I finished reading this very small (about the size of my hand) book about the film director Wes Anderson recently, and so I think now is a good time to try and do the next part in this series of posts. That pile of books has been in the corner of my room for a really long time now as well. I’ve just had a lot on my mind, of course this blog doesn’t have a stated topic or theme, but I do tend to talk about a certain set of issues fairly frequently. The thing is that’s just what is on my mind most of the time, it’s what occupies my thoughts and it’s what I care about right now. I find it hard to write the posts that are about something different, like these ones, when I’m so preoccupied with other thoughts. The last post I uploaded was the longest I’ve ever written I believe, yet it only took me a couple of days to write. I’ve started writing this post and stopped, and deleted stuff and tried again, and so on, for over a month. I’ve got quite a few free days this week though with nothing whatsoever to do, so I’ll do my best. It’s not that this isn’t something I want to do, or am enjoying (I’m very happy with the other posts in this series) I’m just having a bit of a hard time right now focusing on anything.
Ok, so this book was was an interesting insight into Wes Anderson’s influences and the themes and feelings that repeatedly come up in his films, but I wouldn’t say it has made me much more interested in actually watching them. The few of his I haven’t seen that is, I’ve watched almost all of them at this point. Because the thing is, I’m not really that much of a fan anymore. I have watched a lot of his films as I just said, and I think he has a unique charm and visual style, but I’m kind of losing interest in him. This book was a gift, I didn’t buy it for myself, my uncle gave it to me along with some other books for Christmas. This isn’t even the first book about Wes Anderson in particular that he’s given to me. While this one was rather small, the other was rather large. As you can see from the header image, I’ve taken a photo of them next to each other because I don’t know what else to put there. So he clearly seems to think I am a big fan, and I can only think of one reason that might be.
This is that I just don’t say very much, which means that people seem to give more weight to the things I do say. At least, those few people who know and care that I exist. Which isn’t a bad thing necessarily for reasons I’m sure anyone would understand, I hate when I’m not taken seriously, but it does mean that sometimes people seize on the things I say too firmly. This is a perfect example of that, I’ve perhaps made a few somewhat positive comments about the director and his films over several years (while watching them with him, my uncle himself and his family all seem to like his films much more than I do) and now I guess I’m his number one fan. I will say I do think The Darjeeling Limited is a great film, but as much as I might have enjoyed the others I’ve seen they haven’t stuck with me.
The writer of the little pink book seems to have a very strong attachment to Wes Anderson’s films, for every one there’s a memory attached. She repeatedly associates them with certain periods in her life, times where things were going well that she reminisces over, or when they were going poorly and his films provided a certain comfort. Now maybe this is seen by some as the pleb tier way of appreciating art, it’s an entirely emotional and instinctual appreciation rather than an intellectual one. Yet that is how most of us decide upon what we consider our “favourites” to be when talking about art or at least popular media. My posts about The Cure were very similar, in fact even more so because while the woman writing this book does have some knowledge about cinema and technique and that sort of thing I know nothing about music. In the book she does still talk about how the films were made, I couldn’t have done the same even if I wanted to. I talk about the music of course, those posts aren’t just 13,000 words worth of nostalgiafagging, but it’s not technical at all. I don’t know what notes and chords and time signatures etc etc. are. I can just say things like, “the spiralling sound created with the guitar on One Hundred Years is really cool”.
So as I said I kind of had that experience with The Darjeeling Limited, far less intensely than the writer of this book or what I have had with other things, but I certainly remember it fondly. For reasons that shouldn’t be hard to figure out if you’re a regular reader, a story about estranged family members going on a journey together through a beautiful tropical world. I don’t know if I’d enjoy it the same way today as I did as a young teen, but it did stay in my thoughts for a while. The rest of Wes Anderson’s filmography just does nothing for me though, maybe this is a tired analogy but his films are like candyfloss. They’re certainly very pretty and enjoyable, and a great deal of care goes into the making of them, but there’s nothing substantive or nourishing contained within. You don’t feel much better, or much worse, once you’re finished with it. Just a very brief feeling of satisfaction, that wears off before the credits close.
So the question is what do I do with these two books? I don’t like throwing away gifts that I’ve received recently, and I did get this smaller book only half a year ago, but I’m not going to read it again and other than the section going through Wes Anderson’s various artistic influences I don’t think I gained anything from reading it. On top of that, now I know that I’ve already been gifted two very similar books like this (I’ve only briefly flicked through the other one, but it’s the same sort of thing) who’s to say I won’t just be gifted another next year. Will I just have to throw away another book about the director every year, is this going to become some kind of bizarre yearly ritual? On top of that, I’ll end up wasting so much time (not that I use my time well anyway) reading these books because I feel bad throwing a book I was given as a present away without reading it once at least. I’m probably going to have to make myself read this other bigger book before I can give it away without feeling bad, but I will be giving it away. I’ve decided, and of course I will also be putting the pink book in the throw away pile as well.
A fair few of the books I have were presents from my uncle, and all of the ones to do with cinema. See he has a film studies degree I believe, or something to do with cinema, and so that has always been something I’ve been able to talk about with him. I don’t see my uncle and cousins very often, at this point I really only see them once a year for Christmas despite them living only a short walk away, but even when I was younger and seeing them much more often I never was that comfortable around them. I’m almost as awkward and stilted when interacting with them as I am with my co-workers or with the regular customers who recognise me. So talking about and watching interesting things is one of the few ways in which we can “bond” I suppose. I see my uncle more often than the rest of his family, I didn’t explain that too well just now, we tend to go to see a film every few months.
So I think because we talk about this so often he has the impression I’m more interested or passionate about cinema than I really am, as I was saying earlier. Whenever he mentions that I should reconsider my decision not to go to university, which is pretty often, he also mentions that perhaps doing a film degree would be something I’d enjoy. See him and my mum were from a very middle class background, where “going to uni” isn’t so much a decision to make but something that’s spoken about as just another part of life. I can quite clearly recall my mum saying things like “.. and when you go to uni” fairly often. My dad on the other hand was from a poorer and more working class background up north and so he didn’t have that attitude, but he wasn’t my main carer for most of my development as he and my mum split up when I was only two years old. Then when he had to start looking after me at the age of 14, I realise now I gradually became more and more opposed to the idea of higher education. I already talked about his poisonous influence in a lot of detail in my last post though, I don’t need to beat a dead horse here.
Anyway, in particular we both quite enjoy a lot of the old European westerns from the 60s and early 70s, that is to say they were shot and directed in Europe but of course set in the American wild west. So over the years I’ve been given a few books about those as well, and I’ve already gotten rid of a couple in the past so there are only two left. One by Alex Cox the director, which I will keep, and another which follows a very similar structure to that one but is far less engaging and in depth so I’ll give it away. Now almost everyone will have heard of the phenomenon of “spaghetti westerns”. Even if you’ve never seen any of them, you know who Clint Eastwood is, you recognise Ennio Morricone’s signature sound, you’ve heard about A Fistful of Dollars and Django, and so on thanks to cultural osmosis.
What people don’t realise is just how many lesser known “spaghetti westerns” were released. In total it was something like 500, over only a decade and a half roughly. Now most of them were very derivative, and even the most famous ones by Sergio Leone which inspired hundreds of rip offs were themselves very “inspired” by the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, but there are loads of gems as well. 10,000 Ways to Die, which is the book by Alex Cox I mentioned, goes through a lot of these lesser known releases and reading about them before going on to watch them either on my own or with my uncle has been a lot of fun. In fact, I was lucky enough to go and see a showing of one of the only two (or maybe three) original surviving film reel copies of The Great Silence by Sergio Corbucci with him, and that is a film that will always stick in my mind. It’s not my favourite film ever, that would be Brazil by Terry Gilliam, but it’s one of them.
The funny thing is, I actually first watched Sergio Leone’s “dollars trilogy” not with my uncle but with my dad. My dad plays the guitar, and so when he first started looking after me he would often play it and one evening he was playing a piece from the soundtrack to For a Few Dollars More. So I asked him what it was, and he told me about it and these films and the next day he went and bought copies of the films and I loved them. I must have mentioned this to my uncle, which he was happy about as he had actually written about one of the films for his degree I think, and so whenever I went around to visit (this was when I saw still in my mid teens, and going there frequently) he had a different one for us to watch.
My dad and my uncle never got along, they’ve always disliked each other and I’ve always been stuck in the middle of it. They’re not brothers, he’s my mother’s brother, and I can remember quite vividly me and my mum being invited over to visit for Christmas when I was maybe 6 or 7 years old and my dad being distinctly not allowed to come. When my mum asked why, she was told “I just don’t like him”. Not that my dad is any nicer, the amount of vitriol and filth I’ve heard him say about my uncle from such a young age is frankly disgusting. As I said earlier they are from very different backgrounds, so my uncle is very middle class and passive aggressive about it while my dad is much more crude. Since my mother died they have had to interact a lot more, so nowadays they’re cordial with one another but all the resentment is there just under the surface. My dad thinks he’s being looked down on, he’s always had a chip on his shoulder about it, but in this case I would agree that my uncle probably does and always has.
The result of this is that I can’t help but view anything that happens involving both of them as some kind of weird power game, or at least being suspicious of something like that. I hate it, and it’s mostly because my dad is genuinely mentally unhinged and paranoid and has felt the need to tell me about his delusions my entire life. Many of which focus around my uncle, naturally. In fact for a good couple of years he seemed genuinely convinced my uncle had murdered my mother, I wish I was fucking joking. He even went to the police station with his “evidence” and was laughed out of there, of course there are certain police officers that are out to get him he believes so that doesn’t mean anything. This is the exact kind of toxic shit I was talking about last week, he’s fucking poison. I’ve had this crap in the background since before I can even remember, I could write a 10,000 word post going over the many different wacky scenarios and conspiracies against him he thinks there are or has in the past. I’m getting completely sidetracked though, my point was that I always had this niggling feeling that maybe my uncle was trying to “steal” that thing I had with my dad watching these films. After all I started watching these films with my dad, but now it’s more of a tradition with me and my uncle. I’m just not sure what to think.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 