Missed it by . . . THAT much

The bad news is: I didn't get it.

The good news is: I was a finalist for this year's National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center for my play Beautiful Day.

Which you can read at the NPC 2013 Finalists Page here.  

Or, if you want a hard copy, get back to me offline and I'll send you one.

William Shakespeare, 1964-2016

“If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing television.”

You hear this sentence a lot when people speculate about the Bard (and speculation is, alas, what passes for autobiography when it comes to the author of the First Folio).  The premise behind this statement is twofold.  The first is that, in our modern media-driven culture, live theatre is pretty much dead as a livelihood, never mind as a creative pursuit, and not even a consideration for someone of Shakespeare’s talents.  The second is that those talents would be best suited for television, because you can indeed make a living doing it, and because there’s that repertory feel to a lot of comedy and drama shows that translates back to what we like to think of as the repertory camaraderie of the Chamberlain’s Men. 

That first premise is the perfect definition of Sad But True.  For better or worse (oh who am I kidding—it’s definitely for worse) these days theatre is a niche entertainment that has become, for writers, actors and directors, a stepping stone to TV and the movies.  But what about Shakespeare?

Let’s say our boy Will was born in 1964 instead of 1564, in Stratford, Connecticut.  He would have graduated high school in 1981, and almost certainly thought about going to college.  Now here’s where it gets tricky.  If we’re translating what we do know of Shakespeare’s life in contemporary terms, then we have reached a crossroad.  The Elizabethan Shakespeare was a father when he was 18; would the modern Shakespeare have married some girl from Fairfield because he got her pregnant in 1982?  It might have been what a normal kid in 1582 would have had to do, but given that normal kids in 1982 knew a thing or two about contraceptives, there’s a better than even chance that Will and Anne would have had a great little fling and gone their separate ways, which means Will would have gone to college, majored in English with a minor in the classics—and then what?  Probably gone to New York with his classmates and his connections and made a creative life for himself.  With no family to support, he could have become a starving writer, or even gotten a day job and started writing in his free time.  But writing what?  Poetry?  (Almost certainly.)  Poetic plays or plays with heightened language?  Maybe.  Maybe he’s the next David Mamet, or the American Stoppard.  Next stop: HBO, right? And The Plantagenets, Season Four.  Which makes my head hurt.

But let’s say those contraceptives didn’t do their job.  Let’s say Anne did get pregnant, and Will married her.  If he did, he probably wouldn’t have gone to college (or finished it, if he had just become a freshman) and would have had to get a survival job just to support his growing family (let’s give them the twins as well).  Let‘s say he runs off to New York the way Elizabethan Will ran off to London.  In the mid-1980’s, what would a clever wordsmith with no connections and no college end up doing?  Off-Off Broadway?  One man shows?  Maybe, but Shakespeare was not the lead actor of the Chamberlain’s Men, just a member of it.  If anybody was the driving force, it was Richard Burbage.  So who would have been modern Shakespeare’s Burbage?  Who, with no nobility to suck up to, would have been his Southampton?  And was it really possible for a kid from Stratford Connecticut to suddenly become well-known in his field by 1992?  Just asking the question makes my head hurt even more.

Becuse it’s this way.  If you want to think of Shakespeare in modern terms, then you either have to force the square peg of his Elizabethan history into the round hole of the modern 80’s and 90’s, or you do the reverse, and try to retro-fit the man with the age. Either way, getting the writer into a group of people for whom he can write means trying to think of a modern version of the Chamberlain’s Men, and that’s where the analogy breaks down.  That's where you try to think of who Shakespeare was without a company of fellow-actors around him. And if you conclude that this company atmosphere is necessary for his success as a writer, and it’s TV-related, then the only avenue that immediately comes to mind is Saturday Night Live.  Which means Will would be a writer/performer who would use the TV gig as a springboard for movies rather than television, and movie comedies more than anything else.   And now my head is splitting.

So yes: it is indeed possible to manhandle our country mouse wordsmith into the rarified world of screenplay rewrites, pitch meetings, and writers’ rooms.  What is not possible is to imagine what he would be writing, because all the plays the Elizabethan Shakespeare wrote would be impossible to get greenlit.  Tragedies?  Forget it.  History plays?  I guffaw in your specific direction.  King Lear, or anything approaching King Lear?  Never.  Unless it was something like Dallas or Dynasty.  But to even think of equating Dallas or Dynasty with King Lear says all you need to know about how low Shakespeare would have to fall in order to be explained away by the words “Shakespeare would be writing for television.”

Which is why, to my mind, the only correct response to that remark is to say “Yes—and he wouldn’t be Shakespeare.”

This post is part of today's Happy Birthday Shakespeare Project.  Click on the link and keep the celebration going.

Love does not stop because the loved one dies

Love does not stop because the loved one dies.

   It drowns in grief, and suffers a sea change

Until it sees with more than mortal eyes

   And blossoms into something rich and strange

That plucks the ripest fruits of memory

   And polishes them up until they gleam

And aches for something that can never be

   And makes from emptiness a tempting dream

Just like first love does when the heart is young—

   With yearning and despair—each nerve ignited

With love that bleeds like honey on the tongue—

   Never returned, and yet not unrequited:

A dead seed planted in Life’s darkest hour

That will past death forever bloom and flower.

Copyright 2013 Matthew J Wells

10 plays in 6 days

4/7 - Spring Fling: The Morning After

A mixed bag of six one-acts, alternating neatly between skits and actual plays or attempts at plays, starting with the weakest of the bunch, a Little Mermaid wedding-night sketch called Beyond The Sea by Joe Tracz, which felt like an after-midnight Saturday Night Live sketch without the talented guest stars.  Very light fare, and not very well-acted.  But if the producers wanted to set the audience up for a sucker punch, it was perfect, because the next piece was Mud Hole by Hilary Bettis. “She’s really fucked up,” said my friend Ann when it was over.  “Yeah, isn’t it great?” I replied.  It starts out at an episode of Young Amish In Love before doing a hit-and-run on everything you’re expecting, and it’s a textbook example of how to do a short one-act right—with the entrance of each new character, the play shifts gears and opens up into something different and, ultimately, darker.  Watching it was like being embraced by Cinderella, and when I tilted my head up for love’s true kiss, I got so professionally mugged that my bruises looked like birthmarks.

Hello Ms. by Heidi Schreck felt like a collection of scenes from an unfinished full-length play, or a proposal for a full-length play, which was not as clever as it thought it was, and whose only structure was chronological.  But this play is probably why the evening got a New York Times review, because one of the actors in it was Annie Baker (aka this month’s Nicky Silver), playing Gloria Steinem.  She certainly looked the part, and played it with a sense of entitlement which, on the part of the actress, felt more like a character revelation than a character choice.  I just wish the thing had a beginning, middle and end, instead of a lot of middle.  Possible approach: the final words of the play are “We sold out,” referring to the first edition of Ms Magazine.  Me, I would have played on those words throughout the entire piece and made it the unifying theme: selling out.  But then I always think in puns.

Coach Darling by Krista Knight was cleverly staged, well-acted and smartly written, except for one thing.  I might have missed it, but I didn’t hear the title character’s last name mentioned aloud once during the play, so the “Oh yeah!” moment at the end was not as strong as it could have been.  And yeah, if I had turned on a flashlight and read the title of the play about halfway through, then my laugh would have been a lot bigger when the coach name-checks his kids as “Wendy, Michael and John.”  Like I say, I could have missed it, or it didn’t register because I was paying more attention to Amanda Sayle’s detective than I was to anything else.  But if it wasn’t spoken, it should have been, and at least three times. (Rules of Threes: mention it three times and people remember it.)

The last two pieces, if I had been scheduling the show, would have been reversed.  Thanks For The Bowl With The Soup In It, Helen! by Nick Jones would have been the perfect closer: an upbeat, funny, sharply-observed monologue on The Roommate From Hell with a great performance by Allyson Morgan.  Instead, the final piece was Us: A MEMORY by Janine Nabors, a dark little time-trip through the good and bad of a couple’s life together which was a deliberately sobering downer.  Me, I would have ended on the upper.

4/9: Happy Birthday by Anita Loos

When I saw that Hanna Cheek was in this, I figured, even if it was bad, I would have a great time watching her trying to make it good.  Plus, y’know, Karen Ziemba.  Not knowing anything about the play, I figured she was the lead.  Having seen the play, I can say with confidence that (a) she would have played the lead 20 years ago and (b) I still think she’s in her 30’s.  But then I think the same way about myself, which is why I need all day Saturday now to recuperate from my Friday nights. 

The play is a clever riff on the old saw that wine reveals the soul as a mirror reveals the person.  Helen Hayes did it originally, and it won her a Tony.  Katharine Hepburn was interested in filming it, but you can see why it didn’t get made: there’s no judgment about the evils of drinking here, and nobody walks onstage equal-timing alcohol with sobriety.  It’s set in a bar; everybody drinks.   And the only spectre is the guy who gets so smashed he becomes violent.  Which is again, thematic.  It’s actually a delightful eveling, brightly played and smartly directed as both an ensemble piece and a star turn for the lead part, played with determined glee by Mary Bacon.  But as fun as it was to watch her, I couldn’t help wishing it was 20 years ago and Karen Ziemba was doing it.  Or next year and Hanna Cheek was.  

 4/11: Julius Caesar, Royal Shapespeare, BAM.

This is miles away from the stolid sausagefest that is your typical Julius Caesar—continents away, in fact.  Set in modern Africa, with a killer set and an opening ten-minute crowd scene that establishes the energetic and almost celebratory atmosphere that’s maintained throughout the entire evening, this is by far the most emotionally riveting production of the play that I’ve ever seen.  Everybody’s on edge.  The only way Paterson Joseph’s Brutus could be described as stoic is if, in this version, the word “stoic” means “a man who doesn’t spit when he yells.”  And maybe because of this naked openness, the Rome of this production is filled with nothing but manipulators.  Nobody’s honorable—not Brutus, who’s like a glad-handing quarterback trying to buck up his front line every time one of his passes falls short—not Ray Fearon’s Mark Anthony, who will promise anybody anything to get what he wants—and certainly not Cyril Nri’s Cassius, who gets publicly dissed by Caesar and is a live wire of frustrated action.  Another virtue of this production is that it really makes you feel for Cassius, who’s not as popular as Brutus, and whose advice (which Brutus never takes) is never wrong.  To continue the football image, Cassius is the sideline coach who keeps sending in plays, and Brutus is the quarterback who keeps calling audibles. 

I had only one irksome moment, at the end.  When everybody’s carrying AK-47’s, it seems more than a little incongruous to ask someone to hold a machete while you run on it.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just put a gun to your head and pull the trigger?  Unless of course you’re out of bullets.  Which could have been easily indicated, but it never was.  (Consider this a play call from the booth for future modern dress productions of JC.)

4/12: The Big Knife, by Clifford Odets

The curtain rose and just the setting and the placement of the actors made me lean over to my friend Jessica and whisper: “Oh—right!  This is that Jack Palance  movie!”  Which is how I know The Big Knife, notable for being Rod Steiger’s first movie as well as one of the few films where Palance plays the lead.  (Opposite Ida Lupino, no less.  And directed by Robert Aldrich.  So Fifties you could die, right?)

The theme is one that was probably devastating in 1949 and looks old hat now: see how Hollywood makes your dreams come false.  It gets a little heavy-handed at the end (but then the big challenge with Odets is fitting the square peg of his Obvious into the round hole of our Naturalism), and although there are some fine moments, this production is not really satisfying except as a really solid example of how raising your voice does not actually raise the stakes.  And the stakes are always high in an Odets play.  Plus he writes dialogue like it’s sweaty poetry.  There’s something vulnerable under the slangish patter; those verbal tics are armor against despair and failure. Treating his words naturalistically is like deliberately walking away from the only door that leads you into his characters, and makes you look like you’re in a different play.  Bobby Cannavale and Marin Ireland are in that different play.  As opposed to Reg Rogers as Smiley, who is neck-deep in an Odets play—he has it down.  So does Chip Zein as Nat Danziger.

Cannavale, alas, does not—there’s a lot of fuming, but very little struggle, in his performance.  He sprawls like a ragdoll on a low chair or stands dead center with his hands in his pockets—which, for a man who is supposedly haunted by the past, desperate for the future, and fighting for his life, is the textbook definition of “uncercutting.” Marin Ireland snaps into focus now and then, but most of the time she’s an uncertain bystander.  Rachel Brosnahan has a self-aware sharpness that’s totally undercut by a Betty Boop voice that I just started to understand five lines before her scene ended.  And on a scale of 1 to 10, Richard Kind comes in at 10 and stays there, which is a fine piece of work until he needs to up the ante and you don’t care a bit because 12 is just 10 with feedback.

Ultimately there’s enough good in this to make it difficult to say where the dissatisfaction lies—is the play at fault or is it the production?  I’d go with the production, and Doug Hughes’ direction, if only because the lasting image I have of the evening is Bobby Cannavale standing there like a lounge lizard waiting for his next dance partner, instead of pacing like a prisoner in a cell of his own making.  Watching him made me think of Jack Palance in the movie (which is bad, I know).  And once I started thinking about the movie, I began to imagine what that would have been like with, say, Paul Newman in the lead.  Which is much worse.  But it helped pass the time till the next scene with Smiley Coy, and I was brought back to what was actually happening onstage.

Recognition

After the rush comes the exhale, and the same

Old air in the next breath.

After the hug comes the release, with all

Its yearning for connection.

I stand there and wait to be stared at and

The world walks by unnoticing --

Wait for the sky to open and a Light

To shine down on me while a Voice declares

THIS IS MY BELOVED WRITER, 
IN WHOM I AM WELL PLEASED.

GIVE HIM A THREE-BOOK DEAL ALREADY.

But all I hear is the echo of yesterday’s praise

And people talking about everybody else but me

And a voice inside me that says “Maybe next time.

So get to work.”

(from Write Lonesome)

Copyright 2013, Matthew J Wells

Jottings from the notebook

Aim therefore at no less than all the world.

        -- Milton, Paradise Regained. (Spoken by Satan, of course.)

The earth turns over, our side feels the cold.

        -- WH Auden

The deepest trap is to think about where I haven’t been, instead of where I’m going.

“Why is it always the ones who can’t fulfill them who have the power to get your hopes up?”

“They’re your hopes; bet them on a higher number.”

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

-- Raymond Chandler

The harder you push it away, the tighter it clings to you.

A poet once told me that originally the poet’s job was to name the things of this world.  In a way, I am trying to name things with my emotions.

        -- Lili Taylor

The highest purpose of poetry is to keep us from listening to fools.

-- Leopold Froehlich

“He says hello like the word could unzip the back of my dress.”

That roar which lies on the other side of silence.

-- George Eliot, Middlemarch

You know you do something right when you lose something.

        -- Tift Merritt

Being creative and being marketable: a bull surrounded by barbed wire.

My weapon against the world is another vision of the world.

        -- Jorge Teillier

As a writer, I think he chews out loud.

         --- Peter DeVries

Love is the only thing we have the right to be totally selfish about.

Marriage: a minimum of temptation with a maximum of opportunity.

        (after Shaw)

Marriage: a sort of friendship recognized by the police.

        -- Robert Louis Stevenson

“I’m sorry I never got back to you.”

“But you did get back to me--silence is also a response.”

Good things always come to an end; bad things must be stopped.

        (after Kim Newman)

I only see the trail when I look back.

Disco’s Dead And You’re Next

        (one day I’ll write a thriller with this title)

New York City is the capital of a country that has no borders.

Only a banker’s wife can show you Hell.

        -- one sentence review, Dante’s Inferno.

Blondes all have something to hide, brunettes all have something to prove, and the only sane redheads are orangutans.

From the great deep to the great deep he goes.

        -- Tennyson, Idylls of the King.

“You’re like the moon.  I know you have a dark side, but the way you always face me, I can’t see it.”

My soul and the internet: a giant weighed down by snowflakes.

He who would flee from bad taste is riding for a fall.

        -- Pablo Neruda

The ones who are dead inside live the longest.

It is the second job of literature to create myth.  But its first job is to destroy that myth.

        --Kenzaburo Oe

This body where I live: my dear assassin.

When Lear is mad, he speaks prose.

        -- Joshua Mehigan

"Forget it, Oz--it's China Town."

Remember Peter Jackson’s King Kong?  Y’know--the one that threw such a huge special effects budget at a beloved classic that it made you want to go home and re-watch the original?  Welcome to Sam Raimi’s Oz The Great and Powerful, which does the exact same thing to The Wizard of Oz.  Seriously -- the novelization of this film begins with the words "You don't know about me without you have seen a 1939 movie directed by Victor Fleming."
 

So what can you say about a movie that can only stand on its own two feet by grabbing an 84-year-old crutch?

1.  If you don't like James Franco, you'll hate the movie.

2.  Even if you do like James Franco, he comments when he should commit.  So you’re probably going to be annoyed as hell whenever he opens his mouth.

3.  Speaking of which, the man’s facial hair goes back and forth between scruffy Ethan Hawke beardage to immaculately sculpted goatee, sometimes within the same scene. Hey Disney--next time you spend a couple of hundred million dollars on a special effects movie? Earmark ten grand for continuity, okay?

4.  And speaking of continuity, Franco’s character seems to have had a cardiectomy at birth, and only grew a heart because the script says he had to. 

5. Giving the good witch a father complex and making the bad witch go bad because she was jilted by a gigolo: take that, powerful women!

This was a big problem for me.  When I think of Oz, I think of spunky heroines, women who are much more powerful than men, and a huckster who’s pretty much venerated by Ozites the way Emperor Norton was venerated by San Francisco.  What I do not think of is women who are suckers for a con-man even when they have his number, or women with magic powers who are too dumb to recognize a gigolo when his every look says I AM A GIGOLO, and then go all Gossip Girl on his ass when they see the truth.  Seriously: what kind of woman says “Revenge on the whole world!” instead of “What an asshole!” when she finds out her Romeo is a roamer?

THE SCREENPLAY WRITERS: A Hollywood writer’s idea of a woman.

ME:  Oh right; silly me.

6.  Also--since the Wicked Witch of the West is the Oz version of Miss Gulch, isn’t she specific to Dorothy?  Making her the creation of the Wizard is yet another way this movie undermines its female characters by saying “She really wants a man in her life.”

7.  Thanks to the end of this movie, I now have to use a ton of mental floss to wipe away the image of Billie Burke and Frank Morgan bumping uglies.

8.  Thanks to the beginning of this movie, I now have to use a ton of mental floss to wipe away the possibility that the wizard’s sweetheart Annie is marrying John Gale because (thanks to the wizard) she’s pregnant with Judy Garland.

9.  The monkey in the bellhop uniform was supposed to have been given laugh lines, writers.  Try to remember that when you work on the sequel, okay?  Or else pay Zach Braff double for making you look good.

10. Not enough Rachel Weisz.  Although now we know who’s going to die under that Kansas farmhouse in about fifteen years.

Eulogy for Norman Wells

Almost 29 years ago now, after I delivered the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, and I was heading back to New York City, Dad drove me to the Route 128 station, waited with me till my train pulled in, and then when we hugged goodbye, he said, “You did her proud.  I hope you can do the same for me when the time comes.”

Well, the time has come, Dad, and all I can say is: you did us proud.  

There are all kinds of luck in life.  Ours was in having Norman Joseph Wells as a father.

If you were never lucky enough to meet him, but you met one of the five of us, then you met Dad.  He was a handsome devil with a room-filling laugh, a scholar who taught himself a language so he could translate a book, a father and a grandfather who wrote out his cards and letters with a calligraphy pen, a guy who could correct a test and watch a Bruins game at the same time, and a dimly-seen figure sitting on the edge of my childhood bed reading Treasure Island to me before I went to sleep. 

It’s always dangerous to simplify, but I think it’s safe to say that, at heart, my father was a teacher.  Which is not what I ever said when people would ask me what he did.

When people would ask me what my father did, I would either tell them the truth, and say, “He’s a professor of medieval theology at Boston College;” or I would tell them the truth, and say, “Dig up twenty people who died before Thomas Aquinas, and he could talk to all of them.”  And, with the possible exception of Aquinas, win an argument with every single one.  

 He taught for over 40 years at BC, and because every professor in the department was required to teach the equivalent of Philosophy 101, football players and classics majors and pre-law and pre-med students were all lucky enough to get a blue book back with impeccable Palmer Method notes in bold red ink detailing errors in spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and—oh yes—philosophy as well.   This is why everyone in our family has had the experience of a total stranger coming up to us and saying, “I knew your father; he taught me Descartes.”  And, because Dad also taught at St John’s Seminary, sometimes that total stranger would have a cassock and a collar.  We’d be at a wedding, a christening, a confirmation, or a funeral, and there’d be the priest, or the Bishop, suddenly acting like an 18-year-old and saying, “Dr. Wells—how are you?”  

That’s what happens when you’re a teacher.  No matter how old your students get, they always look up to you as someone to respect, to emulate.  Especially when you’re a good teacher.

Now, if I said, “Good teachers make good fathers,” Dad would say I was writing a Robert Frost poem.  But it would still apply.

And if I said, “A man’s life is lived forwards but only understood backwards,” Dad would tell me that I’m misquoting Kierkegaard. But it would still apply.  In the end, the tranquility of his acceptance, not just of his own personal condition, but of the condition to which we all are subject, was nothing short of angelic.  

But if I said, “Even when you’re lucky enough to get to know somebody inside and out, there are still so many places inside that can surprise you,” I don’t think he’d give me an argument.  

For instance: I said five of us earlier.  Actually there were six.  Mom had a preemie—a premature baby—between Kevin and David, a baby who lived long enough to be baptized with the name of Joseph, and then died.  I remember her telling me once, while the two of us were drinking tea and smoking Larks in the kitchen, that she had asked Dad one night, out of the blue, “Do you ever think about the baby we lost?”  “Every day,” Dad said.  And that’s all he ever said.  And all he ever had to say.  

In the movie Amour, which just won the Oscar for best foreign film, you watch a husband caring for his wife as she slowly deteriorates before his eyes.  And notable in its absence, the title of the movie, the word love, is not spoken once in the entire film.  

It doesn’t have to be.  You see it in action.  I was lucky enough to see it in action when Dad was taking care of Mom, almost 30 years ago.   And anybody who watched my sister and my brothers take care of Dad in the last few years saw it in action as well.  

That stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere.  It gets passed on.  Jenna, Eric, Dennis, Alyssa: it’s in you now.  Pass it on, you guys.

Life is funny.  If you’re lucky, you get to live long enough to become an orphan.  And if you have siblings and you’re really lucky, then you get to live long enough to become an only child.  It’s a bitter gift, but Dad was lucky enough to be both.  He embodied, in the best way the words of Descartes when he wrote: “To know who people really are, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.” 

That’s how Descartes would describe Dad.  Here’s how I’d do it.  Because I am who I am, and who I am is my father's son, it’s in the form of a sonnet--a sonnet I wrote on the train ride here from New York.  It’s titled “Philosophy.” 

Philosophy

    It’s not what you believe; it’s how your life 
    Embodies your beliefs—not quotes or facts 
    You weaponize while fighting with the wife,
    But offhand comments and impromptu acts.
    It’s what you do because it just makes sense;
    What gets said when your inner-you voice talks.
    It’s who you are when there’s no audience 
    But God, that stern gent in the upper box.
    Show me a man who lives his life like that
    And I’ll show you my father—someone who
    Has so much going on under his hat
    And in his heart, that what else can he do  
        But laugh, and roar, and take great care, and give; 
        And, if you’re lucky, teach you how to live.

Putting the Rant in Tarantino

I’ve been trying to organize my notes about Django Unchained for about two weeks now, and I’m not satisfied with anything I’ve been able to turn them into.  So, as a homage to David Shields--who is considered a writer because he publishes a bunch of unsourced quotes whose real authors are only noted in an appendix (and whose new book was originally titled How Literature Saved My Life Because It Gave Me People To Steal From)--here are those notes, in no particular order at all. 

Opening sentence:  Django Unchained is the kind of movie Tarantino fans can point to as a perfect example of what he does best and why they love it

It’s really two movies:  the first half is For A Few Deutschmarks More; the second half is Inglourious Niggaz.  So it’s a mash-up of a Sergio Leone Western and a revenge fantasy where the Jews Blacks kill Hitler Whitey.  As well as a twisted version of Paleface.

In-jokes abound.  The bar Minnesota Clay is the title of a Sergio Corbucci Western.  There’s a wanted poster for Edwin Porter, who directed the silent movie The Great Train Robbery.  Franco Nero, who played the original Django, is the guy next to Jamie Foxx when he spells out his name.  Samuel L Jackson’s last words (“You son of a b--“) echo Eli Wallach’s in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  The trick horse dance at the end is a direct steal from the Trinity films (including the Trinity theme music under).

Like Brecht, Tarantino steals with impunity.  (I eagerly await his heist movie, where the main character’s sidekick will be named M. Punity.)  And he displays his stolen goods so openly that they appear to be his possessions by right.  But the truth is, he is owned by them.

I don’t get the Australian accent thing at all.

Slavery is to this movie what torture is to Zero Dark Thirty.  Not just the Big Moral Issue, but The Elephant In The Room. The difference between Bigelow and Tarantino is that Bigelow shows you the elephant right up front, and then escorts you through a couple of other rooms that have a bunch of different animals in them.  Tarantino keeps showing you the elephant no matter what room you’re in, because it’s big enough to hide the lack of furniture.

QUESTION:  So if you take that elephant out of this movie, does it still work as a movie?

ANSWER:  On paper?  Sure.  A bounty hunter frees a prisoner because the prisoner can identify someone the bounty hunter is after.  Because the prisoner has a personal vendetta against, say, the evil rancher who framed him for murder, he agrees to a trade: I’ll help you if you help me.  The bounty hunter agrees, teaching the prisoner the tricks of his trade while they accomplish the first mission (The Job Plot), and then either dying or getting wounded heroically while helping the prisoner with his vendetta (The Revenge Plot). 

QUESTION:  You said “on paper.”  What about on film?

ANSWER:  Ah; well now.  There’s a teacher/student story here too.  In The Job Plot, the student learns the value of Doing The Job Without Caring; while in The Revenge Plot, the teacher learns that There Are Some Things Worth Caring About.  And thematically, whether or not he learns that lesson determines whether or not the teacher dies at the end.

I really hated the way Schultz dies at the end.  It was such a giant FU.  The one guy you figure is going to keep his cool turns into the one guy who loses it, like Steve McQueen suddenly turning into Robert Vaughn halfway through The Magnificent Seven. 

Schultz's plot role requires him to grow as a character--to move from the job view of life to the caring view of life.  But in the second half of the film, he’s the audience surrogate.  He views the casual violence of slavery the way we are supposed to: as something sickening, something to be despised.  Is this character evolution?  Or is this just the most likeable character in the movie continuing to be likeable? Is Tarantino even capable of character evolution?  He’s really good at scenes of competing self-interest, but character evolution? 

And how does Django evolve?  In the words of Stuart Klawans from The Nation: "He changes clothes."   And winds up dressed like a black version of Little Joe in Bonanza.

In story terms, you can do the final revenge movement one of two ways: with Teacher and Student fighting (and possibly dying) together, or with the Teacher off the board and the Student fighting alone.  Tarantino chose the second approach.  Not because the Student grows as a character, but because, since he’s alone, the Student is all we have left to identify with, so we’re the ones who make him bigger.  In a sense, by killing off Schultz the way he does, Tarantino is making us do his work for him.

Sidebar: the whole thing feels schematic.  Like Tarantino wrote it backwards and had to figure out a way to get rid of Schultz that would make sense.

Each main character has a double.  Schultz, who could be the grandfather of Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, is an amoral cosmopolitan who speaks at least three languages fluently.  He’s paired off with Calvin Candie, the fake cosmopolitan who affects to be French but God forbid you speak real French to him because he doesn't know the language.  (He’s sort of like Jay Gatsby with slaves.)  Meanwhile Django,  who starts out not knowing basic words in English and who, thanks to the miracle of montage, winds up as fluent with the language as he is fast with a gun, is paired off with Samuel L Jackson’s nasty-ass Stephen, who looks like the love child of Uncle Remus and Uncle Ben, and who (unless I misinterpreted a brief but telling moment in his final confrontation with Django) has spent most of his adult life faking a leg injury to get over with the white folks.  And he is a nasty piece of work, let me tell you.

It makes sense that the members of each pair will face off with each other, but Tarantino (characteristically) undercuts both moments.  Neither one is satisfying.  The Schultz/Candie showdown is so WTF it either gets nervous laughter or cries of anger or both.  And the Django/Stephen showdown, well, all along I figured we’d end up with a Mandingo fight between these two guys, which would have been all kinds of thematically satisfying.  But instead, you got a guy with a gun and a guy with a cane, and the outcome ain’t in question once the guy with the gun begins shooting.

Tarantino quotes Mandingo as an influence, but that movie is an uncle compared to the three Fred Williamson movies from the Seventies that can claim a piece of DU’s parentage: The Song of Nigger Charley, The Soul of Nigger Charley, and Boss Nigger--which is currently available under the single word title Boss, and plays out like a dead serious version of Blazing Saddles. 

Speaking of which: the KKK scene is in this movie?  Straight out of Blazing Saddles.  A bunch of lynch-happy peckerheads arguing about eyeholes in their pillowcases?  You can just hear Cleavon Little saying , “White people are so DUMB, baby.”  It’s a safe laugh, and when they get blown to hell, who cares?  They’re nothing but a bunch of stupid rednecks who deserve to die at the hands of our cultured, politically-correct heroes.  And in the background, you can hear Tarantino saying, “That’s right, modern audience--you laugh.  You laugh away.  Because in about 20 minutes, I'm gonna have an old black guy torn apart by dogs.  Who's your bitch now?”

If Tarantino was a fighter, he would only have two punches: a left jab so pussy it makes you laugh, and then a right to the jaw that makes you see stars.  He makes you laugh, and then he knocks you on your ass.  He makes you care, and then he knocks you on your ass.  He makes you sick to your stomach, and then he reminds you that it’s only a movie; and then he knocks you on your ass again.  And boy, is he a sucker for that “it’s only a movie” move.  Remember the end of Death Proof?  Where Kurt Russell is getting the crap kicked out of him, and suddenly it turns into a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon, complete with sound effects?  There’s something like that in all Tarantino’s films, and it’s beginning to feel more like a character flaw than a character trait.

Every time Tanrantino gets close to a real emotion, he points to the camera.  He’s the kind of guy who can’t have sex with you without picking the absolutely worst moment to point out that he’s doing to you what Mickey Rourke did to Kim Basinger in  9 ½  Weeks.

MICKEY ROURKE:  In his dreams.

KIM BASINGER:  Not mine.

I keep coming back to Schultz’s death, because it’s totally arbitrary, and yet, because of the way the film is structured, totally necessary.  There are so many ways a plot necessity can be accomplished, but in the end, the way it’s done says something vital about the artist.  When a man faces death, really faces it, you see exactly how much he values life. When a creator kills off one of his characters, especially someone the audience likes and identifies with, you see the same thing.   He can give him dignity, he can give him disgrace; he can have him come onstage cradling the dead body of his daughter, or he can have her willingly commit suicide because the odds is gone and there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.  Or, as in this movie, he can have a character shoot another character and then turn around and say “I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist,” before he gets blown away.  A moment which, the more I think about it, seems to me to be nothing more than Quentin Tarantino talking directly to the audience.   I could have done this so many ways, he’s saying to us.  I could have given Schultz a noble death, or a clever death, or a death that was totally in character for him.  I know that.  But I decided to make it meaningless.  I decided to make it the preface to a ridiculously-over-the-top bloodbath.  I decided to go for the cheap laugh.  I’m sorry--I couldn’t resist.

Opening sentence:  Django Unchained is the kind of movie Tarantino detractors can point to as a perfect example of what he always ends up doing and why they despise it.