Salon.com > Jonathan Lethem

“They Live”: Jonathan Lethem explains a cult classic

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 18:01:00 +0000

Editor's Note: "They Live," John Carpenter's 1988 cult classic, is a fairly subversive piece of work. The film, which combines sci-fi, horror and satire -- and includes one of the iconic fight scenes in movie history -- is an allegorical treatise on the evils of capitalism, set in a Los Angeles populated by evil, conspiratorial and wealthy aliens. The film, despite a mixed original reception, has developed a rabid fan-boy following over the last few decades, and now Jonathan Lethem, the author of "Motherless Brooklyn," "The Fortress of Solitude" and, more recently, "Chronic City" has written "They Live," a meticulous, scene-by-scene analysis of its many, many layers. (If you haven't seen "They Live," the film has apparently also made its way online here.)

What you lookin’ at?

Thu, 14 Dec 2000 17:38:00 +0000

I was lucky to be sent a copy of Dalton Conley's "Honky" in galleys six months ago. Lucky because it's a wonderful book but also because, as a memoir describing Conley's experiences growing up in 1970s New York as a white kid in a largely poor black and Hispanic neighborhood, it confirmed some of the strangest parts of my own childhood experience. I'd just been searching for a way to give some of this material a voice in a new novel, and Conley's book helped.

Conley is a trained sociologist and a career academic teaching at New York University. His book raises his own anecdotal experiences into a sociological light, making it a kind of memoir-plus. Yet it seemed to me the book ultimately comes down on the side of the personal, and on those terms it's a triumph. Like any novelist arraying himself with inspiration for a long voyage into unknown territory, I took it as a hopeful sign.

Jonathan Lethem

Thu, 05 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000

New York writer Jonathan Lethem twists form and style to create unconventional books that manage to transcend the restraints of the genres in which he plays. He is the author of numerous books including "Gun With Occassional Music," "Amnesia Moon," and "Girl in Landscape." Lethem is the recipient of the National Book Critic's Circle Award for his recent novel, "Motherless Brooklyn," a story whose main character is a Tourette's syndrome-afflicted detective.

"Another terrific entertainment from Lethem, one of contemporary fiction's most inspired risk-takers. Don't miss this one." -Kirkus Reviews

Listen to two excerpts from his award-winning novel "Motherless Brooklyn" (Doubleday). An MP3Lit.com exclusive recording.

Motherless Brooklyn

Thu, 16 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"Frank, what happened?"

"Knife," said Minna. "No biggie."

"You're gonna be all right?" Coney was asking and willing it at once.

"Oh, yeah. Great."

"Sorry, Frank."

"Who?" I said. "Who did this?"

Minna smiled. "You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must."

Minna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticcing. It was rare that I could.
"Let me think," I said.

"It'll hurt him if he laughs," said Coney to me. "Say one he knows already. Or one that ain't funny."

"Since when do I laugh?" said Minna. "Let him tell it. Couldn't hurt worse than your driving."

"Okay," I said. "Guy walks into a bar." I was watching blood pool on the backseat, at the same time trying to keep Minna from tracking my eyes.

"That's the ticket," rasped Minna. "Best jokes start the same fucking way, don't they, Gilbert? The guy, the bar."

"I guess," said Coney.

"Funny already," said Minna. "We're already in the black here."

"So guy walks into a bar," I said again. "With an octopus. Says to the bartender 'I'll bet a hundred dollars this octopus can play any instrument in the place.'"

“Past Forgetting: My Memory Lost and Found” by Jill Robinson

Fri, 22 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Classic, film-noir amnesia -- bewildered victim awakening in a hospital room with no sense of self, no memory of a name or of the events leading up to the present, dependent for clues on nurses and policemen and others claiming (but surely only pretending) to be family members: This sort of amnesiac state is almost completely a fiction. It is the stuff of movies and novels, a reliably suspenseful narrative device and a metaphor richly evocative of human experience but in fact hardly a human experience at all. Amnesia in the clinical sense is usually something much less absolute (and often quite temporary) even at its worst.

Odd, then, that "Past Forgetting," a gemlike, seductively readable and quietly moving memoir recounting that great rarity, a truly encompassing and persistent loss of memory -- in this case caused by a swimming-pool accident -- should be written by a woman whose life involves so many fairy-tale elements and is populated by so many movie stars that if it were fiction it would seem ludicrously trashy. The novelist Jill Robinson ("Perdido," "Bed/Time/Story" and many others) is the daughter of Dore Schary, who, when he replaced Louis B. Mayer at MGM, became legendary as the only screenwriter ever to be handed control of a movie studio.

Screened out

Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Four wonderful novels and one whole career obscured by film adaptations, good, bad and indifferent.

True Grit by Charles Portis

The difference between the novel and the film is that the novel, which like Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and Thomas Berger's "Little Big Man" perfectly captures the naive elegance of the American voice, is about the inner life of the narrator, a 14-year-old girl. The film is, of course, about John Wayne, who in portraying Rooster Cogburn turned his screen image gently on its ear, and won an Oscar. That was nice, but the book should be better remembered.

Endless Love by Scott Spencer

Behind that titter-provoking Brooke Shields movie is one of the best candidates for Great American Novel
-- "The Great Gatsby" meets Terrence Malick's "Badlands,"
a story of teenage romantic obsession told in a voice
as rich, intelligent and full of emotional nuance as the
best of Philip Roth or Richard Yates.

A Cursing Brain: The Histories of Tourette Syndrome

Tue, 06 Apr 1999 10:08:00 +0000

Led by its flagship symptom, compulsive cursing, Tourette's syndrome has recently entered the popular imagination as joke, metaphor and disease of the week. The colorful syndrome has been the subject of reflections by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker and gist for popular memoirs and fiction. Whats still little known is the complex history behind the seemingly obvious-as-the-crazy-expression-on-your-face diagnosis -- a history that continues in the persistent disagreement between French and American clinicians. Tourette's, with its garish array of twitches, shrieks and mutterings, has for more than a century been a football in the struggle between psychological and neurological views of human behavior -- and between psychoanalytic and pharmacological approaches to treatment.

Fascinatingly, the current American consensus for a neurological view was galvanized, in the '60s and '70s, by parents of Tourettic children who were furious about psychoanalytic interpretations of the disease -- interpretations that, implicitly or explicitly, blamed inadequate parenting. This grassroots rejection of Freudianism, so American in its activist pragmatism, transformed the medical establishment's approach to the symptoms of Tourette's. The French, on the other hand, remain in the grip of the more literary and existential Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition. For them, Tourette's remains an outward clue to deep psychological trauma and a beautiful metaphor for stifled masturbation, eroticized parental love and resistance to societal pressure to conform.

Hurlyburly

Wed, 23 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000

"Hurlyburly," adapted by director Anthony Drazan and writer David Rabe from Rabe's award-winning play, is less a tale than an X-ray of four self-destructive and misogynistic Hollywood wise guys. The film is a discomforting dose of fast-lane meltdown and macho angst, one that justifies comparisons to the best of David Mamet. Not since "Glengarry Glen Ross" has such a vibrantly and uncompromisingly talky play been so successfully translated to film. The result is a showcase for a remarkable ensemble of actors.

Scream queen

Fri, 20 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

"Gods and Monsters," a fictionalized version of the last days of '30s horror film director James Whale, is a showcase for a uniquely sympathetic virtuoso performance by legendary stage actor Ian McKellen in an otherwise minor film. It's simultaneously a lesson in the treacheries of novel-to-film adaptations and in the pitfalls of the "biopic."

The film takes as its source Christopher Bram's deft, elegiac novel "Father of Frankenstein." Bram centers his novel on the retired director's obsession with a hulking gardener who's been hired to mow the lawns at his Hollywood home. The gardener, played by Brendan "George of the Jungle" Fraser, is Bram's invention, and clearly a conscious and witty variation on the hackneyed sexual fantasy of the virile manservant. In the novel's scheme the gardener serves to trigger the elderly Whale's musings on the central themes of his past: his interrupted career as early Hollywood's only ecstatically "out" gay director and his invention of an icon -- the image of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster -- which persistently overshadowed his other achievements and, eventually, his life.

Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays And Criticism From A Lifelong Love Affair With The Movies

Fri, 06 Nov 1998 20:00:00 +0000

For a writer like Phillip Lopate, with his deep commitment to the essay as a literary form, any piece of journalism -- a film review, a profile of a director or another critic, even a summary-style "film festival roundup" -- is a chance to practice the higher calling of his art. And for an essayist as committed to personal disclosure as Lopate is, every gathering of essays into a book is an opportunity to smuggle another chapter of his own autobiography into the hands of readers. In "Totally, Tenderly, Tragically," we see Lopate occasionally stumble at the task of making art in the form of journalistic assignments, while succeeding spectacularly at making the collection more, much more, than the sum of its parts.

Noir way out

Fri, 02 Oct 1998 19:00:00 +0000

For filmgoers with a keen eye for writer's credits, Steve Shainberg's neo-noir "Hit Me" offers an intriguing two-for-one: noir legend Jim Thompson's novel "A Swell-Looking Babe" adapted for the screen by Denis Johnson, author of "Fiskadoro," "Jesus' Son" and many other haunting, enigmatic volumes of fiction and poetry. The lead actor, setting and premise of "Hit Me" are promising as well: Elias Koteas ("The Adjuster," "Exotica," "Crash") plays Sonny, a desperate, scuffling night bellhop in the ominous and claustrophobic Stillwell Hotel, where a sequence of seemingly random bad turns draws him into the sucker role in a violent robbery scheme.

"Hit Me" was evidently a labor of love for the writer and director, who attracted a number of cult character actors as well as Johnson to the project. What should have been a low-budget jewel, however, goes badly off the rails. Instead, "Hit Me" is an object lesson in how much first-class talent at every level of a film's production can be set adrift when director and screenwriter don't know what kind of film they want to make. Uncertain whether to aim for morbid satire or poignant character study, "Hit Me" hedges. Sometimes Sonny the Bellhop functions as the plot's dupe, and the camera and story hold him at arm's length for our amusement. Then, in lingering and lugubrious close-ups, we're asked to indentify with his yearning for escape and with his bid for romance with Monique (played by French actress Laure Marsac), an authentic film noir hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold.

Not a warm puppy

Wed, 30 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000

Todd Solondz's "Happiness" is a masterpiece.

OK, "Happiness" might be a masterpiece. I'd have to do more than see it again to really know -- I'd have to see it again five or 10 years from now, when the distractions and diversions of its present context have fallen away. "Happiness" is a good enough film, though, to deserve its audience's best efforts to banish distraction and view it clearly. A heralded entry in this month's New York Film Festival, "Happiness" was controversial before release for its scrupulous depiction of the daily life of a child molester -- though that, it should be said, is only one of several threads in this two-hour-plus, multiple-story-line black comedy. Dropped by its intended distributor (who scored a considerable success with Solondz's previous film, "Welcome to the Dollhouse"), the film has been released without a rating by a unique consortium brought together expressly for this purpose.

The darkest side of John Wayne

Mon, 11 Aug 1997 19:00:00 +0000

in a live recording of a 1968 performance, the radical folk singer Phil Ochs introduces a song by saying: "I was always a John Wayne fan when I was younger." The audience laughs, thinking he's joking, but Ochs persists: "One of the dilemmas we have is that many of America's greatest artists are very right wing and reactionary, and not very intelligent. But they're truly great in their own mediums. I think that John Wayne is one of the greatest men ever to step in front of a camera. This song is dedicated to John Wayne." As he begins strumming chords through the giggles of the crowd he mumbles: "Nobody takes me seriously."

Thinking about his politics is a way out of really looking at John Wayne. His brute Republicanism gives us an excuse for flinching from the awful contradictions he represents, without even stopping to name them. It's a forgivable instinct. What other American icon comes so overloaded with reflections of our national disasters of racism, sexual repression, violence and authority? Who else thrusts the difficult question of what it means to be a man in America so forcefully in our faces, daring us to meet his gaze? Thank heaven he's also a laughable political ignoramus, a warmongering hypocrite who never served in the armed forces. Thank heaven he's associated with the western, an easily dismissible film genre. All this gives us the chance to avert our eyes, to giggle or scoff. And we do.

Monstrous acts and little murders

Mon, 06 Jan 1997 20:00:00 +0000

theres "The Lottery," of course, the story everyone knows
even if they don't remember Shirley Jackson's name. A small New
England town, blandly familiar in every way, sleepwalking its way
through ritual murder. Likely the most controversial piece of
fiction ever published in the New Yorker, resulting in hundreds
of canceled subscriptions, later adapted for television, radio
and ballet, it now resides in the popular imagination as an
archetype. It can be as difficult to persuade readers that the
story is just one sheaf in the portfolio of one of this century's
most luminous and strange American writers as it is to explain that the town portrayed in "The Lottery" is a real one.

I know it is, because I lived there. North Bennington is a
tiny village less than a mile from the otherwise isolated
Bennington campus in Vermont. Shirley Jackson was married to
Stanley Edgar Hyman, a literary critic who taught at the college.
And she spent her life in the town, raising four children,
presiding over a chaotic household that was host to Ralph
Ellison, Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov, and at times going
quietly crazy and writing, always, with the rigor of one who has
found her born task. Six novels, two bestselling volumes of
deceptively sunny family memoirs and countless stories before
her death at 48, in 1965.