Gotham Diary:
Entitled
11 March 2015
Whilst ironing napkins yesterday, and generally tidying up the bedroom, I watched Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher. I had hoped to see it in the theatre, but upheavals intervened, so I sent for the DVD and, as soon as the movie ended, regretted not having simply rented the thing from the Video Room. (Have I heard of Netflix? Oh, yes.) When will I watch Foxcatcher again? During a DIY Bennett Miller retrospective? (I’ve got Capote; what about Moneyball?) I remember news of the true crime that inspired the new movie. It was weird — a du Pont under arrest? In the movie, it all becomes much too creepy to be merely weird. (It’s interesting, though, that Bennett Miller makes movies about real people.)
Steve Carell really deserves some sort of Academy Award. It’s not just the facial prosthesis that buries his well-known persona, which, as we know from Dan In Real Life and The Way Way Back, can be disagreeable as well as lovably goofy. The impersonation of John DuPont is full-body acting, with a special walk (nerdy but feline), a ritzy Pennsylvania accent, an entitled way of slouching in chairs, and that incredible manner of sniffing the air, as if wondering what delightful treat — or irksome frustration — the world were about to serve up next. It is clear that this John du Pont would be swept to the margins of society if it were not for his family’s wealth. He is not just spoiled, but damaged in some biological way that rarely permits its victims to survive adolescence. He ought to have been institutionalized. Instead, he was allowed to play the munificent patriot. Steve Carell captures the compleat horror of this miscarriage, and he does so very quietly, by conveying, for example, du Pont’s inability to have a true conversation with anyone. Bradley Cooper was excellent in American Sniper, and a more real-world Academy would have awarded him the best-actor Oscar. But Carell deserved it. Maybe he’ll get it next year, the way that Jeremy Irons got it for Reversal of Fortune — truly an award for his unwatchably superb portrayal of the Mantle twins, in Dead Ringers, made the year before.
Everyone else in Foxcatcher is very good — not just the three other stars, but also the actors who play du Pont’s various henchmen. Guy Boyd and Anthony Michael Hall behave with the casual but cutthroat courtliness that surrounds America’s rich and powerful; it is their deadliness that makes John du Pont possible. They keep flashing messages, never properly interpreted, to the Schultz brothers, warning them to clear out while they can. I’d have liked to see more of Sienna Miller, who, here as in American Sniper, polishes off a gift for playing the strong man’s sweetheart. I sensed early that Channing Tatum’s gift for brooding (he can make resentment look manly and even admirable, even though it never is either) would show his character an escape route, and that Mark Ruffalo’s open manner would mark him as uncomprehending fodder for a domesticated predator, but because I was confused about which brother John du Pont shot, I watched the movie somewhat quizzically. I’ll have to see it again. But when?
***
In Sunday’s Times, Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soul Craft, an appealing book from a few years back, published a complaint about inescapable advertising at airports.
Silence is now offered as a luxury good. In the business-class lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, I heard only the occasional tinkling of a spoon against china. I saw no advertisements on the walls. This silence, more than any other feature, is what makes it feel genuinely luxurious. When you step inside and the automatic doors whoosh shut behind you, the difference is nearly tactile, like slipping out of haircloth into satin. Your brow unfurrows, your neck muscles relax; after 20 minutes you no longer feel exhausted.
Outside, in the peon section, is the usual airport cacophony. Because we have allowed our attention to be monetized, if you want yours back you’re going to have to pay for it.
This is not exactly news. Luxurious precincts have long been known for their well-upholstered hush. But Crawford is right to point out that the “usual airport cacaphony” is out of hand. What bothers me is the suspicion that most people find this reassuring, as though the constant racket signified and guaranteed their safety. Whether or not that’s the case, it’s clear that nobody can afford to pay much attention to all the noise, and that is truly alarming. More and more, the public sphere punishes the attempt to pay attention. Without attention, there can be no memory, a point that I expect Kazuo Ishiguro wants to make in his new novel about a bleak and blasted world.
Consider what advertizing has done to architecture: visit Times Square. This bazaar of signs is both there and not there. It is not there because it is pointing to thousands of other places, other weathers and times of day. Indeed, it creates an alternative time of day every night. Buildings, hidden behind the signs, might look like anything, if you could see them, and indeed one remaining relic of the old days is a Beaux-Arts palace loaded with pediments and cornices. Spruced up — what one can see of it is reminiscent of a firetrap — it would be very jolly to look at. Instead, we get signs that we more or less ignore. Times Square blazes at the point where too much information becomes no information at all.
Crawford compares the proliferation of advertizing to the environmental pollution that we have learned to curb. I think it’s a little worse than that; to me, it’s more like smoking. We are more than a little complicit. Too many of us rely on television for companionship, a vice that makes genuine human interaction more difficult than it ought to be. Too many of us abuse our privacy by introducing the presence of a talking screen. If this were not the case, then we should all see the blaring spread of public advertizing for the invasion that it is.