Haunts and Visitations
"I thought that, when it was your time, you'd be the one writing the capsule reviews"
If you, like me, tend to define your identity and significance by your vocation, one benefit of taking a vacation is being more or less forced to define it in other ways. Who am I? Most of the time, it’s someone with a job, in a community that relies on me for certain things. A vacation asks, what if you weren’t? While I took a book for a review with me (stay tuned if you have opinions one way or another about Freddie DeBoer), I managed to get very much out of the pastor-writer mindset. Unfortunately, I have not entirely gotten myself back into that mindset, even three weeks later. Notes for proper essays exist, but they’re a ways off. I did pay attention to other things, though, and I revisited some old haunts. So this is a bit of a yard sale. Maybe it will make room for more typical work to come. Either way, I hope it makes for some worthwhile browsing.
Below: Writer, Editor, and History - Blood Meridian - Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz - Mark Sears’ 2021 book about the making of The Godfather - Francis Ford Coppola’s 2020 edit of The Godfather Part III - Recommended Reading
Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, directed by Lizzie Gottlieb (2022)
Hardcore fans of journalist and historian Robert Caro are as intense as any fandom, and for all I know, at least as off-putting. A recurring element of this brisk, engaging documentary is talking-head snippets of people enthusing about his books and mewling like children from the next, and final installment of his titanic work on Lyndon Johnson. These audience proxies were the only part of the movie I didn’t enjoy, because they hit too close to home. I have been waiting for volume 5 since 2012, when Good Friday found me getting a flat tire while working on a review of volume 4 (The Passage of Power) and using the previous three volumes to block the other tires as I changed it.1
But this movie is, as the title indicates, about two men: the meticulous reporter-turned-biographer, whose first boss told him to “turn every page” when finding a story, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb. Their partnership ran for decades, starting with the agonizing gestation of The Power Broker (published in 1974). This unlikely publishing phenomenon—a mammoth life of New York infrastructure czar Robert Moses and the city he transformed—was first scooped up and supported by Gottlieb, and then reduced by 750,000(!) words to fit into the largest possible single volume. They went on to collaborate on four volumes of Caro’s projected three-volume life of Lyndon Johnson.
Many of the stories Caro tells about his work (and they are very good stories) were published in his episodic memoir Working. The revelation of the movie, for me at least, was Gottlieb, who died earlier this year after a long career as one of the most important editors in the history of American letters (I won’t rehearse the names but just link the NYT obituary). He is relaxed and ironic, expressing both the love and the detachment required for editing. When they describe fights, Caro flushes and laughs while Gottlieb smiles. Semicolons were a regular point of conflict.
It’s a heartwarming and delightful film with a melancholy side. Gottlieb, whose daughter made the film, had the easier burden. An editor knows many things, while a comprehensive biographer knows one thing. And that one thing will, we know, not be completed by this partnership. It falls to Caro, the younger partner at 87, to see his way to the end of Lyndon Johnson’s story, having already given five decades to it—longer than the years from Johnson’s first foray into school politics to his death. All of those fans asking when volume five will be complete are asking “will you finish this before you die?” It’s a tactless question whose answer I will try, from now on, to be less anxious to hear. Robert Caro has already absorbed enough of his life into that of the 36th president. If he wanted to stop now, I’d be happy for him. And if he doesn’t, I’m available for editing.
The era of the live double- and triple-album was dawning. The era of the official bootleg and outtake compilation was right behind. On the horizon, the Traveling Wilburys and Highwaymen were approaching.
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
The poets were the original moralists. What gets called moral philosophy is a latecomer, necessarily acknowledging its own constructedness and admitting of the possibility of errors and exceptions. Art, on the other hand, is total and uncompromising. No “ought” can escape its “is.” The “is” has no remainder. Harold Bloom, the late critic and literary theorist, liked to say that literature in the truest sense has no moral purpose. He also loved Blood Meridian. But Blood Meridian is more comprehensively, stiflingly “moralistic” than anything Aristotle ever wrote. It’s just a horrifying moralism, a primal theology of struggle and violence.
These, anyway, were some thoughts I had as I staggered through McCarthy’s most lauded novel during a brief but grueling bout of COVID. I can’t recommend reading this book between fever dreams, but I also can’t deny that it, so to say, played. I was mostly prepared for the violence, but there were still some passages that left me agape. Ross Douthat, or a writer he quoted, described McCarthy’s worldview as “malevolent pantheism” and that’s vividly represented here. The violence between human beings is just an elaboration, a momentary efflorescence, of a landscape and a whole cosmos that is locked in a permanent state of war. Holden alone has a real voice and a weight-bearing presence (although an almost explicitly Satanic one) because he accepts this world as it is and narrates it for those around him. I gather there is some dispute over whether Blood Meridian is a work of nihilism, and I just didn’t see the grounds for denying it. “Might makes right” is not even it; “might is right” is more like it, or simply “might is.” Everything else is a fantasy.
Blood Meridian may be a work of wickedness, but it is also a work of genius. Cover-blurb references to the Iliad and Moby-Dick will set someone like me up for disappointment, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t bear the comparisons. The prehistoric (and even pre-human) depth of the landscape portrayal recurs in The Crossing (still my personal favorite of his novels) and the cosmic speculations didn’t terminate until Stella Maris. But the intensity and economy of Blood Meridian, its lack of excess in anything but cruelty, is a unique achievement. Part of me wishes I’d never read it. Part of me wants to start reading it again right now.
The Last Waltz (1978)
When I started listening to The Band in high school, something led me to their legendary farewell concert film. I don’t remember what that something was, or exactly what expectations it built up for me, but I do remember being surprised at how sickly it felt and looked. The stage was saturated in an unlovely wine-red light. Everyone was dressed so strangely, not like hippies but just like people who’d been shot from a cannon through a thrift store. Chaotic but uninteresting. The affect in the interviews was strained and eerie (at the time I didn’t know about all the cocaine and Richard Manuel’s eight daily bottles of Grand Marnier). Someone I followed on Twitter used to post a periodically-updated thread of movie stills with the claim that the theme of every 70’s movie is the material ugliness of the 70’s and The Last Waltz fits that pattern. Almost nothing looks good.2 Roger Ebert wrote, in a contemporary review, that it looked like no one was having much fun, either, that a document of a moment of triumph instead captured a feeling of exhaustion. “The road took some of the great ones,” Robbie Robertson says at one point, naming the familiar names. Richard Manuel would join the list within ten or so years (Paul Butterfield, who plays on a couple of the songs, didn’t make it out of the 80s either).
These people were mostly in their mid-thirties, legends in their own time (and their own minds, and certainly in mine). When I saw the remastered edition in theatrical release in 2002, Pops Staples had joined the choir invisible and seeing him on “The Weight” made my filmgoing companion tear up. But it remained a document of people I still, probably on a level I did not dare admit openly, wanted to become. I watched it again in my thirties, and most recently this month after Robertson’s death. These people kept changing for me, as they stay frozen before middle age and I continue to recede from the moment of their zenith. It is tempting to read the film’s melancholy as an anticipation of the future we know: their time at the vanguard of the transformation of popular music was over, never to repeated. Most would make more good music, and some of them (Joni and Dylan, I’d argue) would match their best, but always on a side stage. The members of The Band, in any configuration, would not write and record another hit song. And in capturing this valedictory moment, The Last Waltz inaugurates something only hinted at before—that the creative ferment of the 60s generation would bolt and go to seed in the form of self-commemoration and anthologization. The era of the live double- and triple-album was dawning. The era of the official bootleg and outtake compilation was right behind. On the horizon, the Traveling Wilburys and Highwaymen were approaching.
That’s the burden Robertson probably didn’t know he’d set out to bear. I don’t think Scorsese knew it either. The concert produced one of those double-live albums, with some songs not captured on film. They’re mostly very good, and some are great (I did not learn until relatively recently that the rough cut was not so great and needed extensive overdubbing to get into shape, but that’s nostalgia for you, even the preemptive kind. It always needs grooming). Even the burned-out road warrior can come alive on stage, doing what got them into all this mess in the first place. In that way, it’s like a great still life, depicting neither beauty nor health nor wholeness, but existence itself, expending its energy on its journey from something to nothing.
The archbishop appears to be wandering the Vatican, alone but fully vested for liturgy, with the sole purpose of being shot
Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather BY Mark Sears (2021)
A great movie appears to us as a finished, and usually coherent, whole. It feels as inevitable as a great novel or symphony. That may be why the stories of the contingencies, clashes, ad libs, and near-misses inherent in film production are so engrossing. Robert Redford as Michael Corleone? A story transposed to 1971 to save money? “Bada BING” and “take the cannoli” weren’t in the script? I find it nearly impossible to imagine The Godfather different in any detail, and yet everything about it, according to Mark Sears, was up for grabs and the filmmaking itself was a shambles almost all the way through.
The lore of The Godfather is by now almost as well established as the movie itself: smash-hit pulp novel, untested director, washed-up lead, unknown supporting cast, studio on the brink of bankruptcy. Sears invests these familiar elements with narrative force, making a persuasive case that the film was, so to say, an accidental masterpiece. Along the way, there are diverting vignettes about Mario Puzo, Coppola, the actors, and the executives (I remembered the story about the actor playing Luca Brasi bringing an expensive watch to an assistant who complained of losing her cheap model, telling her “the guys got you this, don’t wear it in Florida” from the 2009 magazine article that kick-started the book). And I, at least, was not aware of how entwined the production was with the actual Mafia, whose members were both drawn to the movie and angry about it, who influenced its course (the word “Mafia” never appearing, for one) and threatened to withhold labor and neighborhood cooperation from the New York filming, who critiqued its lack of realism and embraced its style and mannerisms.
Sears writes that The Godfather was being mythologized even before it was filmed, as actors claimed real-life connections to wise guys and made men. Many of them were, at any rate, neighborhood guys and not WASP movie regulars. After decades of influencing the very subculture it tries to depict, it’s impossible to say how true-to-life The Godfather was, but there’s a reason it makes all previous Hollywood films about the Mafia look and feel wrong.
There are, presumably, equally good yarns to be spun about many great movies. It’s a good book, but I devoured it in two days, when I had more urgent things to do, for reasons that go well beyond the author’s craft. This movie has been a part of my life since I was in middle school—a time further in the past than the movie’s release was when I first saw it, and further than the movie’s release was from the period it depicts. It’s a great movie that is also a nested egg of nostalgia. Repeated viewings inevitably measure the distance between its origin, when big-business imperatives coexisted with aesthetic swashbuckling, and the mass culture I’ve lived through myself. There are greater movies and bigger hits, but I don’t know a greater movie that was a bigger hit. By the time I was going to the theaters, this was all over. The Hollywood movies of the 80s often kept the cynicism, coarseness, and violence of their 70s forbears but without the critique, insight, or artistic ambition. It was the strangest thing, a period of cultural reaction without prudery or good taste. What they managed to do in The Godfather was improbable in 1971, but impossible in most of the years since.
The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020 re-cut of 1990’s The Godfather Part III)
I am just old enough to remember the critical response to The Godfather Part III when it came out. Everyone acknowledged that it was not the achievement that the first two were, and it was not a secret that Coppola had financial motives for tacking on a third episode to a complete and coherent pair of masterpieces. But few critics, as I recall, came out and called it bad, which it was. “Operatic” some said, which is a polite way to say “stagy” or just “ridiculous.” Of course, it had the bad fortune to be released the same year as Goodfellas, a better movie that ended up redefining the genre away from the faux-aristocratic Corleones and their Sicilian reveries. When The Sopranos came along at the end of the decade, the characters spoofed lines from Part III, but they played forward Scorsese’s story of mid-level assimilated suburbanites facing the emptiness of their dangerous lives. Even the cast drew heavily from the minor players in Goodfellas.
I saw it when it was new, not in the theater but within a year or two, and felt obligated to try to like it. Once a decade or so, when it was on at Thanksgiving, I would try it again, telling myself that it couldn’t actually be as bad as I remembered it. And it always was, so while I saw the first two more times than I can remember, I never got through Part III a second time.3
Thanks to the Sears book, I allowed myself to become curious about Coppola’s re-edit, which came out in 2020. It’s not such a bad film now, some critics reported (Richard Brody, whose wrongness makes him a reliable anti-guide to film viewing, said it revealed the original Part III as a masterpiece). Perhaps a pony had really been pulled out of that manure pile.
It had not. The plot is still a disaster, the absence of all the other principals4 forced Talia Shire’s Connie to do too much work, Andy Garcia’s new-model Sonny is poorly written, and while all the old beats get played, there’s no life and no revelation in it. The elaborate killing sequences are particularly embarrassing, playing like loveless parodies of the original. The ludicrous ambush of Joe Zasa, so needlessly complex and rife with witnesses that one is perhaps meant to assume CIA planning, cops its images from the stunning scene of Fanucci’s murder in Part II without keeping any of the artistry. The murder montage at the end of the original movie is brilliantly put together, with the hitmen and their targets all doing normal things on their way to their climactic encounters. It’s tense and riveting however many times you’ve seen it. In the montage at the end of Coda, the archbishop appears to be wandering the Vatican, alone but fully vested for liturgy, with the sole purpose of being shot.5 The best that can be said is that the absurd elements sometimes cancel each other out (going to the opera when you know hired killers are after you is not meaningfully dumber than staging a murder attempt at a packed opera house). It’s all done for the nostalgia, the spectacle, and the atmosphere, but it mostly can’t even nail the atmosphere.
There’s only one part that works, and oddly enough it’s the relationship between Pacino and Keaton. It’s still a bit clunky (why are characters not so much coming and going in this movie as looming all the time?), but it’s plausible that Michael would see his estranged wife offering some hope of redemption, and seek to try it all again without the marital conflict that comes from routine killing. Pacino is convincingly heavy with regret and guilt, and momentarily enlivened by an attempt to escape it with Keaton. A compelling—though much shorter and not at all “operatic”—movie can be imagined about the two of them, baring their wounds and trying against hope or sense to make peace with the terrible history they shared. No bogus Cosa Nostra monkeyshines, no quadruple-murder climax, just the reality of remorse and yearning. They could even have met by chance in Rome on their anniversary. Call it Godfather Coda: Before Retirement. Or better yet, Michael could face his demons by sitting down with a skilled therapist of Italian extraction. What might have been.
Recommended Reading
I read two interesting takes on Christianity and culture (a recurring object of fascination for me) recently, not in dialogue with each other but proposing what I take to be two meaningfully different ways for Christians to act on their faith in the world. First, from Clint Schneckloth:
Increasingly I've become convinced that if in fact Christianity is what it says it is, a weak force in the world with a crucified God as it's primary focus, then in fact that kind of Christianity can disappear even without remainder into many other discourses/realities in our world.
This is to say, we are very free to join the discourses and practices of others because we do not demand "our" way, and in fact the self-emptying, weak aspects of the faith "give space."
As a result, I mostly don't need religious language to make sense of changes, movements in the world around us. I can borrow liberally from the language of others, join their discourse, have no need to super-impose my "Christian" discourse onto theirs.
Second, from Benjamin Crosby in Plough on forgiveness:
For Christians, of course, Jesus’ clear and unambiguous commands to forgive and love enemies make it rather difficult to argue against forgiveness altogether. But many justice-minded Christians find themselves redefining it, arguing that what practices of forgiveness or enemy-love are really about is the nonviolent struggle for liberation…. And so forgiveness becomes a particular sort of self-assertion. Perhaps more popular is asserting that, even if forgiveness is a good idea in theory, it is inappropriate for the church to explicitly call people to love their enemies, especially across boundaries of racial or gender difference…. There may be a universal command to forgiveness, but the church has been so sullied by its past misuse of this command that any church teaching on it is seen as engaging in respectability politics or policing the actions of the marginalized.
Clint and Ben aren’t addressing each other or even the same topic, but to the extent that these represent two views of whether Christianity is soluble “without remainder” into contemporary discourses or whether it retains its own distinct and sometimes countercultural witness, I incline toward the view expressed by Ben. But both are smart guys who’ve read more than I have and it’s worth thinking through their arguments.
Incidentally related: Mary Townsend on the delusions of Effective Altruism:
As Simone de Beauvoir puts it, we need to be on our guard any time a philosophical-moral stance signals its willingness to count the human lives who stare us in the face as nothing. Chillingly, it’s the inhumanityof depending on the consequence at all costs—backed by a wrongheaded faith in the goodness of one’s chosen project and so placing project and principle above real human lives—that appears “serious” to us, Beauvoir observes, and therefore good and worthy. This, she argues, is the essence of fanaticism, and it is anything, anything but good.
And for something very different, Hari Kunzru in Harpers on Four Quartets (via Washington Review of Books, which I recommend following, especially if you miss the reading recommendations you can get from Twitter):
The perfection of that “questioned,” a word for a kind of probing that is both physical and metaphysical, brought me back to the wonder I’d felt at seventeen. I realized, with a kind of shock, that my notion of what constituted a good phrase hadn’t really changed. I still aspired to combine sensuousness and precision, philosophical abstraction and concrete particularity. I wasn’t the same person, but here was an unbroken thread connecting me to a long lost version of myself.
A great work of literature (or film or visual art or anything else) is one that we have this kind of decades-long relationship with. Not just something intricate enough to have new meanings we missed before, but robust to the changes in our own lives and sensibilities. He quotes the line about the “pattern / Of dead and living” becoming “more complicated” with time. When I was twenty, this line was about the dead of history changing their relationship to the living. Now, for me at least, it’s as much about the growing congregation of the dead from my own time, changing my own experience of the present. Bob Gottlieb, Cormac McCarthy, Richard and Rick and Levon and Robbie speak from the pasts that we shared with them. And to the extent that they did their jobs, those pasts continue to be, and become, present again.
I looked for the review but it has been removed from the site of the publication that asked for it. It was, fittingly, the longest book review I’ve ever written.
Of course Emmylou looks great and Joni pulls off the skirt, but they are cancelled out three times over by Van Morrison’s jumpsuit.
Scorsese fell into the same trap, trying to recapture Goodfellas’ lightning in a bottle with Casino, and I fell into the same trap of thinking it couldn’t actually be so bad. I was wrong, though unlike Godfather III it has a few great moments.
Almost everyone was dead at the end of Part II but I’ve read that Robert Duvall was approached for Part III, asked for the same pay as Pacino, and turned the movie down when he didn’t get it. Connie’s part seems to have ben expanded and changed to do what Tom Hagen would be doing.
A lot of critics saw, and still see, a fixation on Catholicism that they attribute to Coppola himself in this movie. The Vatican dimension of the story comes straight from stories about a connected Italian backer of Paramount during the making of the original, but I didn’t see anything particularly religious in it. Michael gets to confess and is offered a decidedly cheap absolution, but it comes off much more as a character’s personal catharsis than a real act of faith. The rest is costumes. This is absolutely not true of a movie like Mean Streets, which is more Catholic than Silence.