What I Like About Surfing With Mel

is what David Foster Wallace liked about Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Replace Laura Palmer with Mel Gibson, Lynch with Lickona, "roadhouse drunks" with "Russian model" and so on, you get the picture.

"And then Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lynch's theatrical 'prequel' to the TV series, and his biggest box-office bomb since Dune, committed a much worse offense. It sought to transform Laura Palmer from dramatic object to dramatic subject. As a dead person, Laura's existence on the television show had been entirely verbal, and it was fairly easy to conceive her as a schizoid black/white construct - Good by Day, Naughty by Night, etc. But the movie, in which Ms. Sheryl Lee as Laura is on-screen more or less constantly, attempts to present this multivalent system of objectified personas - plaid-skirted coed/bare-breasted roadhouse slut/tormented exorcism-candidate/molested daughter - as an integrated and living whole: these different identities were all, the movie tried to claim, the same person. In Fire Walk with Me, Laura was no longer 'an enigma' or 'the password to an inner sanctum of horror.' She now embodied, in full view, all the Dark Secrets that on the series had been the stuff of significant glances and delicious whispers. 

This transformation of Laura from object/occasion to subject/person was actually the most morally ambitious thing a Lynch movie has ever tried to do - maybe an impossible thing, given the psychological context of the series and the fact that you had to be familiar with the series to make even marginal sense of the movie - and it required complex and contradictory and probably impossible things from Ms. Lee, who in my opinion deserved an Oscar nomination just for showing up and trying. 

The novelist Steve Erickson, in a 1992 review of Fire Walk with Me, is one of the few critics who gave any indication of even trying to understand what the movie was trying to do: 'We always knew Laura was a wild girl, the homecoming femme fatale who was crazy for cocaine and fucked roadhouse drunks less for the money than the sheer depravity of it, but the movie is finally not so much interested in the titillation of that depravity as [in] her torment, depicted in a performance by Sheryl Lee so vixenish and demonic it's hard to know whether it's terrible or a tour de force. [But not trying too terribly hard, because now watch:] Her fit of the giggles over the body of a man whose head has just been blown off might be an act of innocence or damnation [get ready]: or both." Or both? Of course both. This is what Lynch is about in this movie: both innocence and damnation; both sinned-against and sinning. Laura Palmer in Fire Walk with Me is both "good" and "bad," and yet also neither: she's complex, contradictory, real. And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this "both" shit. "Both" comes off as sloppy characterization, muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. At any rate, that's what we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves..." 
(DFW, A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)

Successfully subjectifying a man that everybody loves to hate (or did when it was relevant), is morally ambitious, and Lickona pulls it off wonderfully in his fictional story-in-script-form about the real life soured relationship between Joe Ezterhaus and Gibson during an attempt to make a movie about the Maccabean Revolt.

NAOMI is in bed, reading on her iPad: Peter Boyer's "The Jesus war," a 2003 profile of Gibson published in The New Yorker shortly before the release of The Passion of the Christ. JOE comes out of the bathroom and climbs wearily in bed beside her. 

NAOMI: Have you read this? It's amazing. Boyer got Mel to just lay it out there for everyone to see. Listen to this quote: "Imagine: There's a huge war raging, and it's over us! This is the weird thing. I don't understand it. We're a bunch of dickheads and idiots and failures and creeps. But we're called to be divine, we're called to be more than our nature would have us be. And those big realms that are warring and battling are going to manifest themselves very clearly, seemingly without reason, here - a realm that we can see. And you stick your head up and you get knocked." 

JOE: Maybe that's what happened - he got knocked in the head. 

NAOMI: Oh, shut up. I think it's amazing. It may be the first time "dickhead" has appeared in The New Yorker, and it's certainly the first time I've seen them print such a straightforward statement of faith. 

JOE: Don't tell me you're getting sweet on him. After what he pulled tonight? I'm half-ready to leave right now, except Nick thinks the house is cool and wants to go surfing. 

NAOMI: I don't know. He's sort of awful, but then, he's sort of humble about it. You haven't worked with people who were like that. 

JOE: I don't know. He really believes; I'll give him that. But I think I liked that dirty pagan Paul Verhoeven better. He thought he was so God-damned clever, but I could see him coming a mile away. This guy - it's hard to tell. 

NAOMI: I thought I was the one who was supposed to just have faith. 

INTERIOR MEL'S CHAPEL - NIGHT 

The room is dark except for the votive candles burning beneath the statue of Mary that we saw destroyed in the opening scene. It takes us a moment to realize that a figure is lying face-down on the floor in the aisle between the pews, his arms outstretched, his head pointing toward the gold tabernacle on the altar. We can hear the figure murmuring. Camera cuts to a close-up of his face in profile, forehead and nose pressed into the stone floor. It is MEL; he is praying in Latin. 

MEL: ...Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen (SWITCHES TO ENGLISH) Please don't let me fuck this up. And please give Joe whatever it is he needs. Keep his vision clear; keep his arm strong and his hand steady. Help him to work for your glory, and shield him from the maelstrom. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil... 

Gibson is portrayed as the man we know, a choleric type easily provoked to display his Babelasian strength and neuroses, but with the darker shades of a Rabelasian faith fleshed out via wrestling match with God. 

In short, Surfing With Mel is about what it means to have adult faith, highlighting, as Flannery O'Connor says, that, “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." Gibson is a man on the cross: in one sense screwed through his relationship with religion... 

FR. FUCHS: Do you know what he said his father told him? That Pope John Paul I died because a cardinal sat on his face until he suffocated. And that cardinal, naturally, was part of a liberal Jewish conspiracy to bring down the Church from within.

...and yet still trying to make it work, with his deep seated wounds and explosive habits of being. In Gibson we recognize ourselves: the numbers that have been done on us; the power and demands and difficult rewards of faith, even yet under-developed, perhaps deformed; and the grace that accompanies any proximity to God whatsoever, even a closeness mixed with violence.

Available for cheap as an Amazon Kindle Single, and in hardback for slightly more, well worth it, at Labora Editions.

Strange Blogfellows: FOC & Los Saicos

Tell me this wouldn't be perfect soundtrack closer for a modern re-telling of Good Country People:

Wild teen punks from Peru

Nihil(istic) keen hunks from Mizzou maybe

“I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things . . . One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way. And you needn’t to think you’ll catch me because Pointer ain’t really my name."

A Christmas Carol - GK Chesterton

The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast
His hair was like a star.
(O stern and cunning are the kings,
But here the true hearts are.)

The Christ-child lay on Mary's heart,
His hair was like a fire.
(O weary, weary is the world,
But here the world's desire.)

The Christ-child stood on Mary's knee,
His hair was like a crown,
And all the flowers looked up at Him,
And all the stars looked down.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Thanksgiving, Gooble Gobble!

From The Onion:

“Dear brothers and sisters, it is my deepest joy today to present the life and witness of this humble bird to the Church and welcome him to cluck and cackle among the saints in God’s Kingdom of Heaven,” Pope Francis recited in accordance with the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, invoking the name of God three times before inscribing the newly beatified bird, named St. Gobbler, in the catalogue of saints. “Like those who came before, this pure and simple bird lived a life in consecration of Christ the Lord, his gentle gobbles spreading goodness and grace throughout Applewood Farms. May this noble and dignified bird forever bear witness to the Glory of God on earth and shine light in the hearts of the faithful on this most holy day.” Vatican sources say the ceremony was far less controversial than last year’s posthumous canonization of St. Wattle, a 23-pound wild turkey who was burned alive as a heretic in 1690."

To which the communion of saints responded,

Your Face in the Depths of This Heart (Cinq Grandes Odes)

Paul Claudel

Mercy is not a lifeless gift of something we already have too much of, it is a passion like a knowledge. 
It is a discovery like the knowledge of your face in the depths of this heart which you have made. 
If all your stars are necessary to me, how much more all my brothers?
...Behold the outside world where lies our laic duty, 
Without scorn of one's fellow man, with love of one's fellow man, 
Observing the Ten Commandments better than one sees I knew how to, 
Saying my prayers morning and night and giving each person his due. 

Pope Francis embraces Vicino Riva, a man
 with a tumorous disease, at Nov. 6 Wed. audience

H/T Artur Rosman

I'll Have What I'm Having!

Oh, this is just hilarious.

That Strange Word Which Means Its Opposite

Cambridge, January 2001
by Sally Thomas

Seagulls surf the wet
Updrafts over roofs
 A hundred miles inland. 

Every weather's a weather
 Of gulls, a scream against
The bottle-blue or cloud-

 Mottled sky, the one
Constant besides rain
 Spittling the window: 

These birds who revel in being
 Blown off-course. If
They had any idea,

 That is, where they meant
To go in the first place.


 I was never a believer

In resolutions. What's resolve 
 But another word for wish? 
Ask the fisherman's wife

 How far she got on wishes. 
Would I resolve, say, to let
 A third child choose

Itself? What can I 
 Say I wish for? Just now
My two already-wished-for

 Children, resolved into flesh,
Gallop down the hall,
 Speaking in whinnies. 

I wrench the door open 
 And shout, Inside feet! 
What are inside feet? 

 They'd be justified in asking. 
We have the same feet
 Wherever we go. Instead

They say, Okay. They wait
 for the door to close. Gallop
gallop, neigh neigh. Does control

 End at conception? Or
Only our belief in it? 


 The rain's tsunami threatens

To wash the whole country
 Into its inhospitable
Hinterland, the sea. 

 We inhabit a culture of rain,
Learn to speak its commonplaces: 
 Wellieboots, waterproofs-as if

We needed to prove water's
 Existence. We think in a language
At once ours and not ours. 

 At breakfast, our son holds up
A spoon. What's the English
 Word for this? He won’t believe

That spoon could possibly be the answer. 


 Where does it come from, this desire
To shape-shift, to be, say, 

 A horse for the afternoon? 
Perhaps some memory
 Persists, of pre-life, 

Or not pre-life, but life
 Before it's named, flesh and blood, 
Yes, and also possibility. 
 Perhaps children remember 
Without knowing
 The call that makes them 

Step so fluidly out
 Of their bodies, though
They never entirely

 Leave-the body
Goes with them
 Through locked gates, 

Across snowy pastures
 Their hooves leave unprinted. 


Empty branches tap

 The leaded chapel window: 
Stainless daylight, white
 Walls, the unprompted

Revelation of the world
 Not watching us at prayer-
At the motions of prayer, our lips

 Moving over words
Which like our own names
 Begin to lose sense

When we overhear ourselves
 Whispering them-not watching
But with us, cold, 

 Immaculate, clear. 



We never imagined having 
 To say, Take your feet

Off the celery. Don't lick me. 
 The corkscrew is not a toy. 
What did we expect? 

 Amnesia, entropy
Extend their present-tense
 Mercies to our children who are

Not whatever we dreamed:  
 Vague, two-dimensional
Composites of our childhood

 Photographs. Quiet. Able
To play the piano. Sew. 
 Finish what they begin. 

Absolve us of ourselves. 


 After church, a friend
Offers her baby. She
 Drinks her coffee, grateful
For a minute, two hands free. 
 The baby snuffles, exhales

Warmly into my neck,
 And I think, Oh, 
It didn't hurt so much. 

 And other lies, as if I thought
Nothing of having hands
 Open to take the weight

Of a child who won't wake me
 From an hour's sleep. This
Can pass for a decision. 

 My translation of a word
Like goal. Or sane. 
 I could fit a travel cot

Between my bed and desk-
 Anything's possible. Or if
Impossible, still possibly worth doing. 


 Cot:  what the baby
Sleeps in. Crib:  what
 The manger becomes when surrounded

By plaster statuettes wearing painted
 Looks of reverence or weariness-never
Surprise, though you would think

 Someone might have been surprised. 


In bed, in the borrowed
 Time before the alarm,  

We hold each other, hoping 
 Maybe this time it won't 
Happen, the day will hang

 Back shyly at its own
Threshold. Even now
 The sky is paling, a white

Sliver between the curtains. 
 Eleven years married, are we
Any closer to knowing

 What we want? Our wedding
Vows told us precious
  Little. Not what to

Expect, only to cleave, 
 That strange word which means
Its opposite. I close

 My eyes. This could be
A stranger's body my hands

 Move across, mapping again
Desire's universal, alien terrain. 


 O for the wings-but where
Would I go? Where are you not? 

 All of you, husband, children, 
Calling my name, calling me
 Back from myself, back into

Myself. Erasable
 Only by death. This
Must be what it means,

 One flesh. I carry
Your voices in the pocket
 Of my ear. We speak

Of making vows, lovemaking, 
 As if such things didn't exist
Until we think. 

 And they occur to us. 


Morning wind hurls itself 
 Against the house, forces rain
In through the absence

 Of caulking. In watery daylight
Beached raindrops glint
 Like jellyfish along
The windowsill. Outside, 
 Birds are still free-falling
Like leaves across the housetops, 

 Blown away but never out of the sky.