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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
What do you think about Martin Scorsese?
"Gangs of New York" was like being in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. In a room with no windows or doors or air. Because there's no tension in a movie with extreme violence. There's no suspense. There is literally nothing that your mind is asking itself, because the only solution to every problem is violence. Your mind is so tired but you're getting a sort of psychic workout because it is like having electrodes stuck on your body and you're getting these physical reactions. But it's not engaging your mind.
So what are you loving?
I am obsessed with romance and men and women and the female principle and the male principle and how in this day and age, romance seems to have turned into something like pathology. Nobody believes in it, and yet people are falling in love all the time. And so my favorite movies are romantic movies. I'm a big fan of "Moulin Rouge." That's a movie I would defend. I think Baz Luhrmann is a romantic searching for a contemporary language for romance. And that's why it's so gothic, that movie, because we don't have a natural language for romance.
So I don't have a director anymore. It's more subject matter and view of the world. I have my pantheon of romantic movies, my female transformation plots, which I love, like "The Princess Diaries," "Miss Congeniality," "Now, Voyager." Then, you know, my pure romantic movies that are always exalting even if they're tragic, like "Doctor Zhivago," "Ryan's Daughter," "Brief Encounter" and "Bridge on the River Kwai," "Titanic." I'm a big fan of "Titanic." I think Jim Cameron is our great poet of the doomed heterosexual couple, for which "Titanic" is the ultimate metaphor. [Laughs.]
Ayn Rand wrote an essay called "The Romantic Manifesto." It's the most influential essay, for me, on aesthetics. She makes a difference between naturalism and the romantic. She defines the romantic as the recognition that human beings have a will and they have the capacity to make their own happiness. She contrasts that to naturalism, which has basically triumphed in our cultural world, in which everything is formless, you can't know anything, you can't make your own destiny, you are just prey to all these forces that you can't control. There is no such thing as human will.
I can look at "The Hours," or, say, "Far From Heaven" -- you're looking at people who can't seem to be happy, they can't seem to exert themselves, they can't even seem to say happiness is possible and they will actively work towards it. I'm not a pessimist. So I don't believe everything is darkness and shit and then you die.
Do you think that that's the worldview of classic noir, what you just said?
Absolutely. That we're the prey of these corrupt institutions. They can't be understood, they can't be combated. Essentially, it's just darkness.
Darkness with no hope?
With no hope. And your exaltation is the dark exaltation of flushing your life down the toilet for a woman. And Lord knows they wrote some sexy stuff and made some sexy movies. But I am an optimist and I believe in hope and I believe pessimism is both cause and effect when your worldview is naturalistic.
Why did you use the noir genre then?
I wanted the hard-boiled voice. But I call it "feminist noire," with an "E" on the end.
Why is the last word of the book "Doug"?
Because I have embraced my nature as a romantic. Because the most shocking thing you can be nowadays is a romantic. And that's an ambiguous ending, I hope you admit. And she starts the book dreaming about a gun and ends it on a man's name, after we've had a long soliloquy about why she doesn't love anyone and can't.
It's a message of hope.
It's the lead-in to the sequel.
