It was just past 10 am on a Saturday when the phone in Gerry Vessels’ kitchen began ringing – four straight reps directly into a greeting; loud beep, dial tone, “If you’d like to make a call …”. The cycle then began anew.

Gerry rolled out of bed. He stumbled through the living room, cursing at dark walls and furniture along the way.

“Hel-lo,” Gerry Vessels said. “Hello.”

“Ger, you really need to get a handle on this whole Mikey Rollins situation,” Gerry’s sister Susan insisted.

“Why?” Gerry responded. He sounded out of sorts. “What happened?”

“He called here last night,” Susan explained. “He called here late, Ger, like three-o’clock-in-the-fucking-morning late.”

“He did what?”

“He called here,” Susan repeated, slightly louder, if not faster. “Mikey Rollins called here at three o’clock in the fucking morning last night.”

“What the fuck?” Gerry said, rubbing the sleep out of both eyes. He stood silent for a moment, staring out the window at an empty beer keg in the backyard. “He didn’t leave a message, did he?”

“Leave a message?” Susan responded. “He talked to Mommy, Ger. She answered the phone.”

“She what?”

“She answered the phone,” Susan repeated. “Mikey Rollins talked to Mommy.”

“What did he say?” Gerry asked.

“He told her that she had better start looking into caskets,” Susan explained.

“Mikey Rollins told Mommy that he was gonna put her in a casket?” Gerry said.

“No,” Susan responded. “Mikey Rollins told Mommy that she had better start looking around for your casket.”

Gerry hung up the receiver and shuffled hard toward his bedroom. A half hour later he was speeding down the expressway en route to North Philadelphia.

He had no interest in allowing cooler heads to prevail.

***

I was hearing this story two months after the fact, as Gerry and I sat talking along a counter at the Ring Toss. It was late August, and the sheer exuberance of early summer had given way to deep fatigue. The majority of boardwalk employees were simply angling to get by at that point, subsisting on coffee or nicotine, Jolt Cola or cocaine. The college kids were slowly heading back to campus now, along with a majority of the J-1 Irish and the Canadians. The nighttime crowds had started thinning; the side streets ran wide with neon vacancy signs.

These were the deep weeds of 1994 – a slow-grating period during which fleeting romances gave way to disillusionment, the midnight bars ran thick with regulars and the town began a three-week transition from end of summer into fall. I spent most of these afternoons grinding it out on Surfside Pier, working a stand, or perhaps even two, for lack of any sustainable help. On that particular afternoon the humidity was stifling, and it was bearing down to an extent that I could feel the sting of sweat seeping into my eyes.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“What happened when?” Gerry Vessels responded.

“What happened when you drove all the way back to North Philadelphia that afternoon?”

“Oh, right,” Gerry said. “So I swung by and picked up a couple of buddies, which turned out to be a pretty good thing, actually, considering it was my buddy Chris who eventually talked me out of bringing along some back-up for the …”

“Whoa,” I said. “Hold up. What kind of back-up are we talking about?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Gerry insisted. “It doesn’t matter. It never happened.”

“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “But the fact that you were even considering …”

“Look, man, I have no idea how shit went down back there in Swarthmore,” Gerry said. “Maybe your parents invited the other kid’s parents over for coffee or something. Regardless, where I come from, the situation does not get resolved that way. In fact, assuming you’re like me, and you’re dealing with some fucking asshole who’s suddenly put your mother – a woman who just recently lost her husband of 35 years, mind you – smack-dab in the middle of things, you either nip that shit in the bud or you might as well not bother ever showing your face around the neighborhood again.”

Gerry went on to explain that he and Mikey Rollins shared a history, that the two of them had nearly come to blows one night during a house party in North Philadelphia, that their confrontation ended prematurely when a friend of Gerry’s came barreling across the basement, blindsiding Rollins with a glancing haymaker to the noggin, the thundering force of which sent Mikey semi-conscious to the ground. Ever since, Mikey Rollins had been talking shit about Gerry to anyone who might listen. Mikey was bent on revenge despite the fact he and Gerry lived a hundred miles apart.

***

Gerry Vessels had been working mornings throughout that summer, flipping burgers at a Beach Grill along the back of Surfside Pier. Most days, Gerry was finishing up right about the time that I was starting my break. We were like two ships passing, either one of us waving to the other as we wandered up and down the pier. This was the first time since early June that Gerry and I had found an opportunity to talk.

“You ever land one of those on a bottle?” Gerry wondered. I had been pulling plastic rings from a bucket and tossing them oe by one at a massive configuration of bottles in the ring toss.

“Twice,” I responded.

“Twice out of how many?” Gerry asked.

“I dunno, maybe 10,000,” I said. “It’s not impossible, but it is highly incumbent upon luck. Either that or some bullshit method of cheating.”

“What d’you mean, like leaning over and placing a ring on top of one of the bottles?”

“That’s one way of doing it,” I acknowledged. “But placing a ring usually requires the aid of an accomplice, y’know, like somebody who might be willing to distract the operator while another does the placing. Bill Morey, Jr has actually outlawed the first row of bottles all the way around the game in an effort to minimize that sort of thing.”

“Can he do that?” Gerry asked.

“Of course,” I told him. “So long as we post it on the rules and the rules are, in turn, posted on every facade around the outlet, he can pretty much do whatever he wants. The point being, if you’re going to cheat the best way to do it is to either throw a cracked ring or to throw two rings at a time.”

I grabbed a pair of rings from out of the bucket, then layered them one of the top of the other. I leaned forward and lobbed the rings gently toward the first row of bottles. Upon contact, the bottom ring ricocheted off of the top ring, before standing pat.

“Winner,” I said, jokingly.

“Do a lot of people get away with that?” Gerry asked.

“Well, again, the rules clearly state that you can only throw one ring at a time,” I said. “But I imagine some people still get away with it, especially when matters happen to get hectic around here.”

“So what do you do?”

“What can you do?” I said. “You’ve worked a handful of games up on this boardwalk. Once the joint starts poppin’, you can’t risk losing your crowd over an argument. It kills your momentum. So unless you’ve caught some motherfucker red-handed, you simply take the hit and keep on moving. Oddly enough, you can sidestep the overwhelming majority of that nonsense by developing a well-trained ear.”

“You mean like listening for the sound of two rings clanging off each other?”

“Exactly,” I responded. “On top of which, a cracked ring makes a more hollow sound whenever it bounces off of any of these bottles. Cracked rings are also a lot more likely to land flat upon the neck. So every time you happen to hear that hollow zing,” I said, snapping my fingers for effect, “you do your best to locate the offending ring immediately, then break it in half. If the same player pulls that shit again – y’know, like throwing two rings or cracking another ring before he tosses it – you have every right to either tell that low-rent scoundrel to fuck off or call the goddamn police. Either way, he’s the one who winds up looking like the asshole, not you.”

***

I felt a certain admiration for Gerry Vessels, having formed a lasting friendship with the guy toward the end of my first summer. Gerry had gotten me my first full-time job working on the boardwalk. He was the first – and only – person I had ever dropped acid with. More importantly, he was one of the only people still remaining from my initial group of friends. I mean, Bobbi Jean and Billy Lee were both still kicking around, sure. But the two of them had all but given up on Wildwood at that point, what with Bobbi Jean having gotten involved in a long-distance relationship and Billy Lee constantly traveling back and forth between Poplar Avenue and Lancaster.

Gerry Vessels remained the lone constant. Much like me, he had originally moved to Wildwood in the interest of escaping something. Unlike me, Gerry was perennially struggling to make a significant break from the sordid past he’d left behind. The majority of Gerry’s childhood friends were still hustling to make a go of it back in North Philadelphia, with the primary difference being that the stakes were infinitely heightened now – lead pipes and knives were giving way to hair trigger .44s; probation and parole were giving way to long-term sentences. Gerry’s old neighborhood resembled an atmosphere of constant anxiety, one in which the cross streets intersected like lines on a battlefield and the telephone wires hung down low with ghetto tributes to the dead.

It was into this dank haze that Gerry drove that Saturday in June, uncertain just how far he might be willing to go in order to satisfy the balance.

“So what happened next?” I prodded.

“What happened when?” Gerry responded.

“What happened once you and your buddies went out looking for this guy?”

“Oh, right,” Gerry said. “Well, we rolled up on this house where Mikey Rollins was supposed to be. Then I jumped out and started pounding on the door. Only nobody’s answering, see. But I look over to my left and I see this fucking crackhead peeking out from just around the corner. So I wander over there and it turns out it’s this fucking Kenzo by the name of One-Eyed Larry …”

“One-Eyed Larry?” I said.

“It’s a long story,” Gerry explained. “Dude got poked in the eye with a metal dart way back when we were in high school. Anyway, I was in no fucking mood, so instead of pussyfootin’ around I just kind of grabbed that motherfucker by the throat and jacked him up.”

“Did he tell you where Mikey Rollins was?”

“No, he didn’t,” Gerry explained. “He kept on fucking stuttering about how he hadn’t seen that motherfucker for days. I mean, I had my hands wrapped around this fucker’s neck so tight that I could feel the blood trickling out beneath my fingernails. Eventually, it got to a point where I actually started to feel bad for the guy.”

“So what did you do?” I wondered.

“I let him down,” Gerry said. “Then I told him to be sure and pass the fucking message along that if I happened to run into Mikey Rollins again, I was gonna fucking kill him.”

“So is that it?” I shrugged my shoulders.

“It is until I see that motherfucker again.”

I was leaning back against the opposite pillar now, arms crossed, looking off toward the bumper cars.

“What?” Gerry said.

“Nothing,” I responded.

“No, seriously,” Gerry insisted. “What?”

“Why not just let it go?” I said, turning round to face him. “I mean, I understand what you’re telling me about standing up for your mother and what not, but this guy sounds like a complete fucking wastoid. And yet, the way you’re talking, you make it sound like you went down there prepared to do something that could’ve cost you the next 30-40 years of your life. And for what? Some fucking crackhead who probably doesn’t even remember calling your mother’s house that night in the first place? Think about it, Ger: what are you actually gonna do when and if you stumble into this motherfucker again?”

“I’m pretty sure you know exactly what I’m gonna do,” Gerry responded.

“See?” I said. “That’s it. Right there. That’s what I’m talking about. All this cryptic nonsense. You keep on pursuing all of this and sooner or later something really bad is gonna happen. And you know it. You know it. Win or lose, there’s still no way you come of this unscathed.”

“Y’know, I don’t hear you complaining when you’re calling me up at 11:30 at night to shuffle up here and save you from some asshole who’s standing out front of the pier, waiting for you to get off work.”

“That’s different,” I asserted. “You’re talking about a situation where I was simply trying to avoid a confrontation.”

“What you were trying to avoid was getting your ass kicked,” Gerry said.

“OK. Fair enough” I said. “But you, man, it’s suddenly like you’re out there just looking for it. Y’know, I’ve heard a couple of stories about what you’ve been up to this summer, and I gotta tell you, it sure as shit ain’t good. Keep in mind, I’ve buttoned my lip about a lot of stuff over the past couple of seasons, a lot of stuff … even when some of that stuff just so happened to have a negative impact on me.”

“Yeah, well, have you ever considered that maybe I’m not all that happy about the direction things have been going lately, either?”

“No, you know what? I really haven’t,” I said. “I mean, I barely even get an opportunity to talk to you these days. Every little thing I hear is coming back to me second-hand.”

“Well, then, allow me to break it down for you,” Gerry shot back, emphatically. “There are mornings when I wake up and I feel like there’s already a bullet out there somewhere with my name written on it.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

“Nothing,” Gerry said. He stood up, clapping loose grains of sand off of his shorts. “Don’t worry about it.”

I remained seated on the counter, looking up at Gerry as I tugged my shirt, lightly fanning myself beneath the canopy.

“What time you go on break?” Gerry asked me.

“I’ve been on break ever since you wandered over here,” I said. “I’m scheduled back around seven.”

“Perfect,” Gerry said. “What d’you say you and I go grab ourselves a decent bite to eat?”

“No can do,” I told him. “I’m exhausted. I was out drinking until 6 am this morning. As soon as you and I are done talking here, I’m headed directly down to the stockroom to catch a little bit of shut-eye.”

“Just my luck,” Gerry muttered. “You get a pass for tonight. But let me know what your schedule looks like after Labor Day. Maybe we can fire up the grill over at my place and do ourselves a little day drinking.”

“I hear that,” I assured him.

With that Gerry Vessels sauntered off, lumbering south along the promenade. I maintained a vigilant eye, watching until he disappeared down the off-ramp over on Juniper. Then I scampered across the thoroughfare to B&B’s Boardwalk Pub, where my cheesesteak and cheese fries were already waiting.

Day 556

(Moving On is a regular feature on IFB)

©Copyright Bob Hill

“Naturally, in the milieu aforesaid, I was thought somewhat eccentric, which was fair enough, and stupid, which I suitably resented. Still, I despised school – or schools, for I was always changing from one to another – and year after year failed the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky at least twice a week and was always running away from home. Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street – a girl much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame because she murdered a half-dozen people and was electrocuted at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there, I’m wandering again. Well, finally, I guess I was around 12, the principal at the school I was attending paid a call on my family, and told them that in his opinion, and in the opinion of the faculty, I was “subnormal”. He thought it would be sensible, the humane action, to send me to some special school equipped to handle backward brats. Whatever they may have privately felt, my family as a whole took official umbrage, and in an effort to prove I wasn’t subnormal, pronto packed me off to a psychiatric study clinic at a university in the east where I had my I.Q. inspected. I enjoyed it thoroughly and – guess what? – came home a genius, so proclaimed by science. I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn’t want to believe it – they’d just hoped to be told I was a nice normal boy. Ha ha! But as for me, I was exceedingly pleased – went around staring at myself in mirrors and sucking in my cheeks and thinking over in my mind, my lad, you and Flaubert – or Maupassant or Mansfield or Proust or Chekhov or Wolfe, whoever was the idol of the moment. I began writing in fearful earnest – my mind zoomed all night every night, and I don’t think I really slept for several years. Not until I discovered that whisky could relax me. I was too young, 15, to buy it myself, but I had a few older friends who were most obliging in this respect and I soon accumulated a suitcase full of bottles, everything from blackberry brandy to bourbon. I kept the suitcase hidden in a closet. Most of my drinking was done in the late afternoon; then I’d chew a handful of Sen Sen and go down to dinner, where my behavior, my glazed silences, gradually grew into a source of general consternation. One of my relatives used to say, “Really, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was dead drunk.” Well, of course, this little comedy, if such it was, ended in discovery and some disaster, and it was many a moon before I touched another drop. But I seem to be off the track again. You asked about encouragement. The first person who ever really helped me was, strangely, a teacher. An English teacher I had in high school, Catherine Wood, who backed my ambitions in every way, and to whom I shall always be grateful. Later on, from the time I first began to publish, I had all the encouragement anyone could ever want, notably from Margarita Smith, fiction editor of Mademoiselle, Mary Louise Aswell of Harper’s Bazaar, and Robert Linscott of Random House. You would have to be a glutton indeed to ask for more good luck and fortune than I had at the beginning of my career.”

Remember those four guys from your hometown, the ones who decided to bypass college and form a rock n roll band instead? Remember how everybody used to poke fun at them because they were passive, easy targets; because their divergent interests rendered them a minority? Remember how you secretly admired those guys, specifically because they were the only four people you knew who were capable of designing something that existed outside the pre-intentional curriculum? Remember how those four guys continued at it several years after the fact, how they outlasted and outplayed all the bullshit three-chord cover bands? How they eventually moved their act into the city?

You remember all that, right? Good. Because the simple fact is, if you remember who those four guys from your hometown were, then you probably remember who the four original members of Big Star were, as well.

Forget about the fact that Big Star’s original line-up was uncharacteristically talented, that the band made better music than 97% of the established acts out there, that all three of the band’s LPs have since been included on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time, that two of its singles were included on that magazine’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time. Forget about the fact that famed photographer William Eggleston provided the cover art for Big Star’s second album, that said photograph is currently on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Forget about the fact that Big Star wrote and recorded what would eventually become the theme song for That 70s Show, that the band wrote the opening for “Feel” two decades before Jesus Jones recycled that shit as the signature riff for their No. 2 hit “Right Here, Right Now“.

Forget about all of that stuff, because when you get right down to it, the story of Big Star is the story of every small-town rock band that ever dreamed about making it big along their own terms. Theirs is a familiar struggle, and Nothing Can Hurt Me does a pretty decent job of recounting all the various highs and lows. This film provides fascinating insights and commentary about Big Star’s largely unsung run, as well as the tragic-yet-enduring legacies of both Chris Bell and Alex Chilton. It’s highly recommended viewing for veteran fans and new initiates alike, along with anyone who happens to remember those four guys from their hometown.

(Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me arrives via iTunes and Video OnDemand, along with a limited engagement at the IFC Center in New York City, on Wednesday, July 3rd.)   Continue reading →

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Have you ever stood in front of a towering piece of art and thought, “How on earth did he do that?” Of course you have. I mean, you’re not an animal, right? The creative process, as it pertains to any master work, is both individualistic and fascinating. Edward Hopper, the long-reigning King of Modern Realism, used charcoal sketches to work out his ideas long before putting oil to canvas. In that spirit, the drawings included via this exhibition provide a window into how Hopper created a sense of depth, atmosphere, and intimacy; how he tapped into a universal spectrum of warmth and isolation, capturing the very essence of everyday life in the unique vistas of America.

Hopper Drawing includes the most engaging of more than 2,500 early drawings, all of which were bequeathed to the Whitney Museum by Edward Hopper’s widow, Josephine. Included in the exhibition are early sketches of now-famous oil paintings, Early Sunday Morning, Nighthawks and Office at Night among them. Hopper Drawing also showcases several of the photos, blueprints, and texts Hopper used to ensure all of his work was true-to-scale.   

(Hopper Drawing runs through 10/6 at The Whitney Museum of Art, $20 general admission, 945 Madison Ave @ 75th Street)

Five More For The Offing: 

• Llyn Foulkes @ New Museum ($14 admission, through 9/1, 235 Bowery)
• Structure Brought to Life by Henri Labrouste @ The Museum of Modern Art ($25, through 6/24, 11 West 53rd Street)
• Woods, Lovely, Dark, and Deep @ DC Moore Gallery (Free, through 8/15, 535 West 22nd Street)
• Maekawa @ Steven Kasher Gallery (Free, through 6/29, 521 West 23rd Street)
• A spring a thousand years ago by John Zurier @ Peter Blum Gallery (Free, through 6/29, 20 West 57th Street)

OK, so, first thing’s first: I am admittedly waaaaay behind on this one, what with End of Watch actually being released in late September of 2012. For whatever reason, I didn’t get around to watching David Ayer’s L.A. cop drama until Netflix made it available for streaming. Oddly enough, this proved to be a fortuitous turn, in that it allowed me the freedom to go back and watch End of Watch a second time – developing a more critical eye for the constant innuendo, if not the ongoing sexual tension between the two main characters (South Central police officers played by Michael Pena and Jake Gyllenhaal).

I can’t imagine any extracurricular reason why someone might want to sit through End of Watch a second time. I mean, the film got semi-decent reviews, sure. But the reality is End of Watch is incredibly awkward to digest, the intimate back-and-forth so often bordering on homoerotic that you eventually wish the two lead characters would simply kiss and get it over with already. My initial impression upon noticing this was, Hmmm … That’s odd. And yet, upon deeper investigation, it became undeniably clear that the ongoing, almost-palpable attraction between Zavala (Pena) and Taylor (Gyllenhaal) was absolutely intentional. I mean, it had to be, really.

Consider the fact that End of Watch begins with a stoic voiceover by Gyllenhaal’s Taylor, who insists that he has “thousands of brothers and sisters [just like him] who will each lay down their lives for him.” Consider that the two central characters, while working as positive, contributing members of society, are considered deviant pigs by the majority of their constituents. Consider that David Ayer’s screenplay makes a point of ensuring the two officers constantly refer to each other as “partner” (at least 15x or more, by my count). Consider that neither of these two characters has any male friends above and beyond each other.

Consider that about 10 minutes into the movie, there is what can only be described as an uber-awkward wrassling match between Officer Zavala (Pena) and a South Central thug; that at one point during that tussle, Zavala wanders over to Officer Taylor (Gyllenhaal) who runs his hand through Zavala’s hair while the two nuzzle heads, that the aforementioned thug subsequently tries to convince his other hardcore buddies that the cops are actually OK, that he “got down” with one of them and it caused him to reevaluate the way he looks at things.

Consider that a few minutes later a supporting character named Officer Van Hauser, played here by David Harbour, says the following to Zavala and Taylor: “One day the LAPD is going to fuck you in the ass. They are going to fuck you so long and so hard that you’re going to want to eat your gun just to make it stop.” Consider that Taylor’s response to this is to insist that he “can’t wait to get it up the ass”; that Zavala’s immediate reaction is to pull a tiny bottle of Purell out of his pocket, insisting “it’s really K-Y.”

Consider the following lines of dialogue, each of which is spoken by Officer Zavala (Pena):

• “The LAPD has got a big fucking cock.”
• “Why doesn’t he just leave his badge on the Watch Commander’s desk and go home and eat a bowl of dicks?”
• “Look … Liberace’s AK.” (When referring to a gold-plated assault weapon).

Consider that there is an entire exchange during which Zavala and Taylor imagine what it might be like to date female versions of each other. Consider these two additional exchanges between the characters, both of which occur about midway through the film:

No. 1: (While Discussing Their Commanding Officer, Captain Reese)

Taylor: Woman want him, men want to be like him.

Zavala: No, but you, like, want him.

Taylor: Dude, I’m not gay, but I’d go down on him if he asked.

Zavala: Sometimes I don’t know when you’re kidding, and I have to know when you’re kidding.

Taylor: I’m not kidding.

Zavala: I’ve gotta know when you’re kidding.

Taylor: I’m not kidding.

No. 2: (On The Occasion of Officer Taylor’s Wedding … to a woman)

Taylor: You know I love you, man.

Zavala: I love you, bro.

Taylor: I would lay down my life for you, dude.

Zavala: I would take a fucking bullet for you, bro.

During the same sequence, there’s a brief tete-a-tete during which Officer Zavala’s wife insists that her husband enjoys having several fingers shoved up his ass (The notion of ass play is actually brought up earlier in the film by Zavala, himself, who denies being into “that freaky shit”). The wedding sequence ends with Taylor and Zavala alone, at the bar, both of them drunk, Zavala insisting that Taylor’s new bride doesn’t know him like he knows him (Wink-wink. Nudge-nudge).

Keep in mind, both officers are patrolling an ill-reputed section of Los Angeles known as “The South End”, that after the two emerge from a burning house fire, they embrace each other amidst the flames, Zavala cradling Taylor as he yells at all of the other public safety personnel to stay away. All of which is leading up to the climax, a gat-blasting gun battle through the back alleys of South Central, with Zavala and Taylor being set upon by more than a dozen homicidal maniacs. In the end Zavala winds up cradling a severely injured Taylor yet again, stroking his head in the blind spot of an alley as the two of them declare their undying love for each other. I shit you not. This really happens. And it happens only seconds before Zavala is shot down in cold blood, leading to a pan-out of the two unconscious officers lying collapsed upon each other, wrapped in a heartfelt embrace, victimized for little more than who they were and what they stood for.

Is it a stretch? I certainly don’t think so, especially when you take into account the only other viable alternative: that David Ayer and his entire crew were actually so oblivious as to have missed all of this entirely. On top of which, assuming you were David Ayer, and you were angling to make a big-budget, hard-hitting film that was actually a subtextual thesis on the plight of closeted homosexuals in America, which A-List actor do you think you’d be most likely to pursue?

And with that, I rest my case.

(End of Watch is currently streaming via Netflix.) 

Continue reading →

“I understand, alright, the hopeless dream of being – not seeming, but being – at every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone; the vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn’t watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you’re forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you’re genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as
you’ve left your other parts one by one.”

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“I’m one of the last of the optimists about the future of the motion picture industry and Hollywood. But I really believe that all of my colleagues who love film and know nothing else, if the end of the world came, we probably wouldn’t be able to dig a hole to climb into, we wouldn’t know how to do that. We know moviemaking. And so I have to be very optimistic that movies are only going to expand, hopefully not at the expense of other films that might contract for economic reasons. We all know that money is short today – this is 1982 – and the dollar doesn’t stretch as much as it used to. In 1974 when I made Jaws, and I went 100 days over schedule – I went from 55 to 155 shooting days – the budget went to eight [million] which was twice as much. Today because of the dollar, the frank, the mark, the yen, whatever, and because we’re experiencing runaway inflation in the film business, Jaws today would probably cost about $27 million. If you shot for 155 days with a full crew, away from home in local hotels, having to feed them and house them and take care of all their needs. So my fear is that a movie like my most current film E.T., which cost $10.3 million – which for me is one of the least expensive movies I’ve made during the last couple of years – if you made a film like E.T. five years from now, it’s probably going to cost about $18 million. And that picture takes place in a house with children, a back yard, a front yard, and one shot in the forest. Very limited locations. I don’t think we can go around blaming anybody. I don’t think we can go around blaming unions for inflating budgets by the annual 50% increase in Hollywood across the board. We can’t just blame the government. We can’t just blame the dollar. And because there’s essentially no one else to blame, because of the state of the economic art, I think the best that we can do is simply live with what we’ve got … make the best movies we know how. If we have to compromise to make a film that looks like $15 million on a canvas that looks like $3-4 million, we’re just gonna have to do it. I mean, we are the prisoners of our own time. And our generation is probably the only generation that’s going to be able to break through this kind of … It seems that Hollywood – and it’s not that I’m guilty of this, it’s just that I’ve been fortunate enough to have made some very successful films – but it seems like everybody in studio positions with the power to say, ‘yes,’ the power to say, ‘no,’ wants a home run with everybody on base. They want  a grand slam during the last game of the world series when the game’s tied 4-4. Everybody wants to be a hero. They want to ride into Hollywood at the 11th hour and pull a piece of shit out of the closet and turn it into some sort of a silk purse. Everybody wants a last-minute hit. And they want that hit to be a $100 million hit. There seems to be an attitude among the people who run the studios – not all of them, but a lot of people who run the studios – seem to have an attitude that if a film can’t at least reach third base, let alone home, then we don’t really know if we want to make this picture. And that’s the danger. The danger’s not from filmmakers, the danger’s not from the producers or the writers. It’s from the people who are in control of the money who essentially say, ‘I want my money back, and I want those returns multiplied by the powers of 10. So I’m not really interested in sitting here and seeing a movie about your personal life, your grandfather, or what it was like to grow up in an American school, what it was like to masturbate for the first time at 13. I want a picture that is going to please everybody.’ In other words, I think Hollywood wants the ideal movie with something in it for everyone. And of course that’s impossible.”

The problem with Superman – at least so far as I can tell – is that the moviegoing public has simply outgrown his iconography. This happens to be one of the few self-referential points that 2006’s Superman Returns actually nailed right on the head. Ours is a cynical society where most people require proof and justification in return for their allegiance; where atheism trumps blind faith and DNA trumps idle hearsay. As such, intergalactic superheroes fail to connect on the same base-camp level as everyday human beings. This is why Batman has overtaken Superman as the most beloved comic book hero of all-time. This is why the so-called “curse” of Superman is really nothing more than some tabloid critic’s shortcut to analytical thinking.

Consider The Dark Knight trilogy – a multi-billion dollar success story that forever changed the way comic book heroes are portrayed on film. According to the updated superhero model, the origin story comes first, followed by a sequel that introduces the arch nemesis, both leading to a third film via which the stakes are infinitely raised and all overarching plot points get resolved.

The new Superman franchise looks to be constructed according to that same model. The unavoidable problem being that Superman’s long-accepted origin story is absolutely batshit crazy. I mean, we’re talking about a space alien here, one that defied all manner of universal logic to touchdown inside some Podunk Kansas cornfield. Keep in mind, this particular breed of alien has the exact same pore chemistry and physical build as a modern-day human being, this despite having been born to a disconnected species several thousand light years away.

This is precisely the level of hokum that renders the Superman phenomenon irrelevant. In fact, I’ll even go a step further and predict that Lex Luthor winds up being the most intriguing facet about the entire Man of Steel trilogy, specifically because that character represents the one thing modern audiences have come to identify with the most – a severely flawed human being with stunning brilliance and unconventional motives.

This is not to say that Superman is no longer profitable. Quite the opposite, in fact. Chances are, this new Man of Steel will own the box office from now until the 4th of July. And there’ll be a ton of ancillary marketing opportunities to cash in on along the way. A few summers from now, the requisite sequel will more than likely go on to outgross the original, and the final film in the trilogy, which’ll tease the unbelievable notion of Superman dying, will yield the biggest box office of all (Despite being the weakest story of all three).

Why is that? Simple: It’s because making great movies is no longer about making great movies. Making great movies is about making great money. And making great money is based upon an intricately-calculated formula for success. This is why Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen – an absolutely abysmal motion picture that Roger Ebert once compared to “going into the kitchen, cueing up a male choir singing the music of hell, and getting a kid to start banging pots and pans together” – was able to gross more than $830 million worldwide. This is why Vin Diesel still has an incredibly lucrative acting career. It’s all part of what The Wire‘s David Simon recently referred to as “The two greatest currencies of television” – one being sex and the other being violence.

Superman was, is, and always will be a one-woman man, which makes him hot, but by no means overtly sexual. His only inclination toward violence is in the protection of others. Whereas Bruce Wayne is both sexy and human (not to mention broodingly violent), Superman feels a lot more like some weird-ass alien boy scout. Iconically speaking, the 75-year old character represents a perfect reflection of our capital infrastructure – unimaginably profitable yet ultimately off-putting, unrelatable and meaningless.

Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel does very little to soften that perception.

I mean, first of all, Zack Snyder, right? If you’ve been asking yourself who on earth Zack Snyder might have needed to fuck in order to land this gig, look no further than his current wife, Man of Steel co-producer Deborah Snyder. Lest anyone forget, this is the second comic book adaptation Zack Snyder has directed. The first was Warner Brothers’ The Watchmen, which fell somewhere between slow-labored and unwatchable. Despite the fact Man of Steel benefited from a screenplay co-written by Christopher Nolan and David Goyer (both of whom collaborated on Batman Begins) Snyder’s film feels not only bloated but completely disconnected from this – or any other – reality.

There are plotholes the size of meteors in this film. There is a complete lack of continuity throughout the first hour. There are deeply human moments that are immediately swept under the carpet via a series of catastrophic events. It’s precisely the type of thing that led Variety film critic Scott Foundas to suggest this movie might as well have been titled Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Spacemen. None of which is to dismiss Man of Steel altogether. Snyder’s movie does include some entertaining fight sequences, and Michael Shannon makes for a pretty formidable General Zod. But all told, there simply is no meat here, nothing substantial enough to really sink one’s teeth into. What’s more, about midway through the film, the increasing implausibility of just about every major plot point practically renders the whole thing unfathomable. By the time we get around to major wrap beats, the suspension of disbelief alone feels like enough to swallow you whole.

But, hey, what does all that matter, really? The important part is that you step up, pay your hard-earned money, and set your ass down in that bucket. All the rest is nothing more than popcorn duds and focus research. The men behind the Man of Steel have absolutely seen to it.

(Man of Steel arrives in theaters nationwide today.) Continue reading →