March 2018 - Ryan Collett

One of my favorite t-shirts is a dark blue one that has an all-over, stylized print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave. I’ve had it for at least 6 years and have lately only been wearing it as a running/gym shirt, which probably contributed to what cumulated in my finger ripping right through the fabric the other day. “Ripping” suggests the fabric still had a bit of toughness to it though, which it definitely did not. The thread had been worn completely thin and a huge hole opened up like a wet tissue paper tearing in half. There’s lots of Hokusai shirts out there but I’ve yet to find a decent replacement.

That’s the long way of saying I went to see a play called The Great Wave the other day at the National Theatre. Is that an earned transition? A new year of theater is kicking off and I’m already hugely satisfied with what I’ve seen. The Great Wave, so far, is my favorite. It’s about two sisters—the typical setup of bookish vs. wild child—who are torn apart by the titular great wave. One sister is swept away, leaving the other and their mother to cope with the aftermath: a whodunit police investigation and a twisting (and shockingly relevant) political scandal that unfold with a thriller’s pace. The set rotates with each changing scene. Time expands menacingly, with years ticking by from the 70s to present day.

In a way, the play is a spiritual sequel to Pachinko, which I read earlier this year. It uses intimate family bonds to tackle issues of cultural identity and global politics in a way that makes you feel completely inside of and connected to the world presented to you—as you should because, in actuality, it really is your world. It’s a brave play. The acting is astounding and even the played-straight villains have their moments of heartbreak and empathy. You see the ending coming, then you don’t, then you do, and then it doesn’t even matter and you want to see it all over again.

Then I saw another play, like, less than a week after seeing The Great Wave. I tend to go on unhealthy media binges like this (see post below where I saw Black Panther and Lady Bird in one weekend for some reason). I don’t consider myself a theater person and sometimes I’ll even say, seemingly offhandedly but usually just after seeing something, that I don’t like plays, I don’t like musicals, I don’t like tha theataaah. Yet somehow I end up seeing way too many shows not to call myself one (one in the amateur sense… not to stick my neck out too far).

The Inheritance is what I saw next. It’s another blockbuster play. It has sweeping, Angels in America ambitions and in many ways exceeds them. Its structure is ingenious and complicated: ten men stay on the stage for the length of the play, acting as a sort of collective subconscious of the modern gay man in America. They’re joined by the aged ghost of E. M. Forster, who uses his novel Howard’s End to create a narrative that interrogates the gay experience of today vs. the one of just a few decades ago. It looks back at the dangerous world in which Angels in America was conceived and asks how far we’ve come, what have we lost, what have we gained, where do we go from here, etc. It’s a two part play, of course.

It’s a credit to the writing that you never get lost in the surreality of it all. The story-within-a-story-and-then-some has clear delineations and the boys on stage are all fleshed out (emphasis on the flesh in some cases!).

I still have to go see part 2, so I can’t yet gather all of my thoughts together. Part 1 is funny, daring, and has a moving, tear-jerking, perfect finale, but it’s not without its frustrations. For a play that wants to be about a huge swath of humanity, there needed to be a female voice(es, actually). Vanessa Redgrave pops in for part 2, so I’m looking forward to where that goes. And while the methods of storytelling are innovative, the actual plot line is fairly tame, almost cliche, with kitchen table relationship drama, eviction notice drama, AIDS drama, and of course, swooning over New York. Some of the beats are lifted directly from Howard’s End and others feel cobbled together from other gay touchstones. There are shades of Rent, Angels in America, A Little Life, Dead Poets Society, and The Normal Heart. The similarities seem intentional, but not always warranted.

Comparing The Great Wave and The Inheritance is impossible, but I will say they both use up-to-the-minute contemporary life to frame their stories. However, where The Great Wave uses that to compel the plot along and keep things in context of current events, The Inheritance does something that I struggled the most with. The play stays ultra-relevant, including a scene set at a 2016 election night gathering where the stage literally begins to sink. But it starts to flounder with its commentary. At times, it’s not clear whether the play is mocking the liberal bourgeoisie or blindly engaging with it. The characters do and say things that flirt with parody and satire, but without the amount of integrity required so that the audience can clearly tell. I had a similar feeling while reading (ploughing, slowly, reluctantly) through A Little Life, which has moments of brilliant, hilarious parody… until you realise it’s not intentional.

I could go on and on, but I haven’t even seen part 2, so I have to stop myself! Maybe everything will change, who knows. I will say that The Inheritance succeeds in what it wants to feel like. It’s like a music video, in a way, where the feeling or the essence of the thing is there and the audience is clearly clued in, but the clockwork underneath isn’t exactly sensical. It knows what it wants to feel like, not necessarily what it wants to be about. Nevertheless, you instantly want to play it again when it’s over.

I saw Lady Bird and Black Panther this weekend and what a bad pairing that was! (Never thought about the very similar titles though, which has me too intrigued than necessary.) They were both great movies—a solid B+ to both (B+ being solidly above average) if I had any sense of cinema scorekeeping—but also, I haven’t thought about either one since. I would like to think about them still. I would like to have a scene or an image pop in my head and remind me of how great the show was, but there’s nothing there.

Black Panther suffers from the usual Disney/Marvel toothpaste packaging. The fact that it can rise above that inevitable flaw of corporate overlordship is a testament to how it’s the best Marvel movie to date—but it’s still a flaw that adds to its forgetability. The message of the movie, the performances, the directing, all of it was top notch and especially good for a superhero movie, but then there’s all that other fluff (the particularly well-framed Lexus, the detour to South Korea that felt like it was decided upon by a committee) that doesn’t contribute anything besides what fluff contributes, which is a strangely hollow bloating. So the actual movie is fantastic, it’s what Marvel/Disney insist on injecting into it that brings it down like all the others.

Then again, that’s just what a BLOCKBUSTER is I guess. But should it be? What would be so bad if Misney just handed the filmmaker a sack of cash without any strings attached, no sponsorships, product placements, ratings guidelines, test audiences to appease, even their incessantly Christian need to canonized everything together into a Universe™. Who cares if you need to show so-and-so doing something-or-other in this movie in order to build up to their upcoming appearance in this other movie when all it does is hamper everything else. I say, let those movies actually play with all the toys in the toy box, make a mess.

But anyway, Black Panther was good for all the reasons a movie is good and bad for all the reasons Misney has extraneously introduced into their movie-making.

But then here’s where I contradict myself because Lady Bird was practically the exact opposite from a BLOCKBUSTER and I found it equally unmemorable but for the exact opposite reasons: it was too real, too quiet, too meandering.

Can a movie be too real? Lady Bird was one of those fly-on-the-wall, slice-of-life movies like Boyhood where it commits to absolute realism and accuracy. Boyhood though, had the advent of a “gimmick” of sorts in terms of how it was filmed over the course of the main actor’s life, which made it stand apart. Lady Bird doesn’t have that, it just has its expert portrayal of reality, which makes for an all right movie—I saw myself and my family in more than one instance of the film—but still feels, again, hollow.

It reminded me of The Descendants, which is another movie committed to absolute realism and showing you exactly what this specific family goes through in exacting detail, where you walk away from the movie being impressed with everything, but eager to get away, as if you’ve been spying on someone’s life. These kinds of movies lure you in with their intimacy, but when they’re over you feel as miffed as if a stranger stopped you on the street and told you their live store, then disappeared without explanation.

Anyway. I’ve thought for a few minutes about writing a good closer that wraps all these ideas up nicely (something about how I need a movie that’s a perfect mix of Black Panther’s politics and fantasia with Lady Bird’s documentary eye) but then I remembered that uhhh, this is a blog and I can do whatever I want!