Marwencol (2010)

Directed by Jeff Malmberg

This is a documentary about the work of Mark Hogancamp. He lives in Kingston, NY, one of those old milltowns up the river from NYC. He lives in a permanently fixed prefab trailer type home.
He makes detailed WWII type scenes with dolls in the yard outside his trailer. He does this to deal with his loneliness, which might have always been a part of his life, but is now much worse because of brain damage and emotional trauma he suffered after a vicious attack by 5 men outside a Kingston bar. Before this happened he didn’t do that type of work. He shows some old notebooks before drawings. He says he can’t draw anymore.
He works out the trauma of his attack by creating scenarios of the SS dolls attacking and torturing the doll character of himself.

He has an interesting story to tell and does. He is on camera talking a lot throughout the movie.
One might wonder though how this is all done. The documentary doesn't go into any detail. All the dolls have excellent uniforms, they have small rifle replicas, (“This is a BAR.”) even the faces seem more expressive than just Barbie, Ken, or GI Joe dolls, but maybe that is a projection of a viewer seeing them in the settings with full costumes and movie still placement setups for the photos he takes.
Where did the costumes come from? Is he making them himself? Where does he buy all this stuff?
Nevertheless it’s an interesting film. In the hate filled USA, he survived and made something of himself with reasons to go on. Good for him. 

There is a feature film with Steve Carell playing Mark Hogancamp. Mediaglut has not seen this, just the documentary, and probably won’t bother watching it either.

The Tender Bar (2021)

 Tye Sheridan is having a fine year in a very successful career. He is also in Paul Schrader’s very fine drama about the trauma of war;The Card Counter.

In this one he is the main character in a young man’s coming of age story set roughly in the last 30 years of the 20th Century. The 70s and 80s in the movie feel remote, long ago. Was it really that long ago? Part of that could be the Long Island setting. Perhaps there, in comparison to NYC, the suburban lifestyle is very concerned with a type of traditional notions about what a man is and what a woman is and what they can expect from one another. Part of this view of life is that all a young man needs to get through it all is to have another older male mentor to tell him what is what. In this JR is fortunate that he has a middle-aged uncle interested in his well being after JR and his abandoned mother, dad being mostly his DJ voice on the radio, moves into the crowded Manhasset home of the patriarch grandfather and extended family. 
Fortunately the uncle is more than a suburban bar owner and bartender. His mentoring is spot on for the lucky boy. The guy is a bookish autodidact with a closet (!) full of books, “Wanna be a writer? Read all these!”  
He eventually meets daddy with very disappointing results.
Will grow and blossom in spite of his alcohol saturated roots.
George Clooney directed this adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s memoir.
See it on Amazon Prime.

Should We Stay or Should We Go by Lionel Shriver

 This novel is a contemplation of control. Can we manage the end of life in a way to avoid the loss of the qualities that make life worth living?

Generally, people don’t love getting old. We all know that we have to die. Maybe it would be better if we could stay youthful and just drop dead at some point. Maybe it’s that getting very very old and miserable in physical and emotional health issues might just eventually make it easier to become detached from life. That might help us to personally stop holding on and for others to be less sad to see us go. There is often pain and “care” at both ends, being born and dying, coming in and leaving this existence. The physical pain of the mother is followed by a decade or more of necessary care for the child who cannot be as independent as adults can feel. There is pain, work, and ordeal involved with that mixed in with the joy and deepening attachment. Then a few decades later, if we are lucky to make it that far, there is pain and care necessary again as a person loses that cherished independence in old age. 

 In the story of this novel, a couple, he, a doctor working in the NHS (UK National Health Service) and she, a nurse, have throughout their careers seen more than enough of the miseries that can beset the elderly. They make an agreement in 1991 in their 50s to end their lives at age 80. The wife, Kay, has just gone through a decade or so of care for her father. It has been terrible. He lived in an unfortunate diapered dementia, accusing his family of being strange invaders into his home. He became a difficult person to manage and care for. He didn’t know his wife or his children. He pines for a lost love from 50 year ago, before his marriage and family. After years of this the memory of what he was is all but gone and the family has mixed emotions when this monstrosity who was once a loved dear one is finally dead. They can’t help feeling relieved and can at last rest in peace themselves. They are over the grieving loss of him. That happened while he was physically still here, but already somehow gone.

  So after this family disaster Kay is primed for Cyril’s unusual suggestion, and after all it is 30 years off. 

   Flash forward to 2020 and time to take the Seconal that Cyril has stowed away for years in the fridge. Lionel Shriver plays with various outcomes. A couple of them are futuristic science fiction. In one a drug is invented that stops and reverses aging. In another they choose cryonics with unexpected results. 

Sometimes they have good outcomes, others miserable. 

In one Kay sends a text to her daughter that alerts her to what they intend. The authorities, the cops, are called and the couple is put in an institution for the mentally ill. It is a miserable, prison-like place that they cannot escape.

   The reading of this novel was prompted by an interview with Shriver on The Writer’s Voice Podcast. She talks about experiencing the decline of her father and that she is approaching an age where aging and death become eminent realities rather than a younger person who might experience these things as more remote than likely. We all know we are going to die, but in youth it is a far off non-reality that with aging becomes much more real and just around some corner. Where a 35 year old imagined easily living into their 90s the 65 year old might not feel committed to that. Lionel Shriver is 64 years old. 

These factors prompted her contemplation which led to the novel. The main energy of the story is dependent on two related factors. Neither of which is fear of actual death. Death is always an unknown abstraction. There is fear of decline, being in continuous pain and confusion. In relation to the decline, the fear of losing control, independence; having to be dependent.
Maintenance of control, or taking control of their destiny is what has motivated the couple’s suicide pact. They are not depressed. They have a comfortable home and good lives. They fear the harsh and long decline that they have witnessed in their medical careers and are making a gamble to avoid that. They want quality, not particularly quantity. They are also aware that it is not so easy and quick to die. People who are middle-class have access to a medical system that can keep people alive long after their autonomous lively years. In fact we have to prepare legal documents to get the medical industry to STOP, to not resuscitate after certain events so to not be kept alive in a state that appears like living death. The couple knows that there might be no window of opportunity to get out quickly if they wait too long and a health disaster has already hit. 

It could be that at 64 Lionel Shriver is still too young to know what life means to an 80 year old and too youthful and ambitious to understand changes that can occur in the elderly. Perhaps that need to control is let go of along with other youthful ambitions. Rather than being concerned with becoming a burden, some elderly might drop such concerns and just be willing to let others worry about what to do with them as long as they can remain alive. Maybe this even goes on unconsciously.

  Given the high possibility of eventual dependence, can we assume that humans look at this fear and view it from the perspective of past experience? Perhaps a person’s willingness to accept dependence is based on a prior long experience with it; childhood. Therefore a memory of an unhappy childhood dependent on adults who didn’t understand, or even abusive, is transferred to the fear of returning to dependence in a situation commonly referred to as “Second Childhood” and simply not want to go there. . .AGAIN. 

The economic situation of the couple in the book is good. They own their nice comfortable home, will have reasonable pensions, and the NHS to handle the medical so they don’t really fear old age poverty. Ending up old and poor could be a factor in the interest in leaving when one can no longer work and make a “living”. This novel is not about the class war. It has the feel of a work by and for the educated white upper middle class and their fellow travelers 

In one of the scenarios that Shriver invents they are planning on the 80 and out so go through their wealth on vacations all over the world. But backing out at 80 puts them in an unnecessary financial bind in the years to come.

  Writing this report in Sept 2021, the novel has a hot off the press up-to-the-minute feel since it deals some with the March 2020 COVID lockdowns which unfortunately we are still involved with.
 

   The novel doesn’t deal with the most emotional social issue of suicide. What happens to the survivors? The couple have three grown children. One son is concerned about his inheritance. One alerts the authorities when she finds out beforehand what is about to occur. The meaning of suicide to survivors is big issue the novel avoids. After all, the dead are gone and the concerns of the survivors are all that matters after that. Maybe Shriver assumed that since they are 80 year old suicides no one would much care, “Oh they were old anyway.” “Lived a full life.”

In a social structure that doesn’t want to see death as a part of life there is a conspiracy of individual life and its preservation being all that matters. Unless the life is that of another human that suggests a threat to our life. Then they have to be eliminated at all costs even if there is considerable collateral damage that might even be ourselves. Is a major cause of war and conflict the fear of death?

There is a repetition of a particular speech of Kay’s as she gets to her 80th in each of the scenarios. She is contemplating leaving a life she never understood. She says she never knew what it was all about and what one should actually DO. Age is not bringing any wisdom other than knowing one does not know meaning and is not going to ever find out.

Methods are not looked at in the novel. The doctor has access to the Seconal. Is an overdose a non-violent death? It is not as messy and horrifying to discover like a self inflicted gunshot. It does not bring the innocent into it as stepping into a path of a train which horrifies an operator who is just doing a job. 

Is The Bartleby Method of simply, “I prefer not to.”, the more socially responsible? That would be stopping life by not consuming life, self starvation. Other life is what gives us life. We all live off one another. We only live because of consuming other life, plants and other animals. (And they all are equally precious and have their own type on consciousness.)

Is “I prefer not to!” the most moral way to go? Enough, and moving away from the table?

Should We Stay or Should We Go is a good novel of ideas and some melodramatic outcomes.

50 Lies Told to New People About BDSM by Tyler Rose

 50 Lies Told to New People About BDSM by Tyler Rose is not a why, but a how or how not book. It is also not a user manual.

The author writes that as a long time participant in these activities, she feels the need to offer a correction to myths and lies that have come from mass media popularizations of this end of sexual fetish. Namely the Fifty Shades of Grey romance novel, it’s sequels, and film adaptations that have stimulated interested novices to explore the scene and flood internet forums that serve it. (I have not read any of the books or seen the movies but I did enjoy Fifty Shades of Black, the comedy parody.)

She attempts to tell it as it is from her long experience with this type of human interaction and explains how in reality it varies from the romanticism of these mass media products which apparently present it all as very business-like, codified, and, well, romantic. What actually goes on varies a great deal based on and selected by individual tastes, intentions, desires, and boundaries. As a corrective it is 50 instances of it not being like that, but rather in reality like this.

It is a personal look, to a degree. In an introductory chapter “Who am I?”, she writes, “I'm just a very mouthy author who has been doing this d/s relationship and BDSM stuff for the last 30+ years. All of those years, I was in d/s relationships with my husbands. They were both the dominant. One lasted 13 years. The other lasted 18, ending in January of 2018. I do long term d/s relationships really well, so I have a lot to say about how to make them work.” She may have a lot to say about how to make them work but doesn’t really go into that with this book that is more about surface and ethical aspects of BDSM rather than what emotionally propels people to participate in this sort of fetish life to begin with. The “why” might have made it a more interesting read to vanilla outsiders, but that’s not what this is about. She also presents herself as switchable, sometimes a top and sometimes a bottom.

BDSM is not my fetish of choice. I don’t really understand what the attraction to it is all about, frankly it is all kind of scary, off-putting, and seems kind of group-silly to me as other communities and human activities like bikers and hyper-fandom, like Star Wars, Comic-Con, even spiritual or political cults. A search for connection with others in a way that separates into a smaller herd than the larger herd that we find ourselves lost in and maybe overwhelmed by.  A means of establishing a type of more individual identity maybe.
Apparently it feels good to those who do it. Sensually and emotionally. That is probably reason enough. Searching for a “why” in many things we have to do, particularly those things sexual, might not lead to revelation but rather repressive inaction, misjudgement of others involved, and a type of confused madness.   

Taken as it is on it’s own terms the short e-book might be helpful and as a corrective for those interested and confused by the romanticisms of mass-media products. With that in mind the book is probably successful in what it sets out to do.

Meanwhile some of us will continue to look on from afar scratching our heads and wondering what it’s all ABOUT as we try not to judge and focus on the pride we take in Our Identity Things which might be just as peculiar and inexplicable to others.  

         

The Tree of Life by Hugh Nissenson

 This unusual short novel (159 pages) is all the journal entries from 1811-1812 of Tom Keane a white man settler in northeastern Ohio. He chronicles in brief what is going on in his community. He tells us that Ohio has been a state since 1803. That’s fine for the white people, but there are still a lot of indigenous people there, where they belong.

He makes note of his business, his trade, most of these involving things he trades the whiskey from his still for (80 proof). He also relates his sex life, when he masturbates and what he thinks about when doing so. He also uses Lattiece, a freed black woman trying to get to Canada, as a whore. She has developed a taste for whiskey and he gives her a pint now and then and “fucks” her. 

He is a bit of a drunk himself. Tom is also an artist. He draws and some of his images are included in the book. Including the cover image of one of the Indians. 

He is courting a widow who is twenty years younger than him. 

John Chapman, now known as Johnny Appleseed is a friend of Tom’s and a member of their little community. Chapman is a quirky man who prostlitzes the work of Emanuel Swedenborg. He also is vegetarian and doesn’t drink. But many of the others do. Tom tells us about drunken militiamen who slaughter the Indians. 

A war begins, The War of 1812, in which the British and the Indians are in some sort of alliance. Much of the action in the book is about the brutality on both sides. The torture and the scalpings.

The reader is left with the hardship and struggle of these new state settlers and which presents a horrifying picture of the type of people, often drunk, who killed off the indigenous “savages”, took over the land, and in a very brief time made the overpopulation country that is the USA, the horrifying global military power hungry country that it is. 

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

 The first person nature of this book makes it and destroys it.

It is a pulp fiction entertainment from 1952. A novel written to sell. 

It is sensational and lurid, no doubt just right for reading boys back in the 1950s and beyond. It is the subjective story of a serial killer, so presumably an early article of pop culture’s exploitation of and fascination with serial killers which has become big business in mainstream corporate moving picture entertainments, Netflix, etc. 

Lou, the first person narrator, is a deputy in the sheriffs department of an oil boom town in west Texas. He is the son of the town doctor who is referred to but dead for a while. Lou still lives in doc daddy’s house which has the old man’s doctor’s office attached to it. 

Since it is first person and the entire story is told from his perspective. All we know is what he is able or willing to tell us. Therefore being a psycho killer and all, he is an unreliable witness and perpetrator of events. Since he is all we have the tendency is to take his story at face value. Judging by that, the story and events don’t entirely make sense. He seems to be getting away with much more bad behavior than is actually possible in a smallish city of 48,000 people. This could be off putting to a reader who wants to trust what is being told. One might judge the novel as not so good because of that. 

Ultimately it’s not a real pleasant experience reading this book. 

Hell of a Woman is a good deal better. It is first person as well, that guy is somewhat more a victim of circumstances and easier to go inside with. Both that guy and Lou are somewhat smarter, more educated or well read than the other characters. They contain a bit of arrogance and superiority because of that. 

What does the reader expect from fiction?
Entertainment, using up boring old time?
Potentially this book provides some of that.

Insight about the human condition and how to live and grow?
Maybe the reader should look elsewhere for that.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

 The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Directed & story by Bob Rafelson
Screenplay by Jacob Brackman

Atlantic City, NJ was a resort long past it’s most prosperous days in the early 1970s. In desperation of renewal casino gambling was legalized there in 1977, following that another sort of big buildup of new casino hotels, then Trump, then another downturn to present times.

One of the most interesting things about The King of Marvin Gardens is that it was shot in Atlantic City in 1972. That location shooting was quite extensive.

The cast is all star new Holywood of the day: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, with young and doomed Julia Anne Robinson, who died in an apartment fire in 1975 at age 24.

  It is the story of a couple of brothers. David (Nicholson) is a wannabe novelist who is a late night Philadelphia radio storyteller, sort of like Jean Shepherd. He has a dreamer older brother Jason (Dern). Jason is the kind of guy who is always looking for a big score. He thinks he’s a potential big business man, but actually is a small-time, petty operator with low level organized crime connections.
So Jason summons David to AC to get in on the big deal he has going on. He thinks he is going to buy an island in Hawaii and build a resort there.
He is living with two women. 40 year old Sally (Burstyn) and the younger Jessica (Robinson).
  Through the course of the story they run around and play in the off season AC while Jason tries to put together the big deal.

  The movie is mostly character study with fine performances and a lot of good old American hopefulness and dreaming in the dark.

  This is a classic New Hollywood movie, post Easy Rider. Actually it has a good deal in common with Easy Rider; a couple of young men trying to get out of the rat race by winning grandly at the American Dream. These guys don’t make out a lot better than the biker guys in Easy Rider do, but their characters are much more developed which makes it a more interesting movie to watch than Easy Rider and without all the counterculture youth music exploitation.