A Blog of My Own

Not until I downloaded some iTunes tracks of Carter Burwell’s score for the Coen Bros.’ Burn After Reading did I realize how much his music shaped the tone of that movie. Though the film is a comedy, the score is ominous and dark. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it tragic. Try to imagine a more expectedly “comedic” score against the narrative, and you have a whole different, and trivial, film. The Coen Brothers and Burwell—with the sound-world he created for this movie, with its Philip Glass minimalism meets Bernard Herrmann harmonies of fear—are trying to tell us that while we may laugh at the characters in Burn After Reading, we are not to take them, or the world they inhabit, lightly.

Burwell has turned out one creative, idiosyncratic score after another in his movie career, and, unlike the Coens, he doesn’t repeat himself very much. He finds a tonality that uniquely suits the project, and he runs with it. (His first film was the Coen’s first film, Blood Simple, and he has scored all their films since then; he is also the “house composer” for Spike Jonze. But he has worked for a variety of other directors in a great variety of genres. Currently he has about 75 films to his credit.) Film scores used to enhance films, not just accompany them; they brought out psychological dimensions of character and storyline. Burwell’s scores still do this. Of all film composers writing today, he’s the one that can most be counted on to unlock the secret of a film and change it into the film it was meant to be, but wouldn’t have been without him—not just to write music that “works.”

By the way, no trip to Los Angeles is complete without a visit to The Museum of Jurassic Technology—a place that can best be described as a repository of really weird-ass stuff. Carter Burwell’s name is on the wall as a supporting donor. I’m not surprised.

P.S. Click here to read a useful recent interview with Burwell that tells you something about his background and his process.

…when John McCain lectured Obama on the dangers of imprudent speech in delicate matters of foreign policy, and Obama replied, “That’s funny, coming from the guy who sang ‘Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.’ “

Lest we forget:

I’m for Al Franken for U.S. Senate. I gave him money two or three months ago to help him win his race in Minnesota. As a result, of course, I get phone calls from his campaign, asking for more money. I actually plan to give him another infusion of cash in early October – but not because of the phone calls. Believe it or not, Al Franken for Senate Telemarketers, I know Al Franken is running for the Senate, and I know he can use money!

In early September, I answered the phone call from the Al Franken for Senate Campaign, and politely told the young man on the other end of the line that I did not need to receive any more phone calls. He said, “Well, what if we agree to call you only once a month?” I said, in the spirit of cooperation and consensus-building that is my trademark, “OK, I can live with that.”

Of course, they have not lived up to their end of the bargain. I’ve received a call from them about every three days since that conversation. I have not answered the phone when this happens.

But the next time, I will. And here’s what I’m going to say:

“If you call me one more time, I’m giving money to Norm Coleman.”

And I mean it. I will.

The aggressiveness of your phone marketing campaign is counterproductive, Al Franken.

Fair warning.

____________

P.S. (added 10/9): I’m happy to say that after posting this, I received no more phone calls from the Franken campaign! Coincidence, or do they read my blog? Impossible to say. In any event, in return, I kept my end of the bargain and made a second donation to the campaign on October 2.

I think I’ve got the Coen brothers pretty much figured out, except for one thing. I’ve deduced that their m.o. is to fashion stories around dumb people who think they’re smart, and smart people who aren’t as smart as they think they are. What I don’t know is whether the vision behind the formula is a compassionate one, or a misanthropic one. Are they saying, “We are all fools, even the smartest among us, and there’s nothing to do but accept that, and accept ourselves,” or are they saying, “People are stupid except for us, and, as the only smart guys in the room, we are in a position to mock the fools”? Are they laughing with us, or at us? Their movies give off the latter aroma, but I’m not sure. Not that it would be wrong if they were misanthropes, because their contempt (if such it is) has yielded a series of interesting, idiosyncratic (if somewhat like each other) movies. And compassion is no virtue in a filmmaker if it produces boring movies. A healthy dose of vitriol didn’t do the comedies of Preston Sturges any harm. (And if the Coens cited any influence on their comedy, I’d be willing to bet a wad of cash on Sturges.) So I’m good with the Coens no matter what. But I’m still curious. Being the empathic, compassionate soul that I am, I reserve the possibility that empathy and compassion are what drive the Coens.

After I saw the greatly enjoyable new Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading last week, it occured to me that every single Coen Brothers movie is about the same thing. This might seem unlikely, since some of their movies are film-noirs and some are silly romps and some are picaresque adventures and some are dark meditations on the nature of violence etc., but it’s true:

Every single Coen Brothers movie is about people who aren’t as smart as they think they are getting into deep doo-doo because they’re not as smart as they think they are.

That is the formula. Sometimes these people are plain dumb, and in some cases they’re highly intelligent – but in every case, no matter where they fall on the stupid/smart spectrum, they think they’re smarter than they actually are. Even the sharpest of them – and some Coen characters are pretty smart – overreach because they overestimate their smarts. The trouble always comes because their evaluation of their cleverness is a little or a lot high of the mark.

I feel very clever right now because, by unpacking the secret of the entire Coen Bros. oeuvre, I feel as if I just discovered the formula for Coca Cola. If this were a Coen Brothers movie, something terrible would happen to me right now for thinking that.

Take a sampling of their movies in order. Blood Simple. Guy thinks he’s smart enough to hire a hit on his wife and get away with it. Guy finds he’s wrong. Raising Arizona. Couple thinks they’re clever enough to kidnap a baby, raise it as their own, and get away with it. Couple learns different. Barton Fink. Brilliant playwright thinks he’s smart enough to handle Hollywood. Brilliant playwright comes up short. The Hudsucker Proxy. Corporate sharpies hire moron to run their business, with intent to buy it for pennies when he runs it into the ground. Corporate sharpies outsmarted by moron. Fargo. Car salesman fancies himself smart enough to fashion a kidnapping scheme involving a couple of thugs. Car salesman ends up way in over his head. The Big Lebowski. Intelligent cool aging hippie dude and his intelligent neo-con buddy think they’re intelligent enough to take on nasty millionaire. Discover it’s not as easy as they thought. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Lovable moron escaped cons bumble their way across 1930s Mississippi. Intolerable Cruelty. Brilliant divorce lawyer and canny femme fatale try to outsmart each other. Both find selves getting outsmarted. The Ladykillers. Genius professor hires moron thieves to rob a casino. Things do not work out well for genius or morons. No Country for Old Men. Shrewdness and guile turn out to be no match for pure evil.

And now, Burn After Reading. Brilliant CIA analyst turns out to be cuckolded fool. And that’s just the start of it. Washington portrayed as town populated by people promoted one grade beyond their competence levels, buying into their own PR, and suffering ignominious ends because of it. Mixed with morons who severely overestimate their ability to beat the system.

The Coens’ world revolves entirely around brains. Their presence or absence. And how no amount of brainpower is sufficient to make us anything but fools.

Charles Gibson tries not to appear condescending as Sarah Palin looks on.

Sarah Palin didn’t do as poorly in her Charlie Gibson interview as I hoped she would. In advance of the airing, when I saw her “Bush Doctrine moment” excerpted on YouTube, I took comfort from her obvious vamping, stalling, squirming and general b-s-ing. She didn’t look strong at all then, and I had the giddy feeling that America just might be on the cusp of switching into just-not-into-her mode. But, in the context of the whole interview, that moment was atypical. Mostly Charlie Gibson came off as a pretentious jerk, someone who obviously believed he knew a lot more about everything than the woman he was interviewing. The fact that he does know a lot more about everything than the woman he was interviewing is irrelevant. Nobody likes a smart ass. The more Gibson did the “oh please, spare me” look, the more America sat up and said, “You know, we like that she doesn’t know very much!”

Ironically (and I’m not saying I knew this in advance), Gibson would have damaged Palin more if he had appeared to be on her side — if he’d found a way to ask the same questions while treating her as a “friendly witness” rather than a hostile one. In casting himself as an adversary, he helped her. Because in the public’s mind, nine times out of ten, a likability contest between a regular person and the media is no contest.

So now I’m putting my faith in Divine Providence.

Obama shouldn’t be talking about the McCain campaign’s lies as if he needs to defend himself against them. He needs to hit home that McCain’s and Palin’s lies are a giant red flag for us. Every lie they tell is a lie told to the American people. Make it be about us, about the brazen disrespect they show us every time they lie to us. And ask us to imagine the next 4 years based on what they’ve been willing to stoop to so far. Obama should be asking, every single day, “If they’re willing to lie to you so baldfacedly now, how will you ever expect them to tell you the truth once they get in office? What do you imagine that administration is going to be like, people?!?”

Why am I so generous with my consulting advice? I must be a saint.

Putting on my marketing hat, here’s the commercial I would do for Obama.

(I’m accustomed to being paid for this — and, if the Obama campaign hired me, I would insist they pay me well — but since I don’t work for them, but do want him to win, I’m throwing this their way gratis.)

The scene: an eerie twilight-zone world that is the future if McCain wins. (A somber voiceover begins, “In the year 2008, John McCain was elected President…”) Families are living in cardboard boxes, having been dispossessed of their houses. Sick and dying people are massing outside emergency rooms by the hundreds, having been turned away for lack of insurance. Everybody is shooting everybody in the street, since everyone has guns. Young women who have been raped by psychotics who should have been institutionalized (but weren’t, for lack of government mental health funding) are delivering deformed babies, because they have no choice. Old people are starving because their stock market investments tanked (due to lack of government regulation of the banking industry) and social security got privatized, and also tanked. American bombs fall on civilian neighborhoods in Tehran. Anti-American riots choke the streets of Rome, Paris, Islamabad, Tokyo and Shanghai.

Then the commercial ends with a tagline ripped from Palin:

“McCain-Palin? Thanks, but no thanks.”

In no previous presidential election do I recall the news media telling me so early, on a daily basis, how many days are left until election day. No story seems able to omit it. I have a theory to explain this, and the key word is anxiety. No matter whom you’re for this year, there’s reason to doubt that he (and/or his running mate) is up to the job.

As a nation, we are lost in the deepest part of the forest. We can be hopeful that our guy is going to be the one who can lead us out. But I’m not totally feeling it. Part of this may be dread that we’re in so deep, no one can. But part of it is the particular choice we have here. One’s old and lacking conviction (or simply rudderless in his decision-making), and the other’s inexperienced and riding a jet-stream that consists primarily of hope. I know whom I prefer – Obama. And it’s a strong preference. I just wish I had more confidence that everything’s going to get better instead of worse under him. I should probably repeat some kind of positive affirmation to myself to make the dread go away.

One glass-half-full way to look at it is that whoever is our president next, he won’t be George Bush. Other than that, all that’s certain is that as of the night of November 4, John McCain or Barack Obama is going to be president-elect. I picture myself late on election night hearing that the winner is Obama, and I’m celebrating. I’m screaming with joy. I’m ecstatic, no question about it. But I’m also going, “Sure hope we didn’t just make a big mistake.”

With this much in the balance, it’s no wonder we’re obsessed with how many days are left. I find myself wanting to buy more time, but the calendar is inexorable. Care to see a constantly-ticking clock telling how much time remains down to the second? Click here.