Blood Jump #1: Arthouse Pain Olympics
Dispatches from the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Springsteen.
Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA and everyone striking.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump! This extended, inaugural issue features movies, books, and music that consider the suffering that artists enact and endure. Prerequisite? Probably not!
Dispatches from the Chicago Critics Film Festival. Claire Dederer’s Monsters. Springsteen. Let’s begin.
The 10th Annual Chicago Critics Film Festival
One of my great pleasures is the 12-minute walk I take between my apartment and Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. The route is sleepy by Chicago standards, canopied by dense oaks, and the historic theater marks a final bastion before the Southport Corridor devolves into brick-and-mortar product demos for podcast-ad ephemera. It’s also the home of the Chicago Critics Film Festival, which for a decade now has canalled the pillars and rallied the sleepers of capital-F Festivals like Cannes and TIFF into the second city. A busy week precluded me from seeing CCFF’s undersung heroes—I was especially bummed to miss D. Smith’s Kokomo City—but I was able to catch a few of its tentpoles.
Afire
Writing deadlines and impending environmental disasters loom with a similar menace. We have been served ample evidence of their existence and their capacity to ruin our lives; we do everything we can to act as if they are not real. Christian Petzold’s Afire lives in the nexus of these existential threats, teasing their capacity for metaphor and stretching its legs as the world burns.
Thomas Schubert plays Leon, a young writer pinioned under the weight of a subpar manuscript and his own self-importance. He craves what all writers do—time, quiet, inspiration—and so he invites his friend and budding photographer Felix (Langston Uibel) to share a summer house on the Baltic coastline while he bangs the kinks from his draft. Afire marks a loose and playful turn for Petzold, and it’s tempting to wonder whether he’s using it as an opportunity to take the piss out of his reputation as a serious auteur. Leon is a silhouette of Slavoj Žižek without his sinusy genius, a self-important grump devoted more toward looking like he’s working on something great than actually getting anything done (who among us). He wears socks and sneakers on the beach, he spills a bag of goulash as he tumbles down a sand dune. And when a booking error forces Leon and Felix to share the house with the outspoken and enigmatic Nadja (Paula Beer), you can practically smell the sitcom—or is that smoke?
Leon’s book deadline is compounded by a more material concern: a wildfire is tearing through the coast, whittling the perimeter of their rented home’s woods day by day. It’s a potent metaphor, but it also marks the boundaries of Afire’s curiosity. The movie is concerned with Leon’s narcissism and little else. It holds him at an archetype’s distance that saps him of any sense of artistic or social urgency; the tortured artist is well-trodden ground that demands an intentional approach, but Leon wields the specificity of a UCB sketch. Instead of testing the limits (or existence) of Leon’s greatness, the fire only narrows the film’s focus toward a series of recycled punchlines.
This one-note approach to suffering for/from art bleeds from Leon to affect the attention paid to his castmates. Especially frustrating is Nadja: Beer is magnetic, but she’s constricted to set dressing used to underscore Leon’s penchant for self-sabotage. Her own artistic merits are melted down to fit Leon’s convexed lens—a fine detail for a blowhard of a lead, but a disappointing outcome for the movie at large. No one in Leon’s orbit is safe from his narcissistic myopia—unfortunately, neither is the scope of their character.
I can’t help but to compare Afire to Mia Hanesn-Løve’s Bergman Island, another recent movie that pins its tortured writer to an idyllic European coast. Bergman Island benefits from a conversation with a towering body of work, sure, but it also demonstrates a careful curiosity toward process and text, one that includes—but isn’t limited to—an artist’s self-serving approach to their craft. Afire’s summer house and its immenent disaster raise compelling questions about art’s relationship to community, so it’s a shame that the film prefers to repeatedly ring the same bell than to answer them. Let it burn.
Passages
Ira Sach’s Passages offers a course correction for Afire’s limited aperture. It opens on Tomas (Franz Rogowski) as he finicks over the minutiae of a scene he’s filming for his upcoming movie. One extra isn’t holding her cup properly, another isn’t moving his arms enough as he descends a staircase. Minor details, but his fussing proves a reliable synecdoche for the limits of Tomas’s devotion to control and his powerless submission to longing.
Passages tracks Tomas as he opens a boldly modern relationship with his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), to a woman he meets at a club after finishing his movie (Agathe, played by Adéle Exarchopoulos). It’s hard to tell whether the affair accounts for a lapse or a flex of Tomas’s sense of control. “You always get like this after a movie wraps,” Martin says of Tomas’s new muse. This is not the first time Tomas has tested the boundaries of their relationship, and Martin’s patience with the fling feels less bohemian than it does a prerequisite resignation—it’s simply collateral for being with This Kind of Artist.
Tomas leads his romances with the acid and lyrical confidence that define his reputation as an artist, drawing affection from lovers with the same measured ease he might use to encourage an actor to go bigger. He is reactive, mercurial, and sometimes cruel, but backed always with a tenderness timely enough to keep his plates spinning just a little bit longer. That tenderness is rendered with precision by Sachs in concert with Passages’ remarkable feat of casting. Rogowski is singularly kinetic, and his scenes with both Wishaw and Exarchopoulos are sexy and raw enough to convince you that this burning car of a narcissist might be worth the inevitable abuse.
Where Afire circles inward to double down on the same chord, Passages crests brilliance by pulling Tomas past the limits of his control and watching as he’s unspooled by a relentlessly fed id. Both Martin and Agathe enter Passages with little history or agency, and both reveal an increasingly textured humanity the further they breach Tomas’s terms and expectations. His arrangement becomes unmanageable; Agathe introduces her parents, Martin finds a lover of his own, and you begin to feel Tomas crave the boundaries of a film set to help keep the details of his real life from bleeding beyond his reach. But Passages’ real tragedy isn’t the death of Tomas’s control—it’s that his desires keep on living.
Master Gardener
Paul Schrader’s late-career trilogy doesn’t have an official name, but it’s easy to connect the dots between each film. They’re marked by stark digital camerawork that melts at the edges of its wide angles, by violent political convictions that straddle the border between the urgent and the absurd, by severe men who write at spare desks. First Reformed, the trilogy’s first entry, wrestles with faith’s culpability for an untended climate and sits among this century’s greatest films. The Card Counter is a harsh chronicle of a bogus war’s never-ending fallout. Schrader completes the series with Master Gardener, at once as politically fraught and arresting as anything the 76-year-old director has released.
Joel Edgerton plays Narvel Roth (a three-pointer of a name), the burly horticulturist of the once-plantation-now-garden-property owned by Mrs. Haverhill (Sigourney Weaver). The garden’s history runs parallel to Narvel’s: his head-to-toe garden gear hides a body tattooed with white-supremacist insignia. We know little of Narvel’s past beyond its severity, but he’s since made good, and the garden provides a life quiet enough for Narvel to disappear under the shadow of his sins. That is, at least until he’s charged with looking after Maya (Quintessa Swindell), Mrs. Haverhill’s young, biracial niece. Early reviewers have warned that Master Gardner’s discourse will break Film Twitter; Maya’s appearance makes good on that promise.
Part of what makes Schrader’s provocations so consistently exciting is his tendency to land a series of otherwise beguiling choices in sublime territory. Narvel’s proximity to Maya blurs from caretaker to lover at the same pace at which Maya learns of Narvel’s problematic and violent history. It’s a sweaty juxtaposition that dares the thinkpiece right out of you, but—and I realize this but is doing a lot of work here—their relationship is executed with enough nuance and careful attention that I’m inclined to let it marinate. Master Gardener does not expect you to forgive Narvel for his past, nor does it excuse the queasy power dynamics of his relationship with Maya as collateral for his redemption. Like First Reformed and The Card Counter before it, Master Gardener is less concerned with whether forgiveness is earned than with how the unforgiven live out their remaining days.
Schrader’s writing career typically holds a greater share of attention than his directorial output, but he’s quietly amassed one of the more compelling filmographies among our living American directors. Master Gardener is as much of a technical achievement as it is a provocation. Its patient cinematography marks a sober return from Card Counter’s fevered experiments. Edgerton and Swindell are fantastic, and Sigourney Weaver embodies her dowager with so much vinegar that you can feel Charlotte Brontë smile from the beyond. The movie’s score comes from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, who offers a somber interpretation of Mort Garson’s floral synths. And, like the first two entries in the trilogy, Master Gardener is punctuated with an abrupt turn toward the surreal. I won’t spoil specifics, but the scene finds Schrader at his most visually compelling since Mishima.
Schrader films are notoriously uncompromising, even in their imperfections. If Master Gardener’s provocations don’t turn you away, you’ll have to brave cumbersome dialogue and jagged metaphor that can skew Brechtian or lazy, depending on your generosity. But, if you will excuse my own jagged metaphor, the rose is worth the thorns.
There’s a Monster at the End of This Book
Paul Schrader christened Master Gardener’s promotional cycle in the same fashion of the trilogy’s first two entries: with a studio-mandated sabbatical from social media. The director has a history of allowing his biography to overshadow his work; his infamous Facebook posts routinely land him in hot water, he’s been ousted from online poker games for sexist remarks, and his comments on race, sexuality, and “wokeism” often threaten to betray a history of left-leaning politics. His behavior lends a cloud of dread around each of his releases, but one that can—occasionally, perversely—make them a bit more exciting.
Schrader is neither the only nor the worst of the problematic artists whose work I consume in spite of their reputations. My relationship with the art of monstrous men doesn’t seem to adhere to any sense of political logic: I continue to seek out the films of Lars Von Trier but cannot bring myself to listen to Ryan Adams, despite both men being accused of similar misconduct. I get queasy when I remember the works of Louis CK I once loved, but I can return to Roman Polanski’s filmography without much guilt—though the latter’s crimes almost objectively outrank the former’s. A years-long and increasingly stupid culture war around the divide of art and artist has exhausted my curiosity (and, if I’m being honest, my convictions) around why I’m inclined to give one body of work a pass and condemn another. But it’s a conversation that will long outlive our collective stamina, and a tiresome series of Twitter cycles does not render the question inessential.
Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer’s full-length meditation of her 2017 essay for the Paris Review, breathes life back into the dreaded discourse through an exercise of framing. Dederer argues that our status as consumers in late capitalism’s crumbling scaffolding renders our abstinence from (or acceptance of) problematic art effectively meaningless. “Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer,” she writes. “The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.” That’s not to say that Monsters serves as a hall pass to strap on your Yeezys and blast Gary Glitter; instead, Dederer posits that our relationship with monstrous artists is more emotional than it is political.
It’s refreshing to approach an artist’s wrongdoing as a sort of betrayal. I feel so quietly stupid whenever an exposé unearths some horrible act of a musician or director or author whose work sits on my shelf. How could their character have alluded me? How could I have trusted them up until now? Why do I feel compelled to keep returning to their work, knowing what I know now?
Dederer’s answer? Love. “The question ‘what do we do with the art?’ is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: what is it to love someone awful?” Dederer writes with vulnerability of her own love for Polanski, her own feelings of betrayal in the context of his horrific sexual assaults, her own nausea when returning to—and enjoying—Knife in the Water. Like yours or mine, Dederer’s journey into the problematic is a subjective exercise that demands subjective assessment. Monsters rightly dismisses the utility of quantifying the ethics consumption, focusing instead on the pain we feel when horrible behavior stains the art that’s changed our lives.
Love’s entrance into the equation is tricky: Championing human subjectivity comes at the cost of any map or equation that might indicate which art is acceptable to consume under which circumstances, and certain readers are bound to find this deliberate avoidance of resolution frustrating. But Monsters succeeds in its admission that it hurts when art reveals its capacity for betrayal—and when we return to that art anyway.
Reckoning with The Boss
A note to all current and future Blood Jump readers: I have clinically bad taste in music. By which I don’t mean that I will adorably put “Africa” by Toto on TouchTunes after a tequila and soda. I mean that I have serious opinions about the ways Phish construct their setlists and an earnest appreciation for John Mayer.
I am a child of the evangelical 90’s, raised in a church that filtered the dregs of the satanic panic through WWJD-beaded hemp bracelets and a white-knuckled aggression toward secular media. A crunchy purity culture flavored my young preferences and lowered the bar for what counted as subversive; when I became curious enough to sneak away from Christian Contemporary Music, acts like Guster and the Dave Matthews Band were at once sonically safe departures from theology and thrilling opportunities to hear an occasional f-word. And Christian teen logic rendered the few secular acts approved by circles of churchgoing parents as dusty as old hymnals: Bruce Springsteen chief among them.
My nuclear family is an evangelical pocket of an otherwise Irish-Catholic, loud, and loving extended family that all hail from North Jersey, and the faith I was raised with and tastes I developed were at odds with the “Backstreets”-blasting cookouts and pool parties that pocked my childhood. I live across the country from my family now, and many of them have passed before their time. So when I was lucky enough to score face-value tickets to see Bruce at Wrigley Field this summer, it felt like a good chance not just to reassess his massive catalogue but to grow closer to a family I love deeply and to loosen the church’s ever-present grip on my approach to media.
I’m happy to report that something is starting to click. What I once rejected as a boilerplate approach to collective nostalgia has revealed itself as a catalogue of deep empathy for everyday suffering, for the loneliness of looking back. I’m repeatedly floored by the conviction across his early records, the way that even a four-tracked guitar on Nebraska can swell into full arena anthems. I’m taking an album-every-two-weeks chronological trip through his discography that, so far, has only gotten me through Born in the USA, so I won’t demean you with a newcomer’s hot takes or half-baked analyses. Instead, here’s a soft ranking of the albums I’ve taken in so far:
Born to Run
Nebraska
Born in the USA
Darkness at the Edge of Town
The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle
Greetings from Asbury Park
Next week: Tunnel of Love.
Sample Draws
I had the pleasure of discovering Natural Information Society, a Chicago jazz minimalist collective, when they guested with Bill Callahan at his recent show at Thalia Hall. Their new album, Since Time Is Gravity, is a deceptively laconic exercise in cosmic longing.
Robert Stinner launched his (brilliantly titled) Substack Queeriod Piece, a deep dive into queer cinema, history, and discourse, with a look at capitalism’s thumbprint on identity through Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come.
It’s about half a year old, but I loved reading Pitchfork’s interview with Weyes Blood in between her screenings of American Werewolf in London and Possession (what a world!).
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again on Monday, May 29, for the next issue.