John Currin—Society Painter

I ran across the work of the painter John Currin recently in a fawning NYTimes Style piece, the central tenet of which was that his and his wife’s decision to flout the traditional artist lifestyle and live “amid the kind of ritzy indulgence their collectors do” was a act of bold independence (rather than, say, merely ritzy self-indulgence). Of course, for centuries there have been artists who hobnobbed with their patrons and affected the same genteel, affluent lifestyle—the fact that their lives and work are less known to us than those of their more ascetic, or more tormented and excessive, brethren suggests that Currin and his wife/muse/artist-in-her-own-right Rachel Feinstein are probably not destined for the history books.

Currin’s work itself (not much on display in the article—it was a Style Section piece, after all) is actually vaguely nauseating, and seems built around the standard postmodern pastiche-gimmick of shoehorning together in a single frame two radically opposing aesthetic styles, drawn from two distinct chronological eras. In Currin’s case, he adopts the lush painterly approach of a Rubens, Watteau, or Renoir, but applies it to nudes whose bodies have been distended and distorted in a manner reminiscent of German Expressionism (although at times his women, with their comically enormous breasts, recall Pop Art’s simultaneous ironization and celebration of mainstream iconography).

The result makes the viewer queasy in the same way that eating two rich but incompatible foods does. The dripping sensuality of a style like Renoir’s—kitschy as it may seem now—is still a sincere attempt at embracing beauty, at continuing the Classical agenda. The confrontational ugliness of much of German Expressionism, in contrast, aims precisely to upend the Classical tradition, to throw muck in its face out of disgust with its blinkered preoccupation with such a narrow register of existence. (As the poet Rimbaud wrote: “One evening I sat Beauty on my knees / And I found her bitter / And I reviled her.”)

Still, certain unexpected juxtapositions can be revelatory—Sid Vicious’s “My Way” may crap all over the original, but his self-destructive bravado isn’t that far from Sinatra’s, really, and he’s even willing to expose the desperate hollowness behind that bravado (something Sinatra himself is at pains to conceal).

Currin’s work, however, exposes nothing, beyond perhaps his own vacuity as an artist. To merge these two particular aesthetics goes beyond ironic juxtaposition; it does actual violence to both. The love of the physical world inherent in Rubens or Renoir receives a sucker punch from Currin’s uglification of his models, while Expressionism’s desire to shock the viewer into a recognition of the barbarity underlying culture is reduced to mere titillation. Such a stylistic merger (and the business metaphor is entirely apt here) is possible only if both styles are stripped of their motivating aesthetics and reduced to mere styles, to bloodless ciphers. No wonder his work receives such acclaim among the cadaverous socialites of New York.

Eric Ambler—A Coffin for Dimitrios

I lifted this from the shelves at a bed and breakfast I was staying at, thinking that there’s nothing quite like a mindless murder mystery to entertain you at the beach.

In fact, it’s quite a mindful one, from its erudite protagonist to its oddly inverted plotline, in which a British professor turned crime novelist happens into a murder while vacationing in Istanbul. One expects he will set out to solve the crime, but rather than trying to unravel the circumstances of the death, he becomes obsessed with reconstructing the trajectory of the life, much like assembling an existential jigsaw puzzle when you have only a few pieces.

Since the victim was a career criminal who profited off the misfortune of others, the trail leads through various stress points of early-twentieth-century Europe: the uneasy ethnic mishmash of the late Ottoman Empire, the holocaust of Smyrna, the refugee camps of Athens, the political intrigues and coups of Bulgaria, and the trade in drugs and kidnapped women in Paris. Lurking behind everything are the giant, shadowy international banks who profit off all of it, just as surely as Dimitrios did. In the narrator’s words:

It was useless to try and explain Dimitrios in terms of Good and Evil. They were no more than Baroque abstractions. Good Business and Bad Business were the elements of the new theology. Dimitrios was not evil. He was logical and consistent; as logical and consistent in the European jungle as the poison gas called Lewisite and the shattered bodies of children killed in the bombardment of an open town. The logic of Michael Angelo’s David, Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of the Stock Exchange Year Book and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

There's a lovely linkage set up here between the petty criminals who threaten civilized society, the criminal masterminds who destroy it, and the economic masterminds who arrange it for their own benefit, making use of (it is suggested) the other two groups as needed. Published in 1939, before the invasion of Poland, the book ends with the premonition of World War II. If Brecht had written crime novels instead of just reading them, he probably would have come up with something like this.

Nora Ephron—Julie & Julia

I never thought it would come to this—that I would actually be holding up legendary French TV-chef Julia Child as a model of strong-willed womanhood. Yet that’s the only conclusion I can come to after seeing Julie & Julia, a film that traces the quasi-parallel lives of Julia Child and Julie Powell, a thirty-year-old New Yorker who decides to cook every one of the 524 recipes in Child’s iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. And to do so within a year’s time. And to blog about it.

The film is in many ways a meditation on what it means to be an epigone. A middle-aged American wife in Paris in the late fifties, Child brazenly takes on the task of learning French cooking despite the myriad slights and obstructions put in her way by various French people. Brushing them aside, she learns to cook and, in writing about it, makes French cuisine her own.

Julie’s talent, on the other hand, lies mostly in following Child's recipes, and so she’s devastated when she hears that the actual Julia Child might have a certain disdain for her cooking-and-blogging adventure. If Child can be said to translate French cooking into Americanese, then Julie is more like a calligrapher—faithfully reproducing the art of the master without changing a word.

Another way of putting it would be to say that the two women’s lives are not so much parallel as inverted. Child takes on French cooking because she is looking for something to do (“What am I to doooooo? What am I to dooooo?” she trills to her husband sonorously), and in the process invents a new identity for herself. Powell, on the other hand, is primarily looking for a new identity (“I’m not a writer, I’m not a writer,” she insistently whines to her husband), and the cooking project is something she invents for herself to do in the process. The directions of the two women’s lives couldn’t be more different.

Michael Cacoyannis—Zorba the Greek

Back in the days before Nia Vardalos’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding became the standard Hellenic reference point for American audiences, there was Michael Cacoyannis’s Zorba the Greek. Filmed in black and white, set in a poor village in southern Crete, featuring a number of grim scenes and culminating in catastrophe, it would seem to be an unlikely candidate for the international film sensation of 1964. And yet, it took the world by storm, becoming both a critical and a commercial success—among other tributes, it was nominated for eleven Oscars, won three, and was even credited with helping the late-sixties tourist boom in Greece.

This is to a large extent a tribute to Anthony Quinn’s hyperkinetic turn as Zorba, a recklessly charismatic adventurer who moves through life so quickly that the disasters he creates can never quite catch up with him. As with the scene in the film where he emerges unscathed from a mine collapse, he has an astonishing ability to get out just in the nick of time, and while he certainly carries the scars of what he’s lived through, they haven’t so thickened his skin that he can’t feel the pulse of new experiences. He lives with such vitality that everyone around him—his cautious, bookish boss, the black-shrouded men and women of the village, even the flamboyant French prostitute—seem like shadows. Zorba is a force of nature, a hurricane of existence that we can’t help but be overwhelmed by, precisely because he resists our better judgments.

It’s a role that defined Quinn ever afterwards, and it defined “Greek” for several generations of movie-goers as well, though with a strong assist from the innumerable restaurants and diners that stuck the mnemonic “Zorba” in their names. A Google search turns up literally hundreds, and it’s no coincidence that Vardalos, in her own portrayal of what it means to be Greek, pays ironic homage by calling her family's restaurant “Dancing Zorba’s.” Though one has the impression that she’s never danced a day in her life, and certainly not there.

There’s another irony to Zorba’s success, though, which has to do with Cacoyannis himself. From his earliest films, Cacoyannis displayed a sensitivity to women’s position in a male-dominated society that would be rare in any director, but is simply astonishing in a male director of his generation. Zorba is, in fact, one of his few films to even feature a male protagonist. Of his fifteen feature-length works, over ten place women in the starring roles, including his three adaptations of Greek tragedies—Elektra, Iphigenia, and the powerhouse Trojan Woman, which actually stars four women: Katherine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Pappas, and Geneviève Bujold. In the early Stella, Melina Mercouri plays a woman who would rather die than give up her freedom by marrying, even to the man she admittedly loves. It was made in 1955.

And then there’s Zorba, a movie so relentlessly preoccupied with its male characters that it could qualify as an early example of a seventies “buddy film.” In fact, it would be hard to come up with an apter description of Zorba's structure than the genre definition provided by The Journal of Popular Film and Television: Buddy films “replac[e] the traditional central romantic relationship between a man and a woman with a buddy relationship between two men. By making both protagonists men, the central issue of the films becomes the growth and development of their friendship. Women as potential love interests are thus either eliminated from the narrative ... or pushed into the background as side characters.”

And yet, with the women being portrayed by Irene Pappas and Lila Kedrova—who won an Oscar for her performance—one can hardly call them side characters. I would argue that Cacoyannis has done something extraordinary here—he’s made a buddy film that clearly honors the central place of the men’s friendship, and as well novelist Kazantzakis’s tribute to a life lived with courage and a refusal to bow down to the quotidian demands of bourgeois existence. At the same time, Cacoyannis also pays homage to the women who are systematically—albeit unintentionally—destroyed by the men's pursuit of their friendship.

Zorba is indeed admirable for the freedom he asserts as his natural right, but Cacoyannis can’t help but also notice what happens to the women who try to grasp even a small piece of that freedom. Watch Pappas’s face as she welcomes Alan Bates into her house—she knows what she is risking, and she risks it anyway. She is, in this one moment, perhaps more courageous than Zorba ever is.