#52: Yojimbo

(originally published Aug. 4, 2010)

1. Early in Yojimbo, there’s a scene where the wandering ronin Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), looks in horror as a dog trots by carrying a severed hand in its mouth. At first, I thought, Oh, cool, I’ve got a scene like that in my book, and then I thought, Oh, shit, I’ve got a scene like that in my book.

2. It’s been at least 5 years since I last watched Yojimbo, and I had honestly forgotten about that scene. Maybe it had implanted itself in my brain, like an earwig burrowing to lay eggs, and I sub-consciously replicated it. Or maybe I had come up with it on my own and emulated that scene by coincidence only. Having been reminded of it, however, I’m willing enough to chalk it up as an homage to Kurosawa, even if my novel lacks samurai swords flashing about in a flurry.

3. This is on my mind because of the numerous plagiarism scandals that rock the literary world, including 17 year-old Helene Hegemann, who claims the “Kathy Acker” defense, attributing her nimble-fingered lifting to post-modernity and intertextuality. Sorry to break it to you, but this only works if the two texts have a meaningful conversation with one another, which to me, means some acknowledgment of the earlier source. David Shields might disagree, but I’m not the one announcing the death of the novel.

4. As Stephen Prince points out in his commentary, Yojimbo derives from (or, if you prefer, draws upon) earlier works, most notably, Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest and Stuart Heisler’s film The Glass Key, also based on a Hammett novel. Indeed, the scene where Sanjuro receives a beating and crawls away from captivity mimics a scene from the Heisler film. One can assume, as Prince does, that Kurosawa copied Heisler on purpose (or, if you prefer, pays tribute to).

5. Yojimbo itself has also been remade: once as Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and against as Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. Kurosawa sued Leone, who denied similarities between the two films. Remember: it’s an homage only if you admit to it. Walter Hill is much more forthcoming about his appropriation (or, if you prefer, borrowing).

6. Therefore, let this serve as a public announcement: there’s a little bit of my novel which resembles a little bit of Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo, despite the differences in the context, mood and format. Any further little similarities (to Dashiell Hammett, Stuart Heisler, Sergio Leone, Walter Hill or to other films that feature a dog carrying a severed hand [including but not limited to Eurotrip and Wild at Heart]) are purely coincidental.

7. Copying or distributing this written admission without attribution or expressed consent will be considered copyright infringement.

#51: Brazil

(originally published Aug. 1, 2010)

In grad school, the de facto point man for my group of friends, Aaron, assigned us all superpowers and corresponding code names. Colin became ‘The Deconstructor,’ able to use his aporetic powers to destroy bullets by demonstrating that they’re simply texts with irreconcilable and contradictory meanings. I was ‘The Persuader,’ who could cajole almost anyone into doing his bidding.

It’s an old parlour game, of course—a chestnut amongst college students who like stretch out hypothetical questions before them like a red carpet. But for nerds, geeks and dweebs alike, the question takes on a particular resonance. A superpower isn’t merely a neat trick one—it’s a replacement for an identity.

Take the X-Men. I was reared on them. At one point, I had a subscription, and every month, I waited patiently for the mailman to deliver my copy (I was also concerned that he might fold the comic in order to fit it through the mail slot, which would irrevocably diminish its resale value; eventually I found it easier to visit a shop—plus, that way, I wouldn’t have to wait a month). And I daydreamed about—as most young comic book readers do, I imagine—about what superpower I would have.

But just one! How to choose? I was able to narrow it down to three: 1) the ability to walk through walls, à la Kitty Pryde (a manifestation of a desire not to be excluded?); 2) the ability to turn invisible (a desire to go unnoticed?); 3) the ability to fly.

Indeed, in Brazil, this third ‘superpower’ is what low-level bureaucrat Sam Lowry finds himself daydreaming of: his mechanical wings gliding through the clouds so that he can rendezvous with a diaphanous woman. It’s the desire for escape. (In the documentary What Is Brazil?, Gilliam describes how he came up with the idea of Brazil: on a visit to Port Talbot in Wales, he noticed that the sand on the beach had been blackened by years of coal shipments trundling across it on conveyor belts. He went on to imagine a man at sunset, sitting on that beach, surveying the black expanse around him as the song “Brazil” comes on the radio next to him.)

I didn’t have a dystopian, bureaucratic state-corporate apparatus from which I wanted to escape—high school in Aurora, Colorado had its drawbacks, but mistaken renditions were not a daily worry. But what high school student doesn’t dream of escaping his surroundings? Of flying above the familiar landscape towards something more exotic?

Of course, flying would have its drawbacks. How do you keep bugs out of your mouth? What about the lack of oxygen? If you’re flying fast enough, wouldn’t the air pressure keep you from breathing properly? How quickly would your arms tire of flapping? But that’s the thing about daydreaming: it arrives unencumbered by reality. It’s only when you try to bring those dreams into reality (like poor Sam Lowry) that the trouble sets in.

#50: And the Ship Sails On

(originally published July 3, 2010)

Orlando, from Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On, on the nature of cruises: “This is the funny thing about sea voyages: after a few days, you feel as if you’d been sailing forever. You feel you’ve always known your fellow voyagers.”

David Foster Wallace, from his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” on the same subject: “The promise is not that you can experience great pleasure, but that you will…. That they’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun.”

Frank Conroy, on his cruise, as quoted in “A Supposedly Fun Thing…”:  “We entered a new world, a sort of alternate reality to the one on shore.” And, when asked by Wallace why he wrote that: “I prostituted myself.”

***

Who hasn’t dreamed of dining with Astors and Guggenheims in gilt Grand Ballrooms? Dancing to the orchestra; clinking champagne glasses; chewing very, very slowly as not to distort your face while eating. I’ve suggested a gay cruises to Matthew before, but he takes one look at the brochures, fraught with glossy men who have gestated in tanning oil, and says, “Are you kidding?” I try to convince him that every cruise will feature an opera competition in the boiler room—but no dice. He suspects—probably rightly so—that we would most likely be roped off on deck somewhere, like Serbian refugees.

But cruises as a sign of class status have disappeared. But the democratization of sea voyages isn’t a bad thing, per se—it’s allowed, for instance, people like my parents to travel. And though they may be the targets of Wallace’s good-natured scorn (retired, prone to videotape and photograph every little movement), they’re still my parents.

Their first cruise they took spun them through Central America. They returned with a fist full of photographs and t-shirts for the whole family. Did I want the nautical flags under the word Panama or Panama: Puente de los Americas? I chose the former.

I looked through the pictures. The first was of a tiger.

“That was at the lunch buffet,” my mom said. “It’s made out of cheese and chocolate!”

The next was an Arcimboldo-style spread.

“All fruit!” she said. “Every breakfast, you can have all the fruit you want.”

Then came pictures of the bath towels folded into origami animals: a swan, a snake, a giraffe, a lobster, a lobster wearing my father’s glasses, my mother sitting next to a towel lobster wearing my father’s glasses.

“Never the same animal once during the whole week,” my father said.

“Where’s the Canal?” I asked. “Where are your pictures of Belize?”

My parents looked at each other and shrugged—“Did we tell you about the midnight buffet?”

#49: Nights of Cabiria

(originally published June 30, 2010)

You can’t watch Nights of Cabiria without falling in love with the title character: she’s spunky, outspoken, fiery, proud, and, at her core, eminently hopeful. She’s like a mouse encased by concrete. Giulettta Masina plays Cabiria as a female Little Tramp (as opposed to a regular tramp, I suppose), replete with a cute blonde bob and a fake fur shoulder wrap. She picks fights with stuck-up prostitutes and is spry enough to dash away from the cops when they raid.

What struck me most, however, was the community that the prostitutes had formed for themselves. Sure, they teased and tussled and got into spats, but they also organized a carpool for themselves to the Feast of the Assumption. There, as they bought candles and queued in the mass of good Catholics, they kept track of one another in the crowd, even as, one by one, they prostrated themselves before the Virgin Mary, to ask for a miracle.

I’ve known only a few prostitutes—and none in the Biblical sense. Rather, in 1998, on a trip to Vietnam, my sister and I hung out with the various bar girls and rent boys in Saigon, though, for the life of me, I can’t remember any of their names now. We saw them mainly at Apocalypse Now, open seven days a week until four in the morning or later, depending on how many people were dancing. The dance floor was almost always full: the music, a condensed overview of American pop hits from the 60s to the present. The helicopter-rotor ceiling fans barely dried the sweat coming off all those bodies.

Apocalypse Now served soft drinks without ice, conscious of tourists who didn’t trust the water, but beer was the main beverage. There was a two-tier pricing system: Vietnamese, $2; foreigners, $3. The lighting came from twenty-watt bulbs in frosted glass globes. A bloody blotch of red paint covered each globe, dripping like a war wound. The bar resembled a thatch hut, and a surfboard hung from the wall. It read: Charlie Don’t Surf.

Obviously, my sister and I weren’t the clientele for the working girls. Whenever a Westerner walked in, bar girls surrounded him in a feeding frenzy, and we’d lose sight of him among the girls clinging to his arms, following him. My sister would point and giggle with her slatternly pals, while I hung out mostly with the rail-thin, gay Vietnamese boys, all of whom, it seemed, had foreign boyfriends who sent them gifts: clothes, cologne, occasionally cash. They rarely, if ever, dated one another.

“It’s like dating your sister,” they told me.

One night, as we waited for our hotel to let us in (the doors were bolted at night, and metal grates were pulled around the premises; my sister and I had to ring a doorbell to wake the maids sleeping on the floor), she asked, “Why is it that, wherever we go, we always make friends with the fags and whores?”

I shrugged.  “Birds of a feather?”

She wasn’t pleased with my answer.

#48: Black Orpheus

(originally published June 27, 2010)

Right around the turn of the millennium, you couldn’t walk into a mid-to-high end home goods store—Anthropologie, for instance, or Pottery Barn—without being pummeled by Bebel Gilberto. Her light, summery voice became simpatico with overpriced textiles and gewgaws, and store managers piped her into the atmosphere the way some automatic bathroom air fresheners pump out blasts of lilac and freesia.

Oh, Brazil, you’ve given us so much in terms of rhythm and fruit: batucada, guarana, funk carioca, caipirinha, capoeira, açaí—not to mention naked soccer players. But I wonder if it galls to have a large part of your culture presented mostly through intermediaries. For instance, long before Bebel Gilberto exploded on the scene, I had been listening to bossa nova as filtered through Europe. It was Brazil processed by trip-hop beats—the more accessible version.

Maybe this is what’s happening in Black Orpheus:  a French director’s film about Brazil, as channeled through a Greek myth. This is the exotic made palatable—everyday is Carnaval! No one misses an opportunity to beat out a rhythm on an overturned plastic pail, people move through the streets in conga lines, and even children can play the guitar well enough to raise the sun.

A more recent criticism of Black Orpheus comes from a little-known autobiography entitled Dreams of My Father, in which the author recalls watching the film with his mother: “I suddenly realised that the depiction of the childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen, the reverse image of Conrad’s dark savages, was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white, middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life: warm, sensual, exotic, different.”

I can’t say that I disagree. As a good post-colonialist and strategic essentialist, I struggle with how Asian (particularly Vietnamese) cultures are represented in film and in literature. It gets tiring trying to assert individuality in the face of archetype and expectation. Marcel Camus has all the best intentions: vibrant colors, expressionistic lighting, enough gold lame to catch a whale, Breno Mello shirtless at every turn. But for all its beauty, Black Orpheus still seems reductionist. The favelas: they’re not so bad, if you ignore the occasional firebombings from jealous girlfriends.

So I leave it to film critic Peter Bradshaw to explain how it’s important to remember one’s own context in relation to the film. It’s a matter too, perhaps, of refusing to be satisfied with the Muzak in the atmosphere exhorting you to consume and discovering, instead, with where a more authentic beauty may reside. Consider: receiving something in a processed form may spur a person to discover its more ‘unadulterated’ forms. I graduated from the pleasant-enough Germans Mo’ Horizons to Otto, Joycé, and Celso Fonseca.  Who’s to say that being exposed to Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfá via Marcel Camus won’t lead to a full immersion in João Gilberto and Caetano Veloso via Walter Salles and Hector Babenco?  Heck, all the Portuguese I’ve learned has been from bossa nova songs. Felicidade!

#47: Insomnia

(originally published June 23, 2010)

By 1997, when Insomnia came out, I was head-deep into electronic music, and I bought the soundtrack without much caring about the movie itself. I must have come across it in one of the used record stores scattered around D.C. (Flying Saucer, DCCD, 12” Dance Records), because there’s no way I could have afforded the Norwegian import. Not on a bookseller/part-time DJ’s salary, at least.

I’ve been a fan of Geir Janssen ever since he was a part of the band Bel Canto (with ethereal chanteuse Anneli Drecker and cute, bespectacled Nils Johansen). I first discovered Bel Canto on Teletunes, with their video for “Birds of Passage,” and being a sucker for moody European synth-pop with gossamer singers, quickly tracked their first two albums which—luckily for me—were released in the US. Janssen’s solo work under the moniker Biosphere, however, was slightly more difficult to find: his first two albums were only released in Austria on the famed ambient label, Apollo.

What I knew of ambient music when I was younger was what I’d heard on Hearts of Space. I sat beside my Dad’s stereo at midnight on Saturday, my finger hovering above the ‘record’ button on the cassette deck. Even though I enjoyed it, much of what I heard struck me as hokey—like I should have been weaving dreamcatchers as I listened. I felt the same way about soundtracks, as well: stripped of their emotional context, soundtracks seemed somewhat thin.

But by the time I hit college, ambient music had taken a different place in my life. I’d outgrown industrial music (no longer angry) and mainstream dance music (overexposure from work). What I wanted—after an afternoon of shilling books and then a night of playing David Morales and Peter Rauhofer remixes—was to be transported. Out of my studio apartment, out of Dupont Circle and its lazy Susan of entertainments. When I put my CD of Insomnia into the player, I let the sound sink me deep into Norway. The music was sparse and icy: refracted piano chords, low electronic throbs. I wondered: what was happening in the film at that moment? Who were those ghostly faces on the cover? Why the tagline “No rest for the wicked”? It was a soundtrack not for any film in particular, but the one projected on the ceiling as I lie on my futon, hands behind my head.

Yesterday, on the summer solstice, I rewatched Insomnia. NPR had broadcast a story about the Midnight Sun Parade in Nome, Alaska, and I imagined the all-night (-day?) parties starting up in Scandinavia. Pagans jumping over bonfires, beaches awash with vitamin D-seekers. Sleepless Swedish detectives getting trapped in Norway and having hallucinations about their murdered partners. Upstairs, on the third floor ‘man-den,’ I reclined on the couch in the sweltering heat. The A/C blew intermittently. Matthew was out watering the garden, trying to save his plants.

I put on Ruxpin’s album Avalon and remembered why I listened to ambient music: it sets your mind adrift.  By the time “In Form of a Bird I Meet My Creator” came on, I had unmoored from the blistering Delaware summer and, amidst sunshine, slept blissfully.

#46: The Most Dangerous Game

(originally published June 17, 2010)

I got a giddy little thrill when the opening credits for The Most Dangerous Game rolled: “from the O. Henry Prize Winning Collection story by Richard Connell.” Ohmigod, I thought, that could be me. In the past several years, there’s been a small resurgence of movies adapted from short stories: In the Bedroom from the Andre Dubus’ “Killings”; Jindabyne from Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home”; The Illusionist from Steven Millhauser’s “Eisenheim the Illusionist.” When Zoetrope: All-Story accepts a story, the contract asks for both first serial rights and a one-year film option (previously, the right of first negotiation to acquire film rights). Why can’t my story (or two! three!) be adapted into a film? I’d even be willing to write sequels for as long as the franchise is profitable.

Some writers of literary fiction disdain cinematic aspirations. Why would I want to sully my artistic output with crass commercialism? they scoff. But I wonder if having a film made of your work is a dream which literary writers must harbor secretly, like an urge to kick pigeons. No one wants to admit to selling-out; no one wants to be known as the pigeon abuser.

Herein lies the other dream that writers hold deep in their hearts—less of a dream, really, and more of a dagger: I’m going to be forgotten. Richard Connell, for example, received three O. Henry awards in his lifetime, but the rest his work has mostly faded from memory. Indeed, if it weren’t for the film of The Most Dangerous Game, I might not have known of him at all.

Literary fame touches so few, remembers so few. When I look at the table of contents of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, I wonder how many of my fellow recipients will continue to work, to be lauded. All of them, I hope. But Count Zaroff is a ruthless hunter, and only a lucky few escape the island; the rest end up as preserved heads in his trophy room. The way I see it, Ha Jin, Nadine Gordimer, Paul Theroux and Junot Diaz are already on the speedboat.

It might be that I place too much stock in the idea of writing ‘for posterity.’ It also might be that the New Yorker’s list of 20 Writers Under 40 put me in the doldrums when they misspelled my name as ‘Joshua Ferris.’ But I keep going anyhow—once you’ve accepted the invitation to be the most dangerous game, you have no choice but to continue, avoiding Malay man catchers and Burmese tiger pits as necessary.

Just in case, though, I offer this memo to Hollywood executives, listing acceptable changes if you’d like to adapt my story for the screen:

· instead of regular middle school, school for ninjas.

· Vietnamese Communists to be replaced with Chinese Communists.

· add adolescent love interest and crunk dancing sequence.

· traumatic flashbacks involving carpet bombing will be shot in slow-motion.

· fewer eviscerations; more beheadings.

· post-production conversion to 3-D.

· all Asian roles can be played by white actors.

· in the end, it’s all a dream anyway.

#45: Taste of Cherry

(originally published June 16, 2010)

Abbas Kiarostami, in Taste of Cherry, follows middle-aged Mr. Badii as he drives from the heart of Tehran into hills outside of town. Tehran’s periphery seems like a wasteland—populated mainly by construction cranes, heavy-duty excavators, and a scraggly tree by which Mr. Badii has dug his own grave. He drives without a particular destination, as if driving is its own form of meditation.

The summer after high school, I worked for Mann Theaters. The chain is best known for its Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, but less well-known was the White Suburbanite Aurora Mall Theater. I ripped tickets, slung sodas and developed a lifelong antipathy to popcorn. One woman, I recall, kept asking for more and more ‘butter.’ (We weren’t supposed to call it ‘butter’—“Would you like butter-flavor on your popcorn?”) I pumped the dispenser until I reeked of grease, until my clothes became transparent from stains—and she still wanted more. She left with an inch of hot liquid in her bag, a lawsuit waiting to happen.

On nights when I had a closing shift, I left at 11:30 but didn’t go home right away. Instead, I drove to the outskirts of Aurora, curious to see where major thoroughfares ended: Alameda, Mississippi, Colfax. As I traveled, the city devolved. Sodium lights and strip malls gave way to residential neighborhoods, and from there, the clusters of houses thinned, giving way to farmland. Agricultural machinery as architecture: long arches of industrial irrigators, thick walls of vegetation.

In one scene from Taste of Cherry, Mr. Badii exits his car to watch a cement-making operation. As bulldozers push red dirt and rocks from the top of a hill into a metal grate at the bottom, dust settles onto Mr. Badii’s hair and shoulders until he looks like he’s doubled in age. I only left my car when the roads turned into gravel. You’d think that farm land would be devoid of light, but you’d be wrong: there are lights on the silos, lights on towers, lights on the occasional passing vehicle. But it wasn’t the constant glow of the city. I could see stars.

Near the end of the film, Mr. Badii stares into the stormy Iranian sky. His face is impassive, with no indication of what he’s thinking. I can’t rightly say that on those quiet summer nights before college, I knew what I was thinking either. Maybe typical teenage meditations on Life and Death. I didn’t have passengers off which I could bounce my ideas: no soldiers, no seminarians, no taxidermists. But for a moment, I, like Mr. Badii, could feel alive. The black, fresh air; the solitude; my parents’ Honda humming quietly as the engine ran itself down.

The actual end of Taste of Cherry, of course, features a ‘making of’ video embedded in the film itself as Kiarostami shoots a scene. It reminds the audience of the difference between the movies and ‘real life.’ Kiarostami speaks into a walkie-talkie, instructing a platoon of ‘soldiers’ to stop marching. The soldiers relax on the side of a hill, picking flowers, throwing dirt clods at one another. But the closest equivalent for a ‘making of’ reel in real life is, perhaps, its re-creation in writing. Look: there’s me, sitting at a keyboard, moist with June sweat, remembering another summer almost twenty years past.

#44: The Red Shoes

(originally published June 12, 2010)

My sister had a book of Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales—a gray hardcover with watercolor illustrations for each tale. I devoured them repeatedly (except for “The Snow Queen,” which seemed exceptionally long). Fairy tales, in my mind, were supposed to be short and aphoristic—and the Brothers Grimm were certainly so. Hans Christian Anderson was different, though: his tales were moody. In the film version of The Red Shoes, impresario Boris Lermontov describes the end of the titular tale as follows: “Oh, she dies.”

Well, not quite: in the version I remember, the cursed dancer begs a woodcutter to chop off her feet, and after he does, the shoes dance away with her severed feet still in them. And then she lives happily ever after. As a nun. Repenting.

Powell and Pressburger transform a cautionary tale about vanity (the girl insists on wearing her red shoes to church) into one about artistic imperatives, but, to me, “The Red Shoes” will always be about vanity. To wit: my own pair of red shoes. They weren’t ballet shoes—my ankles would crack long before first position—but a pair of Airwalks. (Nowadays, everyone wears has a pair of Day-Glo Pumas, but I bought mine over 10 years ago, when I lived in Washington, D.C.) The red had a metallic sheen, the type of color you see on a Ford Taurus to make it ‘jazzy.’ On the soles of the shoes was a design of interlocking arrows, like a dance pattern.

Those shoes were my first statement of sartorial personality. Before that, shoes were simply a vehicle to protect your feet. It was OK if they were from Payless Shoe Source and made your feet stink. It was OK if they stained your socks when they got wet, because they didn’t signify anything. All this changed, of course, when I found that first pair that I loved.

How I held myself changed; how I moved changed. The shoes were the first things my former beau, Robert, noticed about me. You walked in wearing your ruby red slippers, he’d say, recounting our meeting. I wore those shoes while I DJed: I had to be on my feet all night and sometimes danced in the booth. After my shift had ended, I moved over to Badlands, where the dancing continued. My shoes didn’t glow when the lights hit them (and they certainly didn’t have the luminous quality of three-strip Technicolor), but when the music was right, they could have been dancing me, for all I knew. One night, the DJ at Badlands grew annoyed at the requests for Madonna’s “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina” and proceeded to play the Pablo Flores mix of the song continually for 45 minutes straight. Good times.

But the more you love something, the more it falls apart. The sheen on my shoes cracked and flaked off from overuse. I staunched the damage by painting the cracks with nail polish, but it didn’t look quite right. The shoelaces, after years of mangling by DC Metro escalators, frayed. The arrows on the soles melded into one another.

No need to cut off my feet or to leap in front of a train—I knew it was time to retire the shoes.  But my feet kept dancing nonetheless.

#43: Lord of the Flies

(originally published June 9, 2010)

Reading Lord of the Flies is a high school rite of passage, one of those time-honored traumas which includes: first shower in the locker room, first kiss, first erection in public (though usually not concurrent). I, only somewhat interested in the novel, read anticipating only the inevitable test. What’s the symbolism of the downed airman? Pig head on a stick: as yummy as it sounds? Do you identify with organizer Ralph or hunter Jack?

The themes of savagery and tribalism escaped me, but I didn’t have to look far into my own history for proof of their existence. From sixth to eighth grade, I had a cabal: John W., a Chinese-American with whom I competed academically; Jason B., biracial and hyperactive with a head of curly hair; and Bill H., whom I may have had a crush on. We lunched in the North Middle School cafeteria and laughed the loud, raucous laughter that hides the insecurities and fears of adolescence. We weren’t close enough to hang out outside of school, but close enough to associate with one another, to taunt more unfortunate middle-schoolers, close enough to call each friend.

That tribe was disrupted by high school: John went on to Central, while the rest of us continued to Hinkley. I could have formed new alliances and met new friends, but I tried to cling to the old ways. We remaining three were still friendly, but it wasn’t the same. If we were stranded on a desert island, I’d certainly receive a share of roasted pig but probably wouldn’t be the first one served.

The irrevocable schism came when Josh D. transferred to Hinkley from California with surfer charm and aw-shucks tan. Bill and he bonded, an easy camaraderie that made me nostalgic for a friendship that had never existed. They shared jokes to which I wasn’t privy. They were hunters, while I was still tending to the little ones.

So I had one last joke for Bill. One day, I was in the orchestra room while Bill was practicing his cello. As he went to sit, I pulled the chair out from under him, and he fell backwards, clattering as he absorbed the brunt to protect his cello. I stood for a split-second, trying to gauge if this was funny, and the orchestra teacher told me to leave.

“Run,” she said.

A few minutes later, she called me back. Bill wasn’t in the room. Bill could have gotten seriously hurt, she said. What was I thinking? she asked. To answer, I could have shown her the scene from Lord of the Flies in which the savage boys dance around a bonfire, frenzied, and end up spearing poor Simon to death. It was The Beast, I could have said.

I avoided Bill for the rest of the year, and he transferred at the end of it.

By graduation, Josh and I had become friends. I lent him my cherished copy of Saint Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha senior year. The next year, Saint Etienne released So Tough, which samples two lines from Lord of the Flies (“Maybe he means it’s some sort of ghost.” “Maybe that’s what the beast is. A ghost.”) But by that time, I was off at college, and my previous associations and tribes had dissipated, like smoke. Josh never returned my CD.

#42: Fishing with John

(originally published June 5, 2010)

To me, fishing is one of those all-American activities in which I’ve never taken much interest. (See also: hunting, tent-pitching, fire building.) Men who fish, in my mind, are Raymond Carver archetypes: stoic, beaten-down, hard-drinking. Men who chill six-packs of beer in the river. Men who don’t stop fishing even when they find a corpse in the water.

And although the idea of fishing appeals to me—patience; sitting out in the sun; yummy, yummy fish—I can’t imagine yanking at something with a hook in its mouth. I prefer to imagine, instead, that fish, of their own accord, jump out of water, filet themselves and swim into a pan full of butter.

If anything, Fishing with John highlights the homosocial component to fishing: John Lurie asking Jim Jarmusch, “Do you want to see my penis?”; Tom Waits sticking a red snapper in his shorts; Willem Dafoe suggesting that he and John zip their sleeping bags together; the narrator announcing, “Both fishermen are covered with sores and boners.” No gay subtext here. Whatsoever.

Fishing as male bonding: on the wall of our garage (the repository for the detritus of the Dinh family) was a pegboard, and lying across the top pegs—the way one would display a samurai sword—was a red fishing rod. Whenever I got out of the car, I saw it above my head. It was something that was always there, something that would always be there, like air.

Maybe my father intended to fish more than he did, but I remember us specifically going fishing only once. I would never be a fisherman myself—my attempts at casting brought the hook perilously close to my own face—but I could at least help my father with the bait. We had jar of green-neon garlic-flavored marshmallows, a jar of cherry-red salmon eggs. I threaded them on the hook as if preparing a shish-kebob. Afterwards, my fingers smelled like a poisoner’s lunch, but I loved pulling the lead teardrop weighing the line. The whole contraption bounced like it was waving hello.

As I rinsed off the odor, minnows darted in the shallows. I tried scooping them up, but they were too quick. I splashed around until my hands turned numb in the sun-dappled water. I hopped from rock to rock, venturing as far into the river as I could without getting wet. Occasionally, the current would catch one of the pebbles at the bottom of the riverbed and send it tumbling downstream.

I decided: it wasn’t necessary to fish to enjoy the peacefulness of fishing.

In any case, my father only caught three six-inch brown trout that day. Not a rainbow among them. Nonetheless, he brought them home proudly—as any man would after providing a meal. He had prepared a whole cooler of ice for them. They lay on top like bottles of Coke.

My mother brought down the hammer on future fishing expeditions. After all, she was the one who got the privilege of gutting, cleaning and preparing them.

“It’s easier,” she said, “just to buy the fish at the supermarket.”

#41: Henry V

(originally published June 2, 2010)

About twenty minutes into watching Henry V, Matthew pulled out a Wordsworth Classics edition of the play and tried to follow along. I didn’t even know we had copy in the house. He flipped the pages of the thin paperback; there was still residue on the cover where the price sticker had once been.

“Hey,” he said. “They’ve taken stuff out.”

Yes, I told him. And not only that, but they added stuff in as well. During the death of Falstaff, we skimmed the pages to no avail. Falstaff isn’t even in the cast of characters. What? Messing with The Bard? Who in his right mind would do that? Laurence Olivier, according to Bruce Eder, trimmed approximately 1500 lines from the source material. Entire scenes have fallen away; in their place, a mounted knight duel, a flurry of arrows, a bravura tracking shot of horses going from a trot to a full gallop.

Honestly, though, Shakespeare’s histories and I—we don’t get along too well. Comedies, yes; tragedies, yes; but I’ve never found the histories that compelling. What? I hear people saying. And you teach English literature? Indeed, but I never claimed to teach all of English literature. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s sixty-plus lines recounting Henry’s lineage might be incredibly informative, but it’s also incredibly dull.

The genealogy craze has exploded in the past few years—two television shows in the last year alone—but I find it less than compelling. Being a recent immigrant to the United States (1975), the wealth of information available to others who have been here longer—church records, immigration papers, employment lists—isn’t useful. Friends of mine have made pilgrimages to small rural towns to check parish records, to thumb through yellowing, water-stained pages, to glance through stocks of microfiche to track down the various branches of their family tree.

And, in any case, listening to someone else recount his ancestry is like watching a vacation slide show: they get to relive their history, I get to live my own boredom. It’s not that I’m not curious about my roots, but that I’m willing to accept the version of history that my parents have passed down to me: I’m descended from royalty. It’s every eight year-old girl’s dream, and it’s something I accept as a matter of faith.

Despite my misgivings, I typed my name into an family tree website but got no further than my parents’ names. I realized that I didn’t know my grandparents (except for my maternal grandmother), beyond seeing their pictures on the altar in our living room and sporadically burning incense for them. I didn’t know their ‘real names’—I only knew them by the functional Vietnamese words for grandmother and grandfather: ông nội and bà nội (ông ngoại and bà ngoại for the maternal grandparents). They were a continent away and decades removed. I could piece together snapshots of them from family stories—my paternal grandmother’s fiery temper, for example—and that makes them real enough to me.

Would it be so terrible to discover, further and further back, that I’m descended from a stablehand or a rice farmer or a drunken French colonialist? Not at all. But it doesn’t help illuminate my own person, even if, as Henry V proposes, it entitles me to a nice piece of property across the sea.

#40: Armageddon

(originally published May 29, 2010)

Armageddon: the bête noire of the Criterion Collection. When I explain what the Criterion Collection is to friends who aren’t familiar with it, I rattle off the usual suspects: Kurosawa, Truffaut, Fassbinder, Hitchcock. But each and every time, I leave out Michael Bay. His name slips my mind.

The rabid fans of the Criterion Collection have conflicting feelings regarding Armageddon: more than a few think that having Michael Bay in the Collection legitimizes his brand of filmmaking: big, noisy, and hyper-masculine to a fault. Others see Bay’s presence as “guilty pleasure,” the cash cow that funds overlooked gems. But why can’t it be both?

As to where I fall on the Armageddon divide, that question has already been answered. In the summer of 1998, when it came out, I had already chosen the other “killer asteroid” movie, Deep Impact, over it. My small, reptilian brain casing only has enough room for one apocalypse at a time, and Hollywood has a penchant letting similar films compete with each other—witness 1997’s battle royale between Volcano and Dante’s Peak. This cutthroat release schedule is the entertainment-biz equivalent of Godzilla vs. King Kong. Except that no one wins.

Why I saw Deep Impact instead of Armageddon, I’m not sure. It might be that Deep Impact came out first. Or it could be my innate distrust of Bruce Willis. Or, it could simply be that I snuck into the film after watching something slightly more reputable. While I was living in Washington, D.C., I did this often: paying to see one movie and spending the entire afternoon wandering from one theater to another, taking in whatever spectacle happened to blossom after the trailers.

I try to be immune to Hollywood blockbusters, but part of their charm is their inherent ridiculousness.  Michael Bay recognizes it—on his commentary track, he explains the reason his asteroid-exploration vehicles have machine guns was because of the Mattel tie-in: trucks with guns sell better. Ben Affleck, on the same track, compares the über-patriotic scenes of Americana to a commercial for Miller Genuine Draft. So even if I groan during the ‘heartland of America’ sequences, I also duly note an increased heart rate as the Russian space station is about to explode, threatening to take the poor cosmonaut with it.  (Ben Affleck, I don’t care so much.)

With Deep Impact, all I remember is end of the world: Téa Leoni embracing her father as the mile-high tidal wave comes to consume them. 1998 was my last summer in D.C. Soon, I’d return to my parents’ house in Denver, that momentary post-collegiate freedom swallowed by economic necessity (also: an extravagant trip to Vietnam). At the time, I didn’t feel like embracing my parents in the face of the cataclysmic destruction of my God-given American lifestyle, but if I could kill a few hours wallowing in some harmless, ear-shattering blockbusters, why not? No one watches these movies pretending they approach anything to real life. Real life waits outside the theater, waiting to clobber you over the head, like the piece of asteroid the crew don’t manage to destroy.

#39: Tokyo Drifter

(originally published May 28, 2010)

If Tokyo in reality were anything like the ways it’s portrayed in Seijun Suzuki’s films, here’s what I’d expect: 1) yakuza gun battles on every street corner; 2) betraying, murderous and ultimately doomed nymphomaniacs; 3) non-stop go-go dancing teenagers; and 4) nightclub singers who only know one song.

But if that’s the image we get of Japan from watching films alone, then I dread to imagine what Japan thinks of the US based on our films. Though, really, there’s no need to imagine: in Toyko Drifter, Suzuki sets a rollicking set piece in a bar (“The Western”) frequented by American servicemen. And—true to form for a Western—there’s a mad brawl: broken bottles, abuse of innocent wooden furniture, inebriated sailors lining up to get conked on the head by gleeful bar girls. Is this how the Japanese see Americans—militaristic, drunken, boorish?

This reflexiveness is inescapable when you’re in a foreign country: how do people see me? How do I see them? How do I see myself? When I went to Vietnam in 1998, I had a run-in at a Saigon gay bar. After a round of vigorous dancing, my friends and I retreated to the second level. Below us, the gay Vietnamese gathered around the white Westerners, who were outnumbered ten to one. It reminded me of the children who came up to tourist buses, divvying up passengers, clinging to their target, selling soft drinks or knick-knacks or, if need be, begging and crying. Foreigners are encouraged to tell them đi, đi (“go, go”), but they are not easily shaken off. They have to be tenacious—it’s their livelihood.

Two Frenchmen stood somewhat apart from the dance floor. They mouthed to each other: “Lui?” “Non.” “Lui?” “Non.” They pointed out boys, casually deciding which one to take home, as if window-shopping.

As I watched, an older man in white seersucker put his arm around my shoulder.

“I very much like your dancing,” he said. His accent sounded Dutch.

“I try my best.”

He seemed surprised. “You speak English very well.”

“Thank you,” I said, but I sensed grudging anger from the other Vietnamese in their looks. The Vietnamese have word for it: liếc.  It’s dismissive and disdaining at the same time.

When my friends and I left Sam Son, we had planned to go to another bar in Lam Son Square. As we passed the fountain of algae-green water, the round, modern sculpture of a mother and child, a motorcycle rumbled behind us. I thought nothing of it, but then, someone screamed, “Stay away from my boyfriend!” and I turned in time to see a guy swinging his belt. The buckle clipped my collarbone.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, but my friends closed ranks around me and hustled me away.

“Tell him to watch out,” my assaulter said, in Vietnamese. He pointed at me. His mouth twisted, as if his words were getting tangled. “Make sure he knows,” he said, driving off.

I had a small bruise for the next few days. I can only imagine how large the bruise would have been if he had used a real Versace belt.

#38: Branded to Kill

(originally published May 25, 2010)

In an interview with Seijun Suzuki about Branded to Kill, the director explains that the No. 3 Killer’s penchant for sniffing rice was merely a statement of his Japanese identity. No subtext, no deeper meaning. It would be odd, Suzuki says, to have him salivate over a T-bone steak. But rice—that’s something every red-blooded Japanese man can get behind.

True enough, but having a rice fetish doesn’t necessarily indicate ‘Japanese.’ It could just as easily signify ‘Chinese’ or ‘Korean’ or ‘Vietnamese.’ Pick any Asian country, you’ll find rice. If the sizzling heart of the American family is the barbeque grill, then the rice cooker is the steaming heart of the Asian family.

I didn’t learn many cooking skills from my parents. Tips on defrosting and microwaving, mostly. Acceptable additives to instant ramen noodles. Most nights, my mother handled the meal preparation, so I never worried about having a hot meal. (As to what I was eating, however, this remained a point of contention in my upbringing.) My father taught me how to prepare a simple concoction of sautéed onions and hot dogs, with a sauce made from ketchup and a few shakes of Tabasco. But this was for those rare times when I was left on my own—as uncommon as it was.

But making rice—this was something I mastered early, before I was tall enough to use the stove. My parents bought rice in 50-pound increments, which we kept in the basement. The bag sat on the floor like an abandoned throw pillow. Once, I saw a kung-fu movie in which the hero strengthened his arm by thrusting into a bag of rice. He practiced every day until he could thrust all the way down to his shoulder, and at the end of the movie, during the climactic fistfight, he punched straight through his opponent, his knuckles dripping with viscera on the other side. I never achieved that level of strength, but I did manage to coat my hand with jasmine-scented dust.

I measured out rice with a dented tin cup—three scoops for the family—and I rinsed and drained it, using my hand as a sieve. I picked out pebbles, the grains that hadn’t escaped their husks. And, when I was ready, my sister taught me the secret to perfect rice: the proper amount of water—one knuckle from the top of the rice. Forget cup measurements and the markings on the side of the pot—an index finger was all you needed.

When the scent of rice drifted throughout the house, it was an olfactory announcement of dinner. My father woke up from his nap; I turned off the television. When I uncovered the rice, it sighed a plume of steam, and I stirred it with a bamboo paddle to prevent clumps. And there in the kitchen, we ate dinner: my father at the head of the table, my mother next to him, then my sister, and me at the far end, finishing every last grain.

#37: Time Bandits

(originally published May 23, 2010)

Known time bandits:

· horror movies. This falls under the ‘guilty pleasure’ category if I felt any guilt about it. Any Manichean struggle is incomplete unless it involves decapitation via machete, high-pitched screams, zombies, or fingernail-related trauma.

· cats. Please play with me. Please feed me. Please let me outside. Please rub my belly. Please lie down next to me on this bed that I have thoughtfully make comfortable by pre-kneading the cushions for you.

· vacations. Not the vacation itself, but the hours of planning beforehand. For a year now, Matthew and I have debated locales for our upcoming summer sojourn: Ireland, Poland, Scotland, Croatia, Britain. Today, the current front-runner is Portugal, but tomorrow—who knows? We briefly talked about Greece, but between the civil unrest and insolvency, I leave it to Randall, the larcenous dwarf in Time Bandits, to sum up the situation: “Stuck in Greece. Lowest standard of living in Europe.”

· student papers. It will make many more lifetimes than I have to teach everyone that therefore and however are not Superglue conjunctions to hold sentences together.

· talking about films. After watching a film, I spend at least four hours thinking deep thoughts. During that process, I draw fascinating parallels, make startling observations, ponder earth-shattering existential questions—but still end up writing about cats.

· refinery burn-off. On the way home from Philadelphia tonight, after a midnight show of The Human Centipede (see: horror movies, above), I dealt with the usual impediments in Center City: girls wearing skirts too short to sprint across the crosswalk; guys pulling up their shirts to flag down cabs, their hairless bellies sliding prematurely into the flaccid rotundity of middle age. They would have had better luck suctioning ‘Baby on Board’ signs onto their stomachs. On I-95, just past Exit 4 towards Chester, a factory burned off waste gases through a smokestack. The evening was hazy with fresh rain; the lights overhanging the highway were smeared with mist. But the fire lit the clouds behind it orange, a clear flame bright enough to make the horizon glow neon. It was trying to burn a hole right through the night, to reveal daylight on the other side. I wanted to rush home, grab my camera, and rush back, park on the shoulder, and stand on the roof of my car and take pictures. But I realized: that’s ridiculous. A waste of time. Better to leave it as a fleeting image—one impossible to capture. Merely another moment stolen out from under you—that second you take to ease your foot off the gas pedal and turn your head to watch the sky flicker with fire.

#36: The Wages of Fear

(originally published May 22, 2010)

For someone who dislikes moving, I end up doing a lot of it. For a five-year period (2003-2007), I moved every single year, schlepping my net worth across the country: Houston to Denver, Denver to Minnesota, Minnesota to Denver, and finally, Denver to Delaware (not counting a final, intra-Delaware move from Newark to Wilmington). I briefly befriended 10-foot U-Hauls, turned down the optional insurance, and went about transporting whatever crap I had accumulated during the year.

I’ve never been as efficient as Matthew at packing—he subscribes to the “no wasted space” philosophy. I don’t fold clothes to pack for a trip; they sort of just bend themselves. Matthew, with Tetris-like precision, carefully distributes weight in the truck, balancing crates full of books and CDs with mattresses and furniture as the truck sinks lower and lower onto its tires. I sit back and act exhausted.

Once I step into the cab of the truck, however, I feel a surge of energy. In that moment, I’m elevated above lesser, weakling passenger cars. I’ve got diesel-powered brute force. So if Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear seems overly masculine, I understand the impulse. It takes balls to drive a truck—the bigger, the better. Don’t believe me? Check out the scene when Yves Montand jumps out of his hammock clad only in underwear.

Thankfully, I’ve never had to contend with ravaged South American dirt roads (though parts of I-70 can be rough), and I’ve never transported anything as volatile as nitroglycerin. But, just in case, I turn up the music in the cab. It drowns out the whinnying of the engine. It gives me a certain pace at which to drive. But most importantly, it smothers the sound of things shifting behind me: the muffled crashes, the thumps of objects falling from great heights and spilling open. Items shattering and tinkling or splintering and ripping. With each move, I try (for a few hours, at least) not to become too attached to anything—an on-the-road moment of Zen.

There’s only been one moment during a move when I feared for my safety. On the Houston to Denver leg, in Southern Colorado, the wind blew as if it were shifting the desert from one side of the highway to the other. I slowed to forty miles an hour. I saw “slowed” but actually, it was as fast as I could drive. The truck strained against what felt like a hand pushing against its side. Going up hills and crests, my speed dwindled to thirty, twenty-five, and I struggled to hold the wheel steady. And while I really never believed that the truck would tip, occasionally I wondered. Against my will, the truck shunted left and right across the road, like in the final scene in The Wages of Fear. But with more abject terror and less maniacal glee. We both had things to look forward to on our respective arrivals: for Yves Montand’s Mario, a spinning and passed-out Vera Clouzot. For me: a bed, a pillow, and possibly a cat or two, in a home that I didn’t think would be temporary.

#35: Diabolique

(originally published May 20, 2010)

One drawback to watching films with a ‘shocking twist’ or a ‘shocking ending’ is that the shock only works once. I watched The Sixth Sense like it was the second coming of Jacques Tourneur, but the second time around, I thought, “This movie’s as dead as Bruce Willis’ hair follicles.”

I always hoped that Diabolique would be one of those suspense films that hold up to repeated viewings. My first time watching it, I felt tense and agitated, unbearably so, as Vera Clouzot wandered the dark hallways of her boarding school, her heart straining in her chest. Returning to the film a few years later, I waited for same dread to creep along the back of my neck. While I could admire the film’s craft—a wardrobe door opening and framing the frightened schoolmistress in its mirror—that sense of horror didn’t arrive. I know what’s coming, I thought. And then it didn’t come.

Being unable to rid myself of previous expectations or to sufficiently suspend disbelief is my own fault, but immediate reactions such as surprise and wonder are always tenuous and fleeting. They’re momentary miracles, like snow in Texas.

This past weekend, I made my second trip to New Orleans. I’d been there about 8 years before and was seduced by its bizarre charms and even more bizarre odors. Voodoo! Ghost tours! 24-hour gay bars! Above ground cemeteries! Drunken frat boys! This time around, however, I passed the voodoo shops without glancing. I pitied for the heavily-costumed ghost tour leaders, leading around their stickered charges to the next balmy location. Even the drunken revelers seemed more annoying: on Bourbon St., a frat boy slammed his shoulder into me without so much as an apology. I daresay he did it on purpose—I wonder if he later laughed with his friends about that dude he’d knocked around like a bowling pin.

I was in town for a literary conference, lured by my friend Sean, who has attended this conference for the past several years and had talked it up as a networking extravaganza. But this time, he seemed less than taken. “I basically came here,” he said, “to meet up with people I haven’t seen in a while.” He compared previous trips to this one: the ribs in the Faubourg Marigny restaurant were better last year. There were no torrential downpours. The mosquitoes seemed less blood-thirsty.

On the last night of the conference, we gathered upstairs at the Bourbon Street Pub and soaked in the cool weather—the floor-soaking rains from the morning now a moist memory. It was warm enough to wear short-sleeved shirt, and the humidity had hit breathable levels. On the balcony overlooking the street, I shielded my eyes from the sun and talked to newfound friends. I devoured the plates of Costco cream puffs that had been set out. Bourbon St. was as quiet as it ever gets, five different types of music blaring out of four different bars.

This slice of the city, this moment of contentment and calm—I won’t be able to replicate it, even if I wanted to. But the next time I’m in New Orleans, I suspect that it will return to haunt me—a dead headmistress giving a young boy back his slingshot.

#34: Andrei Rublev

(originally published May 14, 2010)

Andrei Rublev makes life in medieval Russia sure look grim. Come on, guys, how about a smile? Even the jester with his bawdy songs can’t get people to crack a grin. (Of course, said jester gets frogmarched out of the inn and his head gets knocked into a tree by some of the king’s men. But the king only cuts out half of his tongue. Why half? Because the king has a sense of humor.)

A memoir is not a history; it’s no more a recounting of ‘what really happened’ than a biopic is. And Tarkovsky admittedly takes historical liberties with Andrei Rublev. Accuracy be damned—if the themes he wants to explore don’t match the known history, then it’s better to create one’s own history.

The re-creation of history is an unconscious impulse. A silent revision. Next time, things will go different. For instance, the woman next to me (do I mention I’m on a plane? headed for New Orleans? is this part of the historical record?) continually retouches digital photographs of a young man whom I assume is her son. In the picture, he sits on stone steps, hands clasped. On his right arm is a bracelet, a ‘LIVE STRONG’ rip-off in garish pink. It dangles from his wrist like a gay manacle. With her editing software, she tries different methods of erasing the bracelet: blending, light-shading, blurring. But none of these work. It looks instead as if his wrist has been bruised and scarred.

And thus the memory is altered. If the photo shows that no bracelet, did it ever exist? If Tarkovsky insists that Andrei Rublev killed a man and then took a vow of silence as atonement, does this become the truth? If I recant this entry years later—there was no woman on the plane! I never went to New Orleans!—does the revision become the actual memory?

The woman makes a scrapbook: a different son, posing in front of trophies, holding basketballs, reclining before a lake. Her computer desktop is littered with photographs. She collages the pictures together and labels them in a curlicue font best suited for ice cream.  Brandon. Sr. 2010. Tuttle Tigers.” I don’t know if this portrait is meant for an audience wider than the living room mantle, but it’s no different, really, from what I’m doing here: accumulating my own memories, hoping that they add up to a well-lived life, a meaningful life. I just prefer a more subdued typeface.

She finishes by tilting the photographs, trying to add visual interest. Tarkovsky keeps his camera moving to create a sense of urgency and the forward push of time.  tackle movie after movie after movie and am thankful my next Tarkovsky is Solaris. We’re siblings in futility. But it is our history that we create, and ours alone.

#33: Nanook of the North

(originally published May 10, 2010)

Two words: Inuit porn.

That’s not a knock on Nanook of the North. Or pornography, for that matter. I’m admittedly a  conflicted admirer of porn—with the caveats that it be consensual and non-exploitative. (Also, it helps when the performers actually look as if they’re enjoying themselves. Nanook, for instance, stares directly into the camera, grinning as he chomps down on raw walrus meat.)

But let me explain my analogy of Nanook and porn: long before the short-attention-span-friendly fragments of disembodied body parts littering the Internet, full-length ‘adult’ videos oftentimes were preceded with the ridiculous disclaimer that the film was for education purposes. And while I’ve learned certain things from porn (for instance: how to react when the pool boy approaches, the proper way to tip the pizza delivery man, what really happens in automotive garages), the educational gloss is merely an excuse to make entertainment seem respectable.

And so, one could approach Nanook of the North as an ethnographic examination—look at how much I’ve learned about igloo construction—or as entertainment. Or even both simultaneously. Whereas most porn producers know their work is only nominally educational, Robert Flaherty did intend Nanook to be instructive. The fact it’s also entertaining speaks to its value beyond the appearance of two sets of Eskimo boobs.

My Nanook/porn association continues into Flaherty’s method. Though he’s acknowledged as a progenitor of documentary film, Flaherty filmed Nanook in a way that doesn’t necessarily fall under the category as we understand it today. Flaherty, after a previous failed attempt to make a movie of Eskimos in their natural habitat, returned to Hudson Bay to re-stage the film. So while it has the appearance of ‘real life,’ there’s an admitted artificiality to Nanook. (Its subtitle, A story of life and love in the actual Arctic, emphasizes the constructed, narrative dimension.) Compare this to subcategory of “gonzo” pornography—a form that purports to be ‘real life’ but is as artificial as, uh, the other kind.

One aspect of the film bothered me, however (and this reveals a personal squeamishness more than an inherent flaw in the film): the butchering of animals on-screen. And this comes from someone who’s watched both Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust (albeit with my fingers laced in front of my eyes during the animal-death scenes). With Nanook, the animals are pre-deceased when they’re flayed, though that doesn’t make it easier to watch. This is why I’m not a hunter. This is also why I’d classify the two Cannibal films exploitative, and Nanook not.

I admit, analogizing Nanook to the North to pornography probably reaches too far, so here, I reformulate my critique in a more family-friendly way: Nanook of the North shows man’s indomitable spirit against the forces of nature. (This, of course, could also describe my attempts to watch a midnight showing of Birdemic:  Shock and Terror, as I wandered the streets of Center City Philadelphia, dodging the ladies in short skirts and knee-high boots—blubbery seals waiting to be harpooned.)