Month / March 2010

by Edward Champion

The Dark Side of Healthcare

The present wisdom being circulated — that the healthcare reform passed on Sunday night is “a step in the right direction” — blindly assumes that a public option bill rectifying HMO avarice (among other consolidations of power working against the commonweal) is forthcoming. It assumes that healthcare costs will remain the same between now and 2014 — the year in which all individuals who can’t get healthcare from their employers (including the unemployed, the self-employed, and those working for a business with less than 50 employees) will be required by law to purchase healthcare. (By 2016, those who fail to purchase healthcare will take either an annual tax hit of $695 or 2.5% of household income, whichever sum is greater.)

But the new legislation doesn’t require businesses with less than 50 employees to offer healthcare for its workers. Which means that, for these small businesses, the onus will fall upon the worker to bankroll her own healthcare. And while it is true that federal subsidies (i.e., affordability credits, which will run out in 2019, a little-observed issue among some progressives) will exist, through a graduated scale, to help any individual making less than $44,000 a year ($88,000 for a family of four) pay for her own insurance (at least over the course of a six year period), there remains an army of elephants in the room that nobody wants to talk about.

Beyond the misplaced definition of “neutralizing” industries identified by Glenn Greenwald, there’s the uncertain future of whether premiums can even be stabilized to fit a healthcare organization’s for-profit disposition. The Los Angeles Times‘s Duke Hefland couldn’t seem to get any prognostication from the experts. But if there’s anything just as certain as death and taxes, a for-profit corporation will find a way to make more money, stopping at nothing to squeeze out the vulnerable. While the bill does put a stop to the deadly practice of denying healthcare applicants coverage because of pre-existing conditions (this is arguably Sunday night’s greatest victory and the linchpin for greater progress), it doesn’t hold insurance companies accountable for escalating prices. There hasn’t been a National Insurance Rate Authority established (although Sen. Feinstein attempted to sneak one in), but there has been traction in getting the antitrust exemption removed. Still, the failure to establish an authority is especially problematic, considering that a health insurance company’s business model involves collecting from the healthy to pay for the unhealthy. And what is to stop an insurance company from jacking up premiums across the board (as Anthem notably did back in February)? What is to halt CEOs from collecting compensation? Will we see a legion of Nick Riverias offering cheap and possibly ineffectual insurance to help people purchase the mandated care? Time will tell. But many of these possibilities could have been avoided with a public option.

The Democrats were forced to make some serious concessions on these points. And their long-term strategy may involve a clever alliance. Since the responsibility for paying for healthcare now falls upon a large cluster of businesses, perhaps these businesses may align themselves with government against any premium spikes from the insurance industry. On the other hand, any potential alliance will inherently favor the corporation or the business with more than 50 employees.

Let’s say that you’re someone looking for a new job in 2014. You don’t have any savings. And you need to get a job. Because you don’t have any healthcare. And if you don’t get the healthcare, essential and vital as it may be, you’re going to be hit with hard financial penalties. Corporation A offers you a job for $40,000, which includes healthcare benefits. Meanwhile, Small Business B has made you a counteroffer of $42,000. But because Small Business B employs only ten workers, under these arrangements, you’d be forced to pay your own healthcare costs if you decided to take this job. So in order for you work for Small Business B, you’d need B to pay you about $5,000 more, so that you can purchase the federally required healthcare. But Small Business B can’t afford this. For Corporation A, which must pay for healthcare, and Small Business B, which doesn’t have to, there’s certainly a financial advantage to the small business. But the worker is going to opt for Corporation A. Because the employee is going to get less income after healthcare costs working with Small Business B than with Corporation A. Therefore, potential innovation that might emerge with the small business job is lost to the corporation. And I haven’t even begun to examine the impact on the self-employed — MJ Rose tweeted back to me last night her nightmarish escalation of costs — along with the abortion restrictions (followed by cries of “baby killer”).

A public option and a central insurance rate authority (along with a 21st century recognition of gender realities) would help to create affordable healthcare rates, work to rectify these imbalances, and begin the journey to a greater goal: universal health care that regular people can afford and, if they can’t, care that they can receive for free, without an IRS or an HMO invoice attached, and without the spoils going to private industry. That is the mark of a civilized nation. That is the true mark of progress. But maybe, just maybe, we’re on our way.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: David Shields

David Shields recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #326. Mr. Shields is most recently the author of Reality Hunger.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Settling for a quesadilla or some reality for lunch.

Author: David Shields

Subjects Discussed: The origins of the novel and the pretense of actuality, Shields’s dismissal of Myla Goldberg’s forthcoming novel based solely on a catalog description, the creative possibilities that emerge from mishearing, Sherman’s March, the mutability of text, Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, whether a truer creative impulse comes from misappropriation, common reality and the individual reception of a novel, Spenser’s “Mutability Cantos,” espousing work that is true to human consciousness, Shields’s view as the lyrical essay as the best opportunity for investigation, dreamworlds, Shields’s hatred of the exit door within the novel, Shields’s dismissal of Lolita as a “masturbatory book” that is “smug, so sure of itself,” laden with “purple prose” and “full of condescension,” Shields’s boredom with the “monuments,” Shields’s opinion on “formulaic” plot, the Ca’pn Crunch moment in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, the Huey Lewis and Genesis chapters in American Psycho, Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Shields’s view of novel reading as a “childish” and “frivolous” activity, Vollmann’s The Royal Family, challenging Shields on the “fun” of reading, Sarah Waters, David Markson, Shields’s boredom with The Great Gatsby, a lengthy attempt to find a Lou Reed-related quote in the book, the value of the “hyperfake,” the Gormenghast books, China Mieville’s City and the City, Shields’s failure to maintain a “story gene,” Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Sebald, Rothko, quibbling with Shields’s definition of “a great artist,” David Foster Wallace and Tom Clancy, the meshing of high and low culture, Shields’s distaste for DFW’s fiction, Ulysses, “in no way is Infinite Jest a great novel,” Laura Miller’s review, the contradiction of Shields dissing a book without finishing it, and Shields liking Franzen’s The Corrections when sick and then getting over the flu and retrieving his brain to loathe it.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Let’s start with the beginning of the novel. I think that’s pretty appropriate. You write, “The origin point of the novel lies in its pretense of actuality.” You point to Defoe and Fielding’s efforts to suggest “real” accounts. But I’m wondering if any effort to offer a pretense of actuality in our present age, whether it’s through a remix or a collage, really represents an inevitable return to this antediluvian form. This pretense of actuality.

Shields: Exactly. I’m going to see if I can find this wonderful quote by Adam Gopnik in the book. And maybe you can help me find it. But he basically says that the only kind of — I’ve been trying to find it of late. Let me see if I can find it.

Correspondent: You didn’t memorize all 600? (laughs)

Shields: I’ve memorized most if them. But see if you can find the Gopnik. But anyway, there’s this incredible passage by Gopnik, who says that the only kind of work that can move us is work that is full of a kind of gallows humor and, above all, has an authentic disorder.* I think he’s talking about Francis Bacon. I’m not sure what. But I don’t know. Perhaps later, we’ll find it. But I think that’s right. That in a way, you’ve cut to the core of it. And Gopnik has. And I hope I have. Which is: any such gesture like, for instance, I must admit I was looking at the Knopf catalog. You know, I visited the Knopf office and they send you home with a catalog. That’s their big gift to you. And I’m looking at some of the books described. Various mainstream novels. And I’m just thinking, “You cannot be serious.” That in 2010, you’re publishing this book by this person. It seemed like such an unbelievably antebellum thing. I mean, it’s like, what does this possibly have to do with life lived at the ground right now? It just seemed absolutely preposterous. I just started bursting out in laughter.

Correspondent: Such as what exactly?

Shields: Well, the book that was being described — and no offense to her; I haven’t read her work — but it was a book by somebody named Myla Goldberg. Do I have her name right?

Correspondent: Yeah.

Shields: And, my god, talk about a formulaic text with these little plot points. (to waiter) Thanks a lot.

Waiter: You’re welcome.

Shields: You know, with these little plot points everywhere. (to waiter) Some more water when you have a moment?

Waiter: Sure, I’ll be back.

Shields: And it was just like, I don’t know what. You know, probably an intelligent, well-meaning, well-read writer. It’s like, “Wow!” This is so — you may as well be writing the most formulaic sitcom. And she’s a respected — and I think somewhat respected, somewhat commercially successful writer.

Correspondent: But you’re also…

Shields: And I was like — anyway, this is a longwinded answer of saying.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Shields: You’ve cut to it. Any such gesture now strikes me as antediluvian indeed. Absolutely.

Correspondent: But you’re also judging this not on the book, but on the description of the book. So therefore, we get into meta territory. So how can you make a judgment based off of a catalog description. If I did that, then I would probably avoid most books.

Shields: True.

Correspondent: Because they’re often written in this corporate copy.

Shields: Of course. But I’ve read enough of her other book. I’ve flipped pages to realize that catalog copy was all too relevant to the book. And also I love the line of Borges in the book, where he says something like, “Why write the book? Let’s just write the commentary of the book. The book can be summarized in ten sentences. Let’s write the meta commentary and cut to the point.” So the meta commentary interests me at least as much as the text itself. So in this case, it did not seem to be doing a disservice to the book.

Correspondent: Even though you haven’t actually flipped through the book.

Shields: Well, I’ve read her earlier — I’ve read in and around her earlier books. And it seemed the way — frankly, the way in which the book can be entirely summarized as a narrative machine — seemed to me a very, that very fact meant it was, by definition, for me, a dead text. I mean, there wasn’t a single thing discussed, but “this happened” and “that happened” and “this happened” and “that happened.” I mean, you might as well have had — it was just really embarrassing. It was embarrassing to read.

Correspondent: Embarrassing? You felt embarrassed?

Shields: I felt embarrassed that I was part — I mean, I think it was a Doubleday book. I was embarrassed that I was a publisher that had a relationship to that. I was like, “What does this have to do with the advancement of culture?” You know, nothing.

* — The specific passage Shields is trying to locate can be found in Paragraph 365, and reads: “It may be that nowadays in order to move us, abstract pictures need, if not humor, then at least some admission of their own absurdity — expressed in general awkwardness, or in an authentic disorder.” It’s taken from Gopnik’s “What Comes Naturally,” The New Yorker, July 20, 1992, pp. 66-69.

The Bat Segundo Show #326: David Shields (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #325. Mr. Lipsyte is most recently the author of The Ask.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Looking to ask someone for something.

Author: Sam Lipsyte

Subjects Discussed: Milo Burke as the obverse to Home Land‘s Lewis Miner (and common personality qualities), Lipsyte’s early draft of The Ask getting trashed by his wife, the importance of knowing a character’s job, Stanley Elkin, descriptive dichotomies within The Ask, oscillation between extremes and forward motion in the narrative, digressive impulses, movement by painting yourself into a corner, using linguistic attributes to create distinct dialogue, the plausibility behind student housing and cages, characters who share food, the innate sadness of wraps, breast milk bars, Lipsyte’s methods of collecting information and forgetting to write details down, writing without an outline, Lipsyte’s syllabic form of internal rhyme within sentences, Lipsyte’s previous career as a lyricist, the alternative verb phrases succeeded some sentences, characters who believe that writing a book will solve everything, the purpose of writing a comic novel in a serious age, the elevator pitch motif throughout Lipsyte’s work, Lipstye’s frequent references to Old Overholt and his efforts to get a free case, “home invasion” and Lipsyte’s use of stock phrases, “closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts,” the origin of “toosh dev,” on not keeping notes, the question of whether or not there are any limits to literary movements of the penis, how sequences of events assist narrative, Gordon Lish’s principle of “all the book being the good part,” Lipsyte’s present status in relation to social networks, and Lipsyte’s present relationship with weapons.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about your sentences. You do something extremely interesting, and this syllabic form of internal rhyme. I’ll just give you a number of examples: “a tawny teen in a cocktail dress of skimpy hemp.” “I started to rub myself and, remembering I would have to retrieve Bernie soon, recalled that I’d once done what I was doing with Bernie in the room.” So there’s the oo, oo. The book’s opening line, of course: “Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.” So I’m curious whether these particular sounds serve as, I suppose, reference points in your mind to get a sentence right, whether this came from your previous career as a lyricist or possibly the Gordon Lish school rubbing off now after so many books and the like.

Lipsyte: Well, certainly, if there’s a direct rhyme there, I’d be sorry to see it. But I am interested in words that are close to each other, bouncing off of each other, colliding, creating various assonances, and such. I’m very aware of the acoustic properties of the sentences. And I listen to them. And I like to see those different elements playing off of each other. The different sounds. Just on the level of the morpheme or whatever. But, yeah, I think that I was always conscious of it. I think that studying with Gordon Lish made me understand that you could extract some power and attention to the sounds in your sentences. And I don’t know what I was doing a a lyricist, to be quite honest.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Lipsyte: I was screaming cryptic lines that couldn’t be heard because the guitars were too loud. (laughs)

Correspondent: (laughs) Maybe this was part of the syllabic quality.

Lipsyte: Yeah, exactly.

Correspondent: But I’m curious. Why syllables more so than words? I mean, there’s also, I recall reading, “Touche, douche!” There’s that as well. But more often, it’s this syllabic ride as opposed to a full word, full tilt boogie.

Lipsyte: Well, I guess that’s how I work. I mean, it’s not a conscious choice. And I think I do it in larger units as well. Or try to. And I’m very much aware. I mean, people talk about sentences. But there’s no such thing even as a great sentence. It’s about which sentences are around it. So I think that I’m trying to work on several levels.

Correspondent: I also wanted to ask about another aspect of your sentences, which is this tendency — just when you think the sentence is over, then you add a comma and a verb phrase that’s appended at the end. It’s not quite a comma splice. It’s almost a kind of alternative verb phrase. I’ll offer again some examples for folks who are listening to this. Here’s one: “Now an old man with a ducktail haircut and rolled T-shirt sleeves sauntered by” — you think the sentence is over, but no — comma, “climbed into his wine-dark bearer.” Another one: “Maura did not speak, cut her lemon chicken into rectilinear bites.” And it’s more in this book than the other two novels. And I’m curious as to how this came about.

Lipsyte: I do it as well in my book of stories probably. I just like the way it speeds up rhythm. It changes rhythm. I like the jumpiness of it. And some people say, “Why can’t you just use a fucking ‘and?'” (laughs) And sometimes I do. But sometimes I don’t.

Correspondent: Does it present an almost alternative fate in that action? Is that the idea?

Lipsyte: Yeah. Or kind of compresses time a little bit. It does a few things. And I’ve been fond of it.

Correspondent: Two characters seem to believe that writing a book will cause them to find truth, or find a lucrative career. There’s Charles Goldfarb’s book, in which he tries “to advance a new approach to transcendentalism in the face of technology and interconnectivity.” And then, of course, when Carl at the Happy Salamander tells Milo and Denise to fuck off, he announces that, “I’ll write books!” So you said in a recent interview that you don’t know what the purpose is of writing a comic novel or whether it’s going to fulfill some greater need. But it’s interesting that this reticence is shared by your characters to some degree. And I’m curious if we’re overstating the importance of books or these characters are overstating the importance of books. Or whether this is, again, just a part of the great American compromise. Being a First World bitch or what not.

Lipsyte: I’m curious about my quote. Where I said something.

Correspondent: I read the interview and, regrettably, I failed to note it down before meeting you. I read this days ago. Where you were saying that you’re not sure if the comic novel can be important in any sense. But maybe I should just ask you. (laughs)

Lipsyte; (laughs) Right.

Correspondent: Maybe I hallucinated it. I don’t think I did.

Lipsyte: Well, I’m sure what I meant to say is: I don’t know how many people can see it as important. I do. I mean, I’m not talking about my book, but, in general, I think books that have a comedic element have been the books that have fired up my imagination. No, books are incredibly important to some segment of the population. I’m not trying to say otherwise.

Correspondent: Well, these characters. Going back to them. Their insistence that books will be a vocational savior. Is this a general spitball towards Americana? Or some larger….

Lipsyte: No, I think that there’s a certain delusion about what a book can do for you, as the author. As opposed to what it might do for readers.

Correspondent: I also wanted to ask you. Because Home Land and The Ask both feature variants on the elevator pitch. You have, of course, Miner’s adventure with that white rapper in the black mink suit.

Lipsyte: Right.

Correspondent: And in this, you have Purdy’s insistence that he can deliver the most perfect elevator pitch. I’m curious how the concern for elevator pitches came about. I mean, it’s a West Coast phenomenon more than an East Coast phenomenon. So that is rather interesting.

Lipsyte: Well, I heard the phrase — maybe first in 1991 from an East Coast person. Who was kind of a businessman. So I think it’s used in all sorts of commercial pursuits. But it’s always been kind of a delightful convention to me. Because here you are in this box with a clock running, and you have to say something that’s going to make somebody else feel something. (laughs)

Correspondent: I have a very important question to ask, and that is in relation to Old Overholt. Now in Home Land, there’s that moment in which there’s the effort by Teabag to get some product placement in there, so that he can get a case of Old Overholt. Now I’m reading this. And I see Old Overholt come up twice in the book. So I’m wondering if you have reached an arrangement with the folks at Old Overholt.

Lipsyte: I’m trying to get a free case. And if it’s going to take me three books, it will be three books. (laughs)

Correspondent: Have you tried contacting them directly?

Lipsyte: No.

Correspondent: No?

Lipsyte: There are always little threads I like to pull from book to book. Just to keep me a bit amused as I work. And I like the sound of Old Overholt. It sort of opens the oral cavity in a nice way.

Correspondent: In two ways, actually.

Lipsyte: So I’m certainly happy to keep naming it until somebody at that company notices.

(Image: Mephistofales)

The Bat Segundo Show #325: Sam Lipsyte (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

New Directors/New Films: Beautiful Darling (2010)

[This is the second in a series of dispatches relating to the New Directors/New Films series, running between March 24, 2010 and April 4, 2010 at MOMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.]

“You must always be yourself, no matter what the price.” — Candy Darling’s diary

Candy Darling — born James L. Slattery — was arguably the most intriguing of Andy Warhol’s fearless thespians. She was not only talented enough to dupe The New York Times‘s critical acumen (“this is the first impersonation of a female impersonator I have ever seen,” read one of the Gray Lady’s reviews), but she inspired Lou Reed to write one of his most famous songs and Tennessee William wrote Small Craft Warnings for her. But was Darling, who died of lymphoma at the needlessly young age of 29, truly herself even while charming the thriving New York art scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s?

A fascinating new documentary, Beautiful Darling, produced by Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton, doesn’t entirely answer this question. But it does offer an invaluable perspective on what it was like to struggle as a transsexual during that time. If the film errs on the side of cautious hagiography, it atones for this understandable partisanship by highlighting some too easily forgotten truths, pointing to certain liberties and folkways now taken for granted. Female impersonation was a dangerous criminal charge during the time, considered an indecent aberration that was doggedly upheld by the police. Drag queens were forced to carry their sartorial bundles during the day and change clandestinely within buildings. The empowering compromise one could get away with, as identified in the film by Agosto Machado, was “a little mascara and a mohair coat.” Triumphant bon vivants would happily shout the name of Gay Street at the intersection of Christopher. New York, now a less tolerant playground for the rich, was then considered, as Fran Lebowitz suggests in the film, “a place for people who couldn’t fit in. People who actually did something that nobody was interested in.” Speed was heavily ingested. Bohos and misfits were often forced to find their meals at parties thrown by the affluently curious, taking home the remains for tomorrow’s lunch.

Darling thrived within this harsh yet permissive climate, attracting a league of potential dates and hanging out in the permissive backroom of Max’s Kansas City, where the squares couldn’t make it past the velvet rope. But the seeds for this twentysomething transformation were sown in Massapequa Park, Long Island, where a young Darling waded through movie magazines, spent an entire day staring at a Kim Novak photo, and endured a nearly soul-crushing wave of isolation. In Beautiful Darling, the diary entries — the words solipsistic but uncompromising — are read by Chloe Sevigny. One harrowing photo that accompanies these narrations, showing a pre-Darling Slattery with a painful look on his face, his arm gripped by his mother, is more than enough to convey a sad backstory. Thankfully, additional details are filled in beyond these primary sources. Aside from the film’s many interviews, which include numerous Factory acolytes and Warhol’s decidedly unnerved former secretary, by Newton’s many interviews in the mid-1970s, conducted after Darling’s death. We learn that Darling’s mother married another man who was anti-gay. An anonymous Long Island acquaintance declares her hatred for Darling, once she saw her adopting her truer identity.

But was Darling’s identity genuine? Or some compromise? The film delicately tiptoes over these questions, but it does point to Warhol’s eventual abandonment of Darling so that he can cash in on the forthcoming yuppie-fueled lucre. He later proved, as one former associate puts it, more interested in selling ads for Interview. Darling declares in her diary, “I’m not a genuine woman. But I’m not interested in genuineness.” Yet Darling was driven to Warhol as a genuine benefactor. The Factory’s obsessiveness with pop culture served as a vital surrogate for Hollywood, even if the remunerative pickings were slim (merely $25 to appear in a Warhol scene). There seemed no other place for Darling to thrive. But she was dogged enough to make this difficult situation work, even after being shunned by Warhol. She proudly boasted that she collected no money and would crash on friends’ couches, sleeping until six or seven at night.

“I must conquer New York or be conquered,” wrote Darling in her diaries. It was a daring ultimatum that seems unthinkable for most artists of her type today. After seeing this film, I wondered what Darling would have made of herself had she lived longer. Would she have been co-opted by marketing forces during the Reagan years? Would she have been shunned further? Darling claimed that she wanted to be loved, but one wonders whether the pop cultural construct and the tolerance would have expired. Beautiful Darling works so well because of the way it quietly reveals the unforgiving characters within alternative culture. If you write off or forget the misunderstood, or you’re too busy designing soup cans or collecting corporate revenue, are you really all that different from a narrow-minded stockbroker?

by Edward Champion

New Directors/New Films: Amer (2009)

[This is the first in a series of dispatches relating to the New Directors/New Films series, running between March 24, 2010 and April 4, 2010 at MOMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.]

Young filmmakers must start from somewhere. But if an excitable yeoman merely copies his masters (or “lesser” artists openly admired), can the new film be called original? It’s a question I’ve been pondering after seeing Amer, a feature-length homage to giallo with an aggressive sound mix, a commitment to crazed closeups and Ginsu-style cutting, and a panache for primitive semiotics that serve as crass conceptual catnip for wild-eyed film nerds. Yes, filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have demonstrated that they can mimic Dario Argento’s gel-centric lighting. They have paid attention to the way that Mario Bava has cut with cars and motorcycles. Like every film student on the planet, they have seen Un Chien Andeliou. But do they really have anything new or fresh to say? Not really. Amer essentially amounts to a one-note exercise predicated on an extremely silly worldview in which women must battle against relentless male leers and a neverending storehouse of internal sexual desire. This is certainly a cartoonish viewpoint reflected by giallo, but giallo, for all of its faults, at least permits us a few human moments within its pulpish framework. Amer, by contrast, contains such a preposterously intense energy that I’m not entirely certain that the filmmakers intended this as a parody.

Amer is so determined to bombard us with its ADD cutting style that we’re left to admire the style, but scoff at the crepe-thin substance. My bullshit detector pinged off the charts. Cattet and Forzani’s failure to stretch beyond mere homage, to back up their hungry energy with an offering that makes us feel something, is what ultimately makes this flick more of a calling card for Madison Avenue. This young duo would be more at home directing vacuous Calvin Klein commercials.

The film is centered around Ana, who is depicted here as a girl, a teenager, and a woman. Amer‘s early images, with Ana as the girl, are the most promising. There are numerous eyes in extreme closeup — spastic pupils peering through keyholes, eyes contained in jewelry, and a dead man’s eyes that won’t stay shut. Mysterious glass shards are found beneath a bed. There’s a trunk bundled with limitless dolls. Viscous fluid, which we later learn from a ridiculous bathtub masturbation scene is of a magical realist and sexual nature, rains down on Ana as she attempts to navigate through a decaying palazzo laden with endless horrors, including some creepy figure in a black veil. Given all this imagination, we expect some motivation, something that extends beyond facile formalism. At this early point in the flick, Cattet and Forzani had me spellbound. I was eager to escape into this imaginative world. Until I became very aware that this was little more than a Suspiria knockoff. Then the images began to stretch horizontally, eventually moving into the next sequence of Ana as a teenager, walking along a road and holding her mother’s hand. The camera continued to objectify the young woman’s body with extreme closeups. Diaphanous outlines of her body contained in a purple skirt. The mother undoing her top button. Little dialogue. Yeah, I get it. Here we have a one-dimensional woman to be ogled by the camera. A knowing tribute to exploitation in which sequences are needlessly padded out. (Indeed, one scene involving a walk through the woods, in which various branches grope at Ana’s clothes as a battered shutter is banged about by the wind, proved so interminable that I wondered if I should slip into the restroom and relieve myself.)

Did this really need to be feature length? With all the frenetic cutting, I began to feel very sorry for the actors, who surely could not have had much to contribute to a film featuring few shots longer than a second. Indeed, the film’s editing proved so rapid-fire that it made Tony Scott look like David Lean.

And all this for an homage to giallo, complete with Stelvio Cipriani music cues. But why bother with the copy when there was the great life within the original? And why go to the trouble of making a movie that merely served to repeat, but that wasn’t willing to give us even a minimal human moment?

Homage is a tricky tightrope. As Peter Bondanella has observed in his book-length overview of Italian cinema, Pasolini’s early films paid homage to an early neorealist heritage. Classical art and music accompanied Pasolini’s gritty depictions of downtrodden criminals, and this juxtaposition, predicated upon the triumphant proletariat, permitted Pasolini to later get in touch with the personal and more daring style that he is known for today. But what Pasolini was doing with such films as Accattone and The Gospel was hardly muddled mimesis. Accattone‘s titular hero, for example, emerged as an inverted Christ figure, with the class trappings replaced by oppressive religious forces. These larger concerns allowed Pasolini to escape the mimetic yoke and emerge as an unforgettable filmmaker.

But I felt no such promise with Cattet and Forzani. These are hollow technicians who have seen too many films. Artistic vessels who don’t seem even remotely interested in what it is to be human. I longed for the likes of György Pálfi. But they’ve managed to con the festival circuit with their empty spectacle. Film geeks will rejoice. The rest of us hang our heads in disappointment.