Sound and Meaning

A good advertisement:

By “not making a big deal” of her scar, Tina Fey has made a pretty big deal of her scar.

Some have said that the scar makes her look hotter. If you agree, you might want to read this.

An interesting (but unskillfully OCD’ed) Time Magazine article on Robinson Jeffers, when he was on the cover, April 4, 1932.

Tor House is mentioned in the article, and the fact that it was “built of sea-boulders.” Jeffers wrote a poem on the subject, which appeared in Tamar, his first book of poetry.

To the House

I am heaping the bones of the old mother
To build us a hold against the host of the air;
Granite the blood-heat of her youth
Held molten in hot darkness against the heart
Hardened to temper under the feet
Of the ocean cavalry that are maned with snow
And march from the remotest west.
This is the primitive rock, here in the wet
Quarry under the shadow of waves
Whose hollows mouthed the dawn; little house each stone
Baptized from that abysmal font
The sea and the secret earth gave bonds to affirm you.

Esmeralda: What is your name?
Butch: Butch.
Esmeralda: What does it mean?
Butch: I’m American, honey. Our names don’t mean shit.

Oh yeah?

Tell that to Nicholas Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon.

Okay, this is what I have to say about the movie Michael Clayton.

Stories of redemption, like road trip movies, are only interesting if the journey takes the characters far, far away from where they started. A road trip movie about me walking down to the corner to get my mail is not going be interesting, even if Chuck Norris ambushes me from behind the Browns’ house. A road trip about me walking to Newfoundland, however, would be interesting, even (especially?) without Chuck Norris.

Similarly, you can’t put a man who only really rates so-so on the evilness scale (and who’s trying to be a good person to boot) in the middle of a moral dilemma and expect any kind of drama. Yeah, he’s a fixer, and it’s all kind of sneaky and underhanded, but he is helping people, and he does have doubts about it. In the geography of his worth as a man, his starting point is just down the block from where he ends up when he cooperates with the police and turns down the money.

To switch metaphors, how a character changes in a story is called a character arc, and Michael Clayton’s arc seems to have been the victim of the same mistake the guys in Spinal Tap commit when they use double quotes instead of single quotes to indicate the size of the Stonehenge mockups.

Why did this happen? Because the makers of the movie wanted to make a believable movie (all of George Clooney’s movies scream “I’m sincere!” “I’m for real!”), and it’s hard to make a very evil character a) believable in and of himself and b) believable in his journey of redemption. To really wow the audience, Michael Clayton should have
gone from psychopath to saint (which is why a biopic of St. Augustine would make a great movie – think of all the free publicity the picketing nuns would generate!).

In contrast to Michael Clayton, a rare example of a believable and very ambitious character arc is the movie The Devil Wears Prada, which I saw by accident (obviously), and really enjoyed. The main character believably becomes the opposite of what she was at the beginning of the story (losing the vapid, anime-eyed boyfriend along the way). It’s
not common for a movie to move a character such distances.

So, that’s why Michael Clayton was quietly ignored at the Oscars, except for the supporting actress nod, which I think was more an aknowledgment on the part of the academy of the lengths the actress had to go to in order to imbue at least one aspect of the movie with some kind of drama. She overacted the hell out of the part (a woman
that agitated would have either quit or suffered a nervous breakdown long before), but good for her. Watching her shiver and shake was the best part of the movie.