, we never learn!) It’s as-above-so-below on every level, this a story of falling like Salamander’s bird ride was and really like every section of the Salamander Dream story is, dropping Hailey and the reader back in the woods for more of something. What that something is is different every time, but still united. The woods change, our understandings of the woods change, but there being woods somewhere doesn’t change.

One thing that makes this story so compelling and extraordinary (despite the in some ways quite simple subject matter) is that so little of it is told, and I don’t just mean that there aren’t many words. It’s that everything seems to flow and so much is subtext, faces appearing in the clouds or as clouds, the sky behind the pine trees like another row of pine trees, the moments of quiet recognition between Hailey and Salamander. While it’s a story about growing up and with content appropriate for all ages, I’m not sure how the story would read to someone who hasn’t moved away from home and the woods and childhood a bit. But maybe that’s me thinking this is a story about a girl a little too much like myself.

I suppose what I’m getting at (poorly, I’m afraid) is that Salamander Dream does an amazing amount with a little. There aren’t many words and it’s not a long story, but it’s a haunting one. I’m not sure if it was the contemplative experience of reading only one page a day that made it seem like the story itself had gotten into my blood and DNA and atoms and taken up residence there. It feels like it’s mine not because I identify but because it’s told so clearly and directly and without missteps. I get a little weepy at the ending every time because I don’t want to forget Salamander and the way the story makes me feel even as I read it on my laptop in my little apartment. It’s a little piece of spring that nestles inside me and helps me remember to help it grow. The story brings out all the needlessly florid metaphors in me that the text itself rejects. It’s plain and direct and deep and elusive, which I think is the point it’s trying to make about the essential qualities of life and nature, human and otherwise. We all need to be aware of quiet and the spaces between things and the way stories don’t always have easy endings but also the ways they connect and overlap and wind together, the ways we live in the world.

I’d like to say more about Salamander Dream, but it’s time for my own dreaming. And I know that every time I come back to the story I’ll be someone slightly different, growing up in my own way like Hailey. “But maybe she found another place in the world” like I hope we all do, like I hope I have done and continue to do. It’s not the same place but it might be similar, a place to reflect on old places. For me, this has been a weekend for that sort of thing and it was refreshing to reread Salamander Dream and let it pull me out of that and into something else, a kind of awareness of the now as part of all those pasts. I appreciate that and look forward to pushing into futures. And in the near future, I hope to read Salamander Dream in book form to see what the green on cream looks like between my hands, maybe near some grass this time, see what change that brings. Maybe it will give me another story to tell.

So I’ve been following the news almost nonstop for a week—not good for one’s health. I can almost feel my blood pressure building every time I see Barbara Bush’s Marie Antoinette act, which I think is a good sign it’s time for a break. After all, there’s not much I can do that I haven’t already done; sadly, I don’t have a guillotine handy. Momentary distractions are good, and I might as well distract myself with a return to my old hobby of blogging about unimportant stuff.

Banana Sunday #2, Root Nibot and Colleen Coover: Oh dear, oh dear. Now, monkey can get ambiguous, because there are a few monkey species with “ape” in their common name, although such monkeys are not considered true apes. However, gorillas and orangutans are simply not monkeys. You know, now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever before seen gorillas or orangutans mistakenly called monkeys. Chimpanzees and gibbons, sure, they look sort of like monkeys. But gorillas? But the primates are so terribly cute and fun, especially Go-Go, that I can’t resist.

Also, Martin is a creep. I keep hoping Kirby will wise up and punch him right on the nose. But oh, those primates! I guess I’ll put up with anything for a little gorilla who loves butterflies.

Shining Knight #4, Grant Morrison, Simone Bianchi et al.: Jog is still worried about Seven Soldiers—actually, he’s more worried. Alas for him! Well, Shining Knight sure isn’t self-contained. After reading Jog’s post, I wondered, “What was Morrison thinking with his ‘modular storytelling’ hype, anyway?” And, actually, I bet I know what he was thinking: it was probably a joke at the expense of company-wide crossover “events.” Seven Soldiers, at least so far, has the virtue of being mostly self-contained—you don’t need to catch the allusions to other stories to follow the current story, although an understanding of the allusions can add entertaining nuances to your reading. Because he likes to take the piss, Morrison describes the self-containment hyperbolically: not only does a single issue in the Seven Soldiers series (I won’t call it an “event”) not cross over with other series, it doesn’t even cross over with Seven Soldiers! I doubt Morrison ever planned to make Seven Soldiers “modular.” (Or maybe he did—I haven’t spoken with him on the matter! But it doesn’t really matter if the story is satisfying, and I’ve been satisfied thus far.) I haven’t reread all four issues yet, but I think Shining Knight does work as a self-contained chapter in a larger story.

One promise Morrison has kept is that the chapters never quite intersect. Zatanna occasionally moves through Shining Knight’s wake, but no more than that (so far, so far). Which leads me to another of Jog’s complaints: Zatanna and Shining Knight don’t really match up; there are glaring continuity glitches. I admit that didn’t bother me—maybe I cut Morrison and his collaborators too much slack, but I expect Morrison’s narratives to be malleable, more metaphorical abstraction than concrete world-building. But even if the continuity glitches are simply mistakes, I find them more entertaining than bothersome. But I’m obsessed with cut-up aesthetic in all art forms, and there’s almost nothing I like more in a story than when it starts to fall apart, whether or not the author wanted it to. But this is Morrison, so I hesitate to say the inconsistencies are a result of carelessness. I guess we’ll see, though.

And, well, I think we’re meandering toward Jog’s final question: is Morrison getting in over his head? Actually, I hope so! I don’t trust an artist who doesn’t make an occasional graceful bellyflop into the deep end of the pool, and Morrison is one of my favorite writers because his entire artistic career has been one bellyflop after another—some more graceful than others, but all entertaining.

But what about the story? Well. So, Sir Justin is a girl. Unexpected but unsurprising. Like most of his stories, the building blocks of Shining Knight are slightly off-kilter clichés. Let’s see—in Seven Soldiers #0, Shelly Gaynor dresses up in a stupid fetish costume and stupidly goes to bed with an asshole. Zatanna causes no end of trouble by wishing for the man of her dreams. The Manhattan Guardian presents a variation on that immortal action-movie cliché, the obsessed man who neglects his wife and family because, damn it, he’s got a job to do. Gender, especially the feminine, is something to watch out for in Seven Soldiers; I’ll have to keep this in mind as I reread.

You’ve presumably noticed by now that we have a new design. We also have an about page where you can learn many fascinating things about us, primarily via internet quiz results. We’ve also switched to a new host, so apologies if you ran into one of our bumps as we moved the site from our old host; hopefully most of them have been taken care of by now.

I was supposed to write about the movie Minority Report quite a while ago, but I never got around to it. I got the DVD from Netflix, but every time I had an opportunity to watch it I just didn’t want to spend the time. What really put me off the movie was the advertising. I mean, obviously Spielberg and co. play both sides, presenting horribly intrusive advertising as satire while collecting product-placement cash, so I found Minority Report’s satirical strength a little shaky to begin with. But this article—blecch. I’m disturbed by a lot of advertising right now and the future advertising on display in Minority Report is outright evil, so reading the creative director of the ads in the movie assuring me that advertisers will figure out how to make their ads so intrusive that I won’t be able to avoid them puts me right off wanting to watch the movie.

But I’m definitely not burned out on Mulholland Dr., especially the good discussion on Peiratikos and Motime Like the Present to respond to. Um, but not quite yet….

Actually, one thing. David Fiore, in the Motime post I linked to, makes a good point about the conspiracy in the second part of the movie. Diane’s world is a full of conspirators against her as Rita’s is; the difference is that Diane sees her conspirators everywhere and nobody ever sees Rita’s conspirators. And moreover, as David says, there is no “backstage” in Diane’s world—there’s nothing outside of Diane’s sphere of experience and influence.

Does that connect in interesting ways to my consideration of “obvious fakes” and “seamless forgeries”? Maybe, maybe not? Both conspiracies seem fantastic and implausible. Rita’s conspiracy seems more real, since it exists independently of observation (except for its own observation), but it is nevertheless the subjective invention of a dreaming mind.

What I Watched

Mulholland Dr., David Lynch: I only recently discovered Lynch’s ten clues—or, actually, I might have seen them before and forgotten about them. Here they are (from “Mulholland Dr.” on Wikipedia):

• Pay particular attention in the beginning of the film: at least two clues are revealed before the credits.
• Notice appearances of the red lampshade.
• Can you hear the title of the film that Adam Kesher is auditioning actresses for? Is it mentioned again?
• An accident is a terrible event…notice the location of the accident.
• Who gives a key, and why?
• Notice the robe, the ashtray, the coffee cup.
• What is felt, realized and gathered at the club Silencio?
• Did talent alone help Camilla?
• Notice the occurrences surrounding the man behind Winkies.
• Where is Aunt Ruth?

I haven’t take then time to figure out all the clues, but some of them are pretty easy: one of the clues before the credits is the first-person-perspective shot of somebody lying down to sleep; the red lampshade appears first next to the phone that isn’t answered in the sequence of phone calls between the conspirators against Rita, and later when Diane receives the phone call from Camilla about the party; Adam Kesher is auditioning actresses for The Sylvia North Story, which is the film where Diane and Camilla met; Rita’s accident is at the same place Camilla meets Diane to bring her to the party; etc. The most common interpretation of the movie seems to be that the first part (before the cowboy tells Diane to wake up) is Diane’s dream after learning that the hit man she hired has killed Camilla, and the second part is Diane’s descent to insanity mixed with memories or hallucinations of events leading up to her decision to have Camilla killed. Many of Lynch’s clues do suggest this interpretation, but I but I’ve never been convinced. The second part seems more believable—not only because “there’s an overwhelming tendency, amongst critics and other analytical folk, to privilege the ’sordid’ over the ’sentimental’” but also because it doesn’t have strange conspirators controlling everything behind the scenes—of course, the conspirators are all still there, but they’re presumably regular folks whom Diane incorporates into her fantasies. But does verisimilitude have any place in a movie like this?

Then there’s the man behind Winkies, Silencio, the blue key and the blue box. In one of the comments threads for one of David Fiore’s many posts on Mulholland Dr. at Motime like the Present, a fellow named Charles points out something about Silencio I hadn’t known:

Lynch plays on an old joke of his, and one of his most memorable scenes, by doing himself one better: he has del Rio playing herself, lipsyncing to her own song, a Spanish cover of Orbison. This joke loses much of its humor if (1) you fail to recognize the reality of del Rio, an actual person, (2) its connection to the very real oeuvre of Lynch and (3) how its reality might differ from the rest of the film.

Mulholland Dr. is actually the only Lynch movie I’ve seen, so I can’t follow the joke (it’s apparently something to do with Blue Velvet), but I note that it reinforces the central theme of Silencio. Rebeka del Rio lip-synching to a recording of herself—it’s indistinguishable from reality, but it’s fake. The movie is full of juxtapositions of obvious fakes and perfectly realistic fakes: Betty’s jokey rehearsal with Rita and her real rehearsal with Jimmy Katz; Adam Kesher’s unenthusiastic approval of Camilla Rhodes and his “love at first sight” moment with Betty; Naomi Watts’s bubbly Nancy Drew acting in the first part and her almost show-offy naturalistic despair in the second.

Backing up a bit—the two parts of the movie, the dream and the reality according to the standard interpretation. Like I said, I’ve never been convinced by the standard interpretation, but I do think there are distinct levels of reality (fictional reality, I mean) at play. The reality narrative seems more real than the dream narrative (insofar as one fiction can be more real than another), if only because it’s more sensible to extrapolate a fantastic dream from a hallucinatory reality than vice versa. But there are complications—the theme of obviously fake things and other fake things that look real in comparison, for one. For another, there’s the reversal of causality: the dream is caused by the reality, but their relationship is obfuscated by the presentation of the dream before the reality. As I watch the movie, I think, “Diane’s car ride along Mulholland Dr. is just like Rita’s”; it’s only upon consideration, after the movie, that I see clearly how causality runs backwards through the movie. It’s Diane who wakes up at the end of the dream, so it’s presumably Diane who goes to sleep at the very beginning of the movie. But when she wakes up, it’s like one of those unsettling dreams about waking up from a dream. The reality is more real than the dream, but it’s nothing like firm ground for us to stand on. But maybe that’s the best we have.

The dream and the reality are both stories Diane/Betty tells herself; the difference is that she’s in control of the former (for a while), while the latter crashes messily into other peoples’ stories. Now we’re going way back in Peiratikos history to creation of self through narrative. We create and know ourselves through stories, but the problem with being the authors of our own life stories is that we’re also characters in other people’s life stories.

I completely forgot to talk about the man behind Winkies and the blue box. Maybe later, maybe later.

What I Read

Banana Sunday #1, by Root Nibot and Colleen Coover: Orangutans and gorillas are apes, not monkeys. This error is especially troubling in a book that I would otherwise happily give to a child. Oh well. Nibot writes stylized, emotionally heightened dialogue—it’s like the characters are just a little more excited by everything than they would be if the dialogue were more naturalistic. Hmm, I see David Welsh has already explained what I’m trying to talk about. As he notes, a lot of the dialogue is exclamatory declarations of character traits. It fits just right with Coover’s cartoony exaggeration. The page I’ve scanned here is one of the clearest examples, especially the middle tier of panels. Coover tends to draw characters in an odd half-hunched posture—it makes them look endearingly eager or beleaguered as appropriate. Go-Go the gorilla is a shameless scene stealer, and I cannot resist.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville: I’ve only just started it. I hated Billy Budd when I had to read it in high school, but Moby-Dick is great fun so far. So far it’s mostly been the madcap adventures of Ishmael and Queequeeg, and I can’t wait till this comedy duo encounters Captain Ahab and his mad quest—who knows what’ll happen then, but it’s sure to be crazy and entertaining. For some reason, I imagine Grant Morrison reading Moby-Dick at a malleable age. I’ll have more to say when I’ve finished the book, I think.

Rose and I saw Mulholland Dr. and Rize recently, so hopefully more about them later. And, er, Minority Report, which I haven’t forgotten but have been too lazy to watch.