Category: Uncategorized (Page 488 of 1102)

 

‘There’s probably never been a more serious book about the giggles than Nathalie Sarraute’s Do You Hear Them?, first published in 1972 and newly re-released in English. The sounds start off lovely enough: “Fresh laughter. Carefree laughter. Silvery laughter. Tiny bells. Tiny drops. Fountains. Gentle water-falls. Twittering of birds…” and “clear, limpid laughter… living water, springs, little brooks running through flowering meadows.” But there are also “long peals of laughter like thin lashes that sting and coil up”; “idiotic titters”; and “sharp peals” that “permeate every recess.”

‘That last phrase should be remembered, for it well represents the author’s narrative treatment throughout this work. Considered a key member of the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, movement, Sarraute (1900-1999) spoke and wrote clearly about her strategies of narrative recess-permeation; in a forward to Tropisms, her first of 17 books, she described her authorial focus as those “inner moments” that “slip through us in the frontiers of consciousness in the form of indefinable, extremely rapid sensations.”

‘Here those sensations are given life through sound. Do you hear them, the title asks? Do you hear those children giggling? The question comes from the children’s father, who sits a floor below with an old friend, attempting to meditate on a recently acquired work of pre-Columbian art, a heavy, puma-like animal of rough stone that “would deserve to figure in a museum.” The father is insulted, intellectually derailed, infuriated at these children of his—these “overfed babies” with access to the best cultural education but who “[turn] up their noses at art treasures” for the comfort of comics and television. Here’s one remarkable passage, delivered with the dizzy poetics on which the whole novel floats:

Alone now, leaning toward each other, the two friends turn in every direction the stone set before them on the low table… the two misers tenderly stroke this precious chest, this casket in which there has been deposited, in which is locked up for safekeeping, preserved for all time, something that calms them, reassures them, ensures them security… Something permanent, immutable… An obstacle set on the path of time, a motionless center around which time, arrested, is revolving, forming circles… They hold on to that, seaweed, swaying grasses clinging to the cliff…

‘The most intriguing thing about Do You Hear Them? may be that Sarraute has taken one simple scene—a father’s object fetishization, his children’s in-character childishness, the resulting conflict—and fashioned something wonderfully strange and complex. Very little else happens in the novel except this single scene, played again and again from different angles and with different colorizations and through different voices, the author handling, flipping and turning the story like a Rubik’s Cube. (This novel, intent on showing multiple sides in something of a single view, does in fact seem Cubist.)

‘Thus the reader is given revolving points of view, so that the book’s anger and its sympathies are continually shifting among the characters. When the father marches upstairs, for instance, we are told that the children are “going to stop, cower in corners, scared to death, startled nymphs caught unawares by a satyr, little pigs dancing when all of a sudden, howling, his great teeth bared, in comes the big bad wolf.” But through another lens these cowerers hold the power—”One single invisible ray emitted by them can turn this heavy stone into a hollow, flabby thing,” and to counter the father’s fuming stair-march we’re given this startlingly poetic image: “they felt clinging to them the threads they make him secrete, that slaver with which he tries to envelop them, the slender lasso that he throws at them from behind… and they stiffened, they withdrew violently, they went upstairs, dragging him behind them, giving him hard knocks, his head bumping against the steps…”

‘Sarraute’s elliptical prose can be exhausting and frustrating, but it will ultimately reward the reader who can keep time with the book’s unusual rhythm and accept its plotlessness. The ideas and emotions the author casts a fog over—matters of taste, childhood fear, disdain for the next generation’s future—remain surprisingly intact when the strange novel is over; the fog clears, and the reader sees more clearly the characters Sarraute has created. While the book includes some simple, declarative statements—”They hold art in contempt,” says the father; “He holds a stopwatch on all our gestures,” says one of the children—the reader senses that the richness of the book is in its faint, poetic, quickly passing passages, such as: “I believe that it’s time… They rise… and inside him something breaks off and falls…”

‘The author’s commitment to locating these “inner moments” feels, in the end, worth the labor of both writer and reader. The moments may have slipped through the consciousness of Sarraute’s characters, but they have not slipped through hers, nor ours.’ — Stephen Schenkenberg, rain taxi

 

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Further

‘Do You Hear Them?’ @ goodreads
‘Do You Hear Them?’ @ Winston’s Dad
A Variation on Conversation in Nathalie Sarraute’s Do You Hear Them?
The Voice of Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt
A Conversation With Nathalie Sarraute
Painting Nathalie Sarraute
Claude Sarraute: A Disobedient Daughter
Nathalie Sarraute: Between Genders and Genres
Desire in Language: Nathalie Sarraute’s Theatre of Interpellation
Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115
Download ‘Do You Hear Them?’ @ zLibrary
Buy ‘Do You Hear Them?’

 

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Extras

Le Nouveau Roman et Nathalie Sarraute

Tombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence

Nathalie Sarraute “Le texte est toujours entre la vie et la mort”

Radioscopie : Nathalie Sarraute (1989)

INVITEE : SARRAUTE

 

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Interview
from Exquisite Corpse

 

In your books you have a very fine ear, for the interior voices as well as for the development of the text. Another domain of listening, of course, is music. Do you listen much to music?

I like music a lot, almost too much. Sometimes so much even that it gives me a sort of feeling of anguish. But I haven’t listened a lot, partly because of that. It’s quite curious, the effect it has on me. And precisely in the works I prefer, it’s a sort of anguish that I never have from painting, which always gives me a feeling of eternity, security, peace. Of immobility. I love painting a great deal. Music at times reaches something that is almost superhuman, divine. One listens to Mozart and says, It’s not possible that a human being did that.

Were you ever tempted to write another sort of literature, such as the fantastic?

Not at all. Because each instant of the real world is so fantastic in itself, with all that’s happening inside it, that it’s all I want.

At the time of your first book, Tropisms, what was your rapport with the literary world?

I didn’t know anyone, not a single writer. I didn’t meet Sartre until the war. After the Liberation, he wrote the preface for my first novel, Portrait of a Man Unknown (1947).

How did you arrive at the form of those first short texts?

The first one came out just as it is in the book. I felt it like that. Some of the others I worked on a lot.

And why did you choose the name Tropisms?

It was a term that was in the air, it came from the sciences, from biology, botany. I thought it fit the interior movement that I wanted to show. So when I had to come up with a title in order to show it to publishers, I took that.

How did you know what they were at the time, these tropisms? How did you know when you’d found one?

I didn’t always know, I might discover it in the writing. I didn’t try to define them, they just came out like that.

The tropisms often seem to work through a poetic sensibility.

I’ve always thought that there is no border, no separation, between poetry and prose. Michaux, is he prose or poetry? Or Francis Ponge? It’s written in prose, and yet it’s poetry, because it’s the sensation that is carried across by way of the language.

With the tropisms, did you feel that it was fiction? Did you wonder what to call it?

I didn’t ask myself such questions, really. I knew it seemed impossible to me to write in the traditional forms. They seemed to have no access to what we experienced. If we enclosed that in characters, personalities, a plot, we were overlooking everything that our senses were perceiving, which is what interested me. One had to take hold of the instant, by enlarging it, developing it. That’s what I tried to do in Tropisms.

Did you sense at the time that was the direction your work would go?

I felt that a path was opening before me, and which excited me. As if I’d found my own terrain, upon which I could move forward, where no one had gone prior to me. Where I was in charge.

Were you already wondering how to use that in other contexts such as a novel?

Not at all. I thought only of writing short texts like that. I couldn’t imagine it possible to write a long novel. And after, it was so difficult finding these texts, each time it was like starting a new book all over again, that I told myself perhaps it would be interesting to take two semblances of characters who were entirely commonplace as in Balzac, a miser and his daughter, and to show all these tropisms that develop inside of them. That’s how I wrote Portrait of a Man Unknown.

In effect, one could say that all or most tropisms we might find in people could also be found in a single person.

Absolutely. I’m convinced that everyone has it all in himself, at that level. On the exterior level of action, I don’t for a minute think that Hitler is like Joan of Arc. But I think that at that deep level of tropisms, Hitler or Stalin must have experienced the same tropisms as anyone else.

The tropisms would seem to enter the domain of the social sciences as well.

Yes. I’ve become more accessible, besides. It used to be entirely closed to people. For a long time people didn’t get inside there, they couldn’t manage to really penetrate these books.

Why do you think that is?

Because it’s difficult. Because I plunge in directly, without giving any reference points. One doesn’t know where one is, nor who is who. I speak right away of the essential things, and that’s very difficult. In addition, people have the habit of looking for the framework of the traditional novel—characters, plots—and they don’t find any, they’re lost.

That brings up the question of how to read these books. You do without plot, for example.

There is a plot, if you like, but it’s not the usual plot. It is the plot made up of these movements between human beings. If one takes an interest in what I do, one follows a sort of movement of dramatic actions which takes place at the level of the tropisms and of the dialogue. It’s a different dramatic action than that of the traditional novel.

You’ve said that you prefer a relatively continuous reading of your books. But all reading is a somewhat fragmentary experience. With a traditional novel, when one picks it up again to continue reading, there are the characters and the plot to situate oneself, where one left off. In your books, do you see other ways of keeping track of where one was?

I don’t know. I don’t know how one reads it. I can’t put myself in the reader’s place, to know what he’s looking for, what he sees. I have no idea. I never think of him when I’m writing. Otherwise, I’d be writing things that suit him and please him. And for years he didn’t like it, he wasn’t interested.

Even after several books you weren’t discouraged?

No, not at all. I was always supported, all the same, from the start. With Portrait of a Man Unknown, I was supported by Sartre. At the time, Sartre was the only person who was doing something about literature, he had a review. My husband as well was tremendously supportive, from the very start. He was a marvelous reader for me, he always encouraged me a great deal. That was a lot. It suffices to have one reader, who realizes what you want to do. So, it was a great solitude, if you like, but deep down inside it wasn’t solitude. Sartre was impassioned by Portrait of a Man Unknown. So, that was very encouraging. Then when Martereau (1953) was done, Marcel Arland was very excited and had it published with Gallimard. He was editing the Nouvelle Revue Française at the time. I always had a few enthusiastic readers. When Tropisms came out, I received an enthusiastic letter from Max Jacob, who at the time was very admired as a poet. I can’t say it was a total solitude.

Did Sartre or others try to claim you as an existentialist?

No, not at all. He had published the beginning of Portrait of a Man Unknown in his review, Les Temps Modernes, and then he wrote the preface because he wanted to. And he told me, “Above all, they shouldn’t think it’s a novel that was influenced by existentialism.” Which couldn’t be the case, because Tropisms came out almost the same time as Nausea.

It was rather another existentialism.

He was entirely conscious of that. And very honestly he said, “It is existence itself.”

You’ve said that it was during your law studies that you became attracted to the spoken language, which became your written language in effect. How did that opening come about?

When I was working in law I didn’t practice much, but I prepared probate conferences, which were literary; one said them, it’s a spoken style. I’d worked those conferences a lot, they went well. And so, I think that tore me away from the written language, which I’d always been subjected to since childhood by the very strict French homework. It gave me a kind of impetus toward the freer language, which is spoken French. It did play some role.

The language seems lighter, there’s a greater facility in the flow of the writing.

That facility demands an enormous amount of work. What a job!

Did you look for models elsewhere?

No, I never thought of comparisons. They were things that I felt spontaneously, really. It wasn’t taken from literature but from life rather.

Do you imagine other ways of writing about the tropisms?

No, because for me form and content are inseparable. So, that would be something else. If the form is different, it will be another sensation. And for this genre of sensation, it’s the only form.

Do you feel there are other writers who have found certain lessons in the domain of tropisms?

I don’t feel I have any imitators. I think it’s a domain that is too much my own.

Would it be possible to use the tropisms in a more traditional novel?

I don’t see how. What interest would there be? Because in a more traditional novel, one shows characters, with personality traits, while the tropisms are entirely minute things that take place in a few instants inside of anybody at all. What could that bring to the description of a character? On the contrary.

As if at the moment of the tropisms, the character vanishes.

He disintegrates, before the extraordinary complexity of the tropisms inside of him.

Which is what happens in Martereau.

Martereau disintegrates. And in Portrait of a Man Unknown, the old man, the father, becomes so complex that the one who’s looking to see inside of him abandons his quest, and at that moment we end up with a character out of the traditional novel, who ruins everything. In Martereau, it’s the character out of the traditional novel who disintegrates at the end.

Yet in The Planetarium (1959), it seems that more than ever you’re using traditional characters.

On purpose. Since they are semblances, it’s called The Planetarium, and is made up of false stars, in imitation of the real sky. We are always for each other a star, like those we see in a planetarium, diminished, reduced. So, they see each other as characters, but behind these characters that they see, that they name, there is the whole infinite world of the tropisms, which I tried to show in there.

Considering the interior nature of your writing, has it sometimes been difficult to remain at such depths?

No, what is difficult is being on the surface. One gets bored there. There are a lot of great and admirable models who block your way. And once I rise to the surface, to do something on the surface, it’s easy, but it’s very tedious and disappointing.

 

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Book

Nathalie Sarraute Do You Hear Them?
‎Dalkey Archive Press

‘The setting of Nathalie Sarraute’s Do You Hear Them? is a dinner conversation between a father and his old friend about a recently acquired pre-Columbian statue. As they discuss the merits of the piece and art in general, the father hears his children upstairs giggling. This childish mirth is barbaric and devastating to the father, for in their laughter he hears them mocking his “old-fashioned” viewpoint and the energy he wastes by collecting lifeless objects. In his mind, they have no respect for what has been of greatest importance in his life.’ — Dalkey Archive Press

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. Thank you for the X card! Saw it on FB. It cemented the holidays in my … heart. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, yes, that MK cover is very nice. I’m actually having a coffee with Frieze’s editor this weekend unless the sudden travel restrictions against UK people blockades him in London. Point is, I’m hoping he’ll bring me the issue. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘ISAW’, yes, I agree. Lili Taylor used to be the queen of the indies. I wonder what happened. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, fuck knows if those funders stepped back. Getting a straight answer from our producer is like looking for a vegan McDonalds at the bottom of the ocean. I either have to see ‘Crowd’ tonight or tomorrow, or I lose out. I’m trying to figure out how and when this morning. I liked ‘Detransition, Baby’ too. Big, excellent surprise, that book. How does reverse psychology work? I mean, if you nickname someone who’s skinny Fat Joe, does that make him put special effort into staying thin so his name will be incongruous, or does it make him think, ‘That’s my name, so I guess I should grow into it?’ Enjoy your Anita time today! Love in the form of a 3D scanning device that looks really charismatic like a magic wand, G. ** Tosh Berman, I am in agreement with you, sir! ** geymm, Hi. Ah, I see. My impression is that quite a few blog viewers do that with the escorts and especially the slaves posts. I think I’m like the opposite, which is just as odd, I guess. Whatever works, whatever feeds you. IOW, no, you don’t sound completely nuts to possibly completely nuts me. I didn’t watch the ‘Kevin’ film last night, no. I thought I should keep watching ‘Get Back’ because I kind of stalled out on it, so my plan was to watch it then ‘Kevin’, but I forgot how long those ‘GB’ episodes are, and suddenly my night was over. Soon, though. I wish Ezra Miller hadn’t turned into a celebrity/Marvel franchise actor, but he’s still youngish. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. I didn’t think ‘American Psycho’ seemed like that when it came out. I was pretty on board with it. I should rewatch it too and see how it suits today. I haven’t noticed any supply issues here or heard that there are any. Things are getting worse here, for sure, but so far there’s just new travel restrictions and the necessity of getting a booster shot or getting your vax pass taken away, which would be hell. ** Brian, Hey, Brian. It is definitely pleasant to allow an emo farm to wander about in one’s imagination. And, hey, we don’t know 100% that it’s not real. Maybe I should check google street view for the Manchester area. Good news about your easy booster experience. Mine’s locked down for January 5th, the soonest available. Now that it’s a requirement here, the websites are crashing from the hordes of desperate booster seekers. You’re almost making we want to watch ‘West Side Story’, so maybe I will, least on my next long plane flight. The mesh of Spielberg/Kubrick in ‘A.I.’ is kind of quite interesting. Of course Spielberg had to turn the ending into a sentimental thing, but there are stretches where his dedication to trying to be Kubrickian are curious and successful even to some degree. Bye bye final! Congrats, sir! I like your slate, of course, and honored by my part in it. Me, I have work to do on the new Gisele piece and arranging the little Xmas Buche-ette feast with friends for Sunday. And like that there. Breathe deep and easy all day long. ** Bill, Hi. Her work is very uneven, imo. ‘ISAW’ is quite good. Yeah, see, I’m totally into the idea of immortality. For me. Well, and for select friends who are similarly inclined. Or at least another hundred years or so. So much to do! Huh, I’ll look into that Tsai Ming-Liang. Hey, I’m riveted by ‘Get Back’ which is nothing but nothing much going on. ** Right. I haven’t spotlight the great Nathalie Sarraute in a while, so I’ve done so. Back when I was on my marathon Nouveau Roman reading kick in the 80s, the novel I’ve spotlit today was her most fascinating, and, at the same time, most vexing one to me. Hot combo, if you like that sort of thing. See you tomorrow.

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Her profile

‘Mary Harron speaks about Charles Manson with the detached empathy of a psychiatrist. In discussions with Matt Smith, who transforms wildly from the Prince Philip we know and love to hate on “The Crown” into the famed cult leader in “Charlie Says,” Harron’s new film, the director emphasized Manson’s tough upbringing. Manson was institutionalized from a young age, having “grown up in prison” from the age of 12. He was raped and beaten up due to the fact that he was “small and weedy.” Her insights about him are intensely precise, displaying an almost intimate knowledge of this larger than life figure’s innermost psyche.

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

‘“[Manson] learned to survive by manipulating others,” said Harron. “He was, in some ways, completely feral. He was animal in his instincts, because he’d grown up, for the vast majority of his life, in a place of danger. And so, like a wild animal, he was completely focused on, “Can I fuck it? Can I kill it? Fuck, kill, or fear. Fear or flight. Are they prey, or are they predator?’”

American Psycho (2000)

‘It’s this unsentimental empathy that makes Harron’s films so compelling, that make her the definitive psychopath auteur. She brought the same unique insights to Patrick Bateman when working on 1999’s “American Psycho,” her best-known film.

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

‘From watching her films, it’s easy to conclude that Harron has always had a thing for psychopaths, though good luck getting her to admit that. Her first feature, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” dramatizes the story of radical feminist writer Valerie Solanas, most famous for writing “SCUM Manifesto” and — you guessed it — shooting Andy Warhol. Produced by Christine Vachon and Tom Kalin, the film stars Martha Plimpton; Steven Dorff as Warhol muse Candy Darling; and Lili Taylor as Solanas in a career-making role (Harron has a knack for those). After its Cannes premiere in 1996, “I Shot Andy Warhol” became a classic of the New Queer Cinema.

The Moth Diaries (2012)

‘Incidentally, “I Shot Andy Warhol” was released the same year as Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat,” which also featured Warhol as a character, played by David Bowie. “Charlie Says” is coming out in the large shadow of Quentin Tarantino’s Manson film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Harron chalks the unfortunate timing up to how long movies take to make, rather than claiming any foresight of the zeitgeist. (Guinevere Turner, Harron’s co-writer on “American Psycho,” had been working on the “Charlie Says” script since 2015). There was no thought to timing “Charlie Says” to the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders, coming up this summer; that’s just a coincidence.

Anna Nicole (2013)

‘“There’s other reasons for it; [it’s] kind of an apocalyptic time now. I think there are parallels with the ’60s. I think there’s a big culture war, but it’s really the same culture war that opened up in the ’60s, I think, that we’re still dealing with, and there’s certainly divisions that way,” she said. Harron added that she’d been reading Alan Moore’s graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, “From Hell,” which got her thinking about the cultural fascination with serial killers.

Charlie Says (2018)

‘“I think it’s a bit of motiveless evil. I think there’s a nightmare quality to it, the nightmare that we all carry, even as children, the nightmare of fairy tales, also, that you’re safe in your castle and someone will come and attack you, or steal you away, or do harm to you.”

Daliland (2022)

‘Might there also be parallels with a certain egomaniacal cult-like figure occupying the White House? ‘“There is obviously a connection, because, I mean, we’re at a time of different cults. There’s a number of cults. ISIS is a cult. In terms of connection with [Donald] Trump, Trump is a narcissistic leader with no empathy, with a sort of brilliance for bullying, and for sensing weakness, and for manipulation, and seems to have no core, real motive, apart from domination and wanting attention. That’s a parallel.”’ — Jude Dry

____
Her basics

Mary Harron/IMDb
Mary Harron/Wikipedia
Mary Harron/Rotten Tomatoes
Mary Harron/MUBI
Mary Harron/Letterboxd
Mary Harron/Rock’s Backpages
Mary Harron/Twitter

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Posters for her American Psycho

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She talks on video

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She talks in print

It’s the 20th anniversary of American Psycho, as I’m sure you’re aware.
Yes, I am aware. I’ll try to say something interesting about it.

Do you feel burnt out talking about it?
A little bit. But I also have to be grateful for it. It’s sort of like hitting the lottery, if you make a film that has some cultural significance outside of being a film, that somehow people will take an interest in it and you’re not quite sure why. It’s bizarre.

What do you make of the interest?
This is true of a lot of what I do: The films come out and they get very mixed reviews. American Psycho — I remember the New York Post describing it as the biggest bomb of Sundance — although there was a lot of interest in it at Sundance, where it premiered. There were people lining up around the block. And then the audience sat there in stunned silence.

Did anyone laugh?
No. Except for our little group. I was there and Christian [Bale] was there and Andy Marcus, the editor. We were the only people laughing in the theater. And now I think people know to laugh. People know that a lot of it is satirical.

It’s interesting because I think it was ahead of its time, and all of these trends have become so important in the years since it came out: our obsession with male anti-heroes and toxic masculinity.
Yeah, it’s very interesting. I love Joker. I was on the jury at Venice [Film Festival], the jury that awarded it the [2019 Golden Lion] prize. And I was amazed at the reviews of Joker.

Why did you like it?
Apart from that it was a brilliant piece of filmmaking, I thought it was a great portrait of madness. It had a class theme you very rarely find in American films.

What did you make of the conversation around it?
It was so ludicrous. I was so familiar with that conversation because that conversation has happened around me, because it happened around American Psycho, and it’s always the same conversation. These attacks always focus on some kind of art movie. They never focus on the extreme violence in mainstream entertainment. I love John Wick, but it’s far more violent and has far more mayhem than Joker or American Psycho. Actually, both of them have a small amount of violence. It’s just that that violence is disturbing.

That reminds me of something you said in an interview about the ratings controversy around American Psycho, about how the issue wasn’t that the sex in the film was too provocative or explicit, but that the women in a particular sex scene seemed so bored and that that affect was the thing that was so upsetting to people.
Yes, it was disturbing to sit through. It wasn’t a fun sex scene — it’s about prostitution, it’s a transaction. People don’t have the fun element to make the violence okay. The moral panic is about quite serious films. Invariably.

What’s your theory on that?
Because it doesn’t slide down as easily as, you know, Marvel. Marvel, you can blow up most of Manhattan and people love that. People are very uncomfortable with moral ambiguity. If that same violence had been perpetrated by a person [like John Wick] who was seeking noble revenge, they might feel differently. But when it’s someone who is like the Joker, who is deeply mentally disturbed, you’re put in an uncomfortable position. Even though I think the movie is pretty clear — this guy is psycho — you’ve followed him through his vulnerability and his being humiliated and neglected and used by the world and the people around him. And there’s an element where you’re identifying with him.

The same conversation happens over and over every so often with a film that is upsetting or disturbing, which is a part of what movies are and do. Then everything settles down. It’s crazy to me that everyone talks about American Psycho in such reverent terms.

Is it the culture that’s changed?
No, because look at Joker. I don’t think the culture’s changed. People just had time … no, that’s not true. The culture’s changed to a certain extent, because at the time [American Psycho came out], some people dismissed it. People dismiss films that are disturbing to them, saying, “Oh, it’s not doing anything new. Oh, we know all this. Oh, it’s boring.” People said that about American Psycho. “’Blah blah blah, it’s boring, so familiar.” It was seen very specifically as a film about the ’80s, and of course it’s a period film. But what happened in the 20 years since was late-20th-century capitalism — now 21st-century capitalism — got worse and worse, actually. Those guys didn’t go away.

Do you think there’s anything about your personality or your upbringing that allows you to see these aspects of American culture before other people do?
I was always moving around so much, at a very young age, changing schools and countries so many times, and that gave me a certain outsider quality that’s obviously part of my worldview. And there’s a dark sensibility I had from a young age. I’m sure my family life had something to do with it — seeing good times going bad. That gave me a feeling that things will always go dark at some point.

Where did you grow up?
I came from Toronto, from a generation that did not believe in helicopter parenting. There was a lot of adult drama in my life that my sister and I were just tagging along after.

My dad was an actor who eventually got a movie contract with Paramount that was arranged for him by Katherine Hepburn, who took a shine to him and arranged for him to have a screen test. We moved to a big house in Beverly Hills for two years. Then my parents’ marriage broke up. My father left my mother for this starlet, Virginia Leith. She just died recently. She was in Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire — she was a very wild person — an alcoholic. I always lived two different lives, split between a little of my mother and stepfather, and my father and my stepmother.

Did you meet Kubrick when you were a kid?
I never did, but my mother and step-father went to have dinner at his house in the countryside. They were big fans of Kubrick, and my mom said it was really weird because every time he said something, everyone would laugh or say, “That’s so great.” It was creepy. Women directors, that doesn’t happen — you don’t have the danger of being treated like a genius and going mad with power.

Do you appreciate that?
I do. I actually think that’s an advantage.

It’s good for maintaining a sense of reality?
It’s better to live in the real world.

So how did you first get into writing?
I did journalism at Oxford. I wrote film reviews and features. My third year, I was the editor of the university paper. I shared the editorship with Patrick Wintour, who was the younger brother of Anna Wintour. My last year of college, I published a bit professionally. After college, I ended up in New York for a bit, writing for Punk magazine.

What are your favorite memories of the punk scene?
I went to interview the Sex Pistols. Oh my God. New York punk was kind of humorous, ironic, and I got to London and there’s glasses flying everywhere. These little kids are nuts. They’re all like 16. I was 23 or something. I never found [punk] particularly decadent. I always feel like when people try to re-create these worlds, they get very heavy-handed and want to show dangerous punk stuff. But really, it’s a lot of people sitting around talking about what they saw on television. There was a certain amount of ordinariness.

How did you make the switch from music writing to TV and film?
I wasn’t connected to that world, really, but if your parents are in that world, then obviously it’s not an impossible world. Eventually, someone offered me a job as a researcher for a pop-music show. I researched stories and I wrote questions for all the top celebrity interviews — Boy George or Madonna. I would never ask them about their work. I would ask them things like: What do you think about death? How much is in your bank account?

Eventually, I managed to get onto a big prestigious show called The South Bank Show, which did art documentaries. I knew a lot of people in TV because my friends from Oxford who were journalists had all gone to the BBC. I was renting a room in Adam CurtisCurtis is a British journalist and documentary filmmaker. He has won three BAFTA TV Awards for his films on history and politics. ’s house. We’d all been in the same generation at college, and he was at the BBC, and I was so jealous. But eventually, I got there. It took five years of working as a researcher before I got to direct anything. The stuff I was making for the BBC wasn’t straight documentary — some of it was satirical. I worked with James Wolcott and made a couple of films with him that I thought were very funny.

Were you in New York at this point?
I came to New York to work on [the BBC2 series] The Late Show. But I’d been spending a lot of time in New York before that. I did the research for a documentary on the Wooster Group. I really got along with [its co-founder] Elizabeth LeCompte. My next project was researching this big Pollock documentary, and Liz wanted to make a film about Jackson Pollock’s girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, the one who was in the car when he died. She said, “I want you to write a script with me.” That was huge for me.

So that was your first crack at a feature film?
In a way, yeah. I’d already been writing scripts with one of my best friends from the New York punk scene for several years. One of them was a satirical film about advertising. I’d been trying to sell them and got no interest. That was one reason Liz asked me — she knew I was writing scripts on my own. That film never happened because we lost the rights, but for the next three or four years, I spent all my money coming back to New York for vacations. I’d stay in Spalding Gray’s loft when he was away. He and Elizabeth used to be partners. And I’d work with Elizabeth. I learned a lot from her — she was fearless. The fact that neither of us knew how to write a script, or had any training in it, that was an advantage. We were just going to ignore rules, and I really got a lot from that.

What do you remember about the Factory in New York?
I went to the 1980s Factory, and I interviewed Andy Warhol there because I was writing a piece for an English music magazine about Warhol’s influence on pop culture and the Velvet Underground. It was all about Warhol’s sensibility. There was something mysterious and dangerous about the Factory. It’s quite a cruel place and had the dangers of celebrity and the dangers of being cool and fashionable, and yet at the same time, all of those people were kind of outcasts who had created their own glamour. And I loved that. I’ve always loved outcasts.

What did you think of Andy?
He was very sweet, actually — shy and vulnerable. After about 20 minutes, he made someone else do the interview. “Brigid. Hey, Brigid. Brigid wants to talk. Hey Brigid, come on over.” He’s brilliant. He made Brigid Berlin do the interview.

So you had heard about Valerie Solanas a little bit in that context?
Yes, and she seemed very funny. I had done a lot of interviewing with people from the Factory for that piece I wrote. And then about five, six years later, when I was working in television, I did the research on an Andy Warhol documentary [for The South Bank Show]. Anyway, one day I was walking to work and I saw the SCUM Manifesto in a store and I bought it and I read it on the tube. I already knew a great deal about the Factory and about Warhol. I’d read a thousand interviews. I’d seen all this footage. I met all these people. And the one person there’s almost nothing about was Valerie Solanas. When I read this manifesto, it was like bolts of lightning.

I showed a friend higher up at the BBC the SCUM Manifesto. He thought it was hilarious. He said, “I’ll give you £100,000 or £150,000. See what you can do with that.” I still needed to raise more money, of course. Soon after, I was at a dinner party and an old friend of mine said he’d introduce me to Christine Vachon. He said you should meet Christine, because she’s been getting a really hard time for making all these films for gay men and she’s a lesbian and she needs a female subject.

What was that meeting like?
The office was tiny, like a broom closet. [Producer] Tom Kalin was there too. And I sat down and explained my idea. I was used to peoples’ eyes glazing over. People would often get upset with me for showing them the SCUM Manifesto. But they loved it.

Why would people get upset?
Because she’s suggesting killing men.

And people didn’t like that?
People were like, This is crazy. Not just crazy — but bad, evil.

I do think we have so much more tolerance for men who do evil things.
That’s true. Nobody’s like, “Oh, you can’t do a film like Taxi Driver.” But yeah, you can imagine that a lot of people turned [I Shot Andy Warhol] down.

Anyway, while we were trying to find financing, I still had to make a living, so I’d gone off to L.A. and got a job on this Fox News magazine show. I was working on the script in my spare time, but it felt like months went by without hearing anything. And then I was in our place in Los Angeles and I got a call from Tom Kalin saying, “Congratulations, you’re making a movie.” I had this moment of thinking, I showed them all.

And then I Shot Andy Warhol was a hit at Sundance.
The offer to do the script for American Psycho came in right after I got back from Sundance. That’s what happens if you have a first film that does well at Sundance.

Valerie Solanas is having a big moment now.
At the time, feminism was not cool. At all. Now everyone wants to say they’re a feminist. But at the time — I never denied it. I always said I was, because I felt like, without feminism, I would never be doing this.

Where do you think your feminism comes from?
It was pretty instinctive. My mother was very old school in a lot of ways. She believed men were superior to women with two exceptions — my sister and myself. She was very ambitious for me and wanted me to be an artist. She would’ve been horrified if I hadn’t. She was very upset that my sister married and had kids early. At the same time, we’d disagree. She thought feminism was silly. She ran a radio program, and on her show, they used to excerpt books, and she refused to do Simone de Beauvoir. Still, I always thought I was going to have a career. That’s how I thought about my future — my career, my work, my ambition.

But I always felt like people were saying “Are you a feminist?” back in the day because they wanted to pigeonhole you as an ideological filmmaker, which I’m not, I don’t believe.

What does that mean to you to not be an ideological filmmaker?
Everyone has an ideology, obviously, and it’s in some ways inescapable. But I’m not teaching moral lessons through my films. If there was a feminist ideology in my first film, it was wanting to bring hidden history to light. And upset the hierarchy. No one thought she was important. No one wrote about her at all, hardly.

Do you think if she had actually killed him, it would have changed the way people had viewed her or the film?
It might’ve. Look at the Unabomber manuscript, which also had some interesting things in it but is more obviously crazy, I think. It would have been a more tragic film. Anyway, I wasn’t making the film to say that everything she said is right and I want to see all men killed. I was saying, “Why do you only make films about good people?” This is an amazing story of a fascinating, tragic, brilliant woman and what happened to her when these two worlds collided — her and the Factory.

The same thing happened years later with American Psycho. I remember reading the first couple paragraphs and thinking, This is hilarious. No one else was saying that it’s funny, but to me, this had humor. That was obvious.

I remember I had this conversation with Ed Pressman. I said, “I don’t know if you can make a film about this book, but pay me some money and I’ll see what I can do.” I was already writing with Guinevere Turner by then. We’d already started working on [The Notorious] Bettie Page. So I told her, “Look, Guinevere, we’ve got some money. We can pay our rent.”

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Her films

I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)

‘Harron, a first-time director who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Minahan, does two remarkable things in her movie: She makes Solanas almost sympathetic and sometimes moving and funny, and she creates a portrait of the Factory that’s devastating and convincing. Warhol emerges as a man whose entire being–intelligence, sexuality, artistry–seems concentrated in his detached, bemused gaze. (If Andy ever got a tattoo, I hope it read, “I like to watch.”) He fears personal contact; he snaps pictures and makes tapes of the people around him, and I imagine him later, alone, arranging those documents as an entomologist might pin butterflies to a corkboard.

‘Lili Taylor plays Solanas as mad but not precisely irrational. She gives the character spunk, irony and a certain heroic courage (the sight of her typing on her rooftop, the wind rustling the pages of her manuscript, is touching). Variety calls Taylor “the first lady of the indie cinema,” and in one independent film after another (“Mystic Pizza,” “Dogfight,” “Household Saints,” “Arizona Dream,” “Bright Angel,” “Short Cuts”) she has proven herself the most intelligent and versatile of performers. If you had to look at all of the films of one actor who has emerged in the last 10 years, you would run less chance of being bored with Lili Taylor than anyone else.’ — Roger Ebert

American Psycho (2000)

‘[Bale] saw the part the way that I did, and he got the humor of it. He didn’t see Bateman as cool. I sort of had the feeling a lot of the other actors kind of thought Bateman was cool. And he didn’t. I met with a lot of actors about it but Christian was the only one who was right for it.

‘Obviously, I think DiCaprio’s a great actor, but I thought he was wrong for it,” Harron recalls. “I thought Christian was better for it, and I also thought, and I think my instinct was right on this, he carried enormous baggage because he had just come off Titanic and I thought you cannot take someone who has a worldwide fanbase of 15-year-old girls, 14-year-olds girls, and cast him as Patrick Bateman. It’ll be intolerable, and everyone will interfere, and everyone will be terrified. It would be very bad for him and very bad for the movie. Because everybody will be all over it. They’ll rewrite the script and all the rest. And I knew I could only make this work if I had complete control over it, over the tone and everything.”

‘The other thing is, a lot of the plot depends on people mistaking Bateman for someone else. Not a lot of people look like Leo DiCaprio. They called me and said we’re going to offer him $20 million, but the budget of the movie will remain $6 million. You’re giving the star enormous power over this project, and basically taking it away from the director if you’re making it that disproportionate. So that just didn’t interest me. I’d only done one movie, so it was a big thing to do. But I’d seen lots of movies that have gone awry because they cast a huge star that they shouldn’t have cast. I thought people would respect that and say, oh wow, integrity. But actually I think a lot of people thought I was crazy. So I went through a period after they fired me, of thinking, God, my career’s really ruined, because everyone’s going to think I’m out of my mind for walking away from this.’ — Mary Harron

The Notorious Bettie Page (2005)

‘While researching Page’s life, Harron would ask those who knew her how she balanced her deep religious beliefs with what she did for a living. “I met with Paula Klaw several times. We interviewed Paula several times. We interviewed her first husband, Billy Neal. We show a little bit of that marriage. Billy had his own take on it. He said, ‘Well, she wanted to be an actress and she just saw that as a way to get on.’ As a way to get ahead, as something she’d do to make a career. He had more insight to her religiousness, but people who knew her in New York thought of her more in some ways as this innocent country girl. I don’t think that they really ever talked to her about God. A number of people said to me that she was like a country girl in New York, that she never lost that kind of slightly naïve quality to her.”

‘Harron continued. “It’s very interesting. In a way we’ve always been able to, in America, combine sex and religion. I mean, look at Jessica Simpson and her father’s a preacher – a Baptist preacher. …He doesn’t seem to see anything contradictory in her doing what’s basically pin-ups, posing with very, very clothes and making a career out of that. So, in a way, that’s always coincided.

‘Pin-ups were kind of racy, but it was socially acceptable to be like a Betty Grable or a Marilyn Monroe. The fetish stuff was what was not acceptable, and I think that was hidden. I think that she thought that nobody would see those photographs. I assume that was what she felt because I know from having met Paula Klaw and also talking to Paula Klaw’s son, Ira, that there was that idea of ‘who was it hurting?’ ‘If it’s making them happy, then what’s the harm of it?’ I think that the philosophy of the Klaw studios was ‘what’s the harm’ and I think that Bettie would have probably picked up on that.”’ — Rebecca Murray

The Moth Diaries (2012)

‘“The Moth Diaries” is one of the most rigorously bad yet watchable films I’ve seen in some time and possibly the best worst movie I’ve endured since the notorious Lindsay Lohan bomb “I Know Who Killed Me.” Funnily enough, my tweet last night saying just as much was retweeted by Michael Tully, the fine director of “Septien” and the head honcho of the equally fine film site Hammer to Nail, to whom I owe some inspiration. After all, he was the one who coined the term “Avant-retarde” after becoming one of the biggest proponents of “I Know Who Killed Me” and while “The Moth Diaries” doesn’t share the same embrace of bizarre color schemes or plot points involving amputation, it comes close enough to fit the definition.

‘“The Moth Diaries” was directed by Mary Harron, the well-heeled director of “American Psycho,” “The Notorious Bettie Page” and “I Shot Andy Warhol” who for the first time is the only credited screenwriter on one of her films, after long sharing that title with Guinevere Turner. Whether or not that contributed to why “The Moth Diaries” features most of the worst dialogue that Harron’s ever filmed is up for debate, but there is no doubt from the moment you hear the voiceover of Rebecca (an all-grown Sarah Bolger from “In America”) say “I’ve decided to write a page in my diary every day to capture what it’s like to be 16,” you know you’re in for trouble. When it’s followed by her roommate Lucie (Sarah Gadon) hugging her in excitement, exclaiming “This is going to be the best year ever!”, you know it goes double.’ — Stephen Saito

Anna Nicole (2013)

‘So, should we give up on Mary Harron ever matching the accomplishment of her first two features, “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “American Psycho“? Because since then, it’s been mostly a downward trajectory with lots of TV work, the disappointing “The Notorious Bettie Page” and the forgotten (and not very well received) vampire flick “The Moth Diaries.” And now in what must be a career nadir, Harron has retreated to Lifetime to crank out one of their cheapie biopics, “The Anna Nicole Story,” ripped from the headlines of six years ago.

‘Anyway, Agnes Bruckner takes the lead role in the movie that will track the tragic life of the model with all the subtlety of a TMZ news post. The one-minute teaser features no shortage of posing and glamour shots, intercut with alcohol (gasp!), pills (double gasp!) and a sad-eyed kid looking on (sob!). Somehow, Martin Landau, Virginia Madsen and Adam Goldberg got roped into this thing, which if anything should be just as tawdry as Anna Nicole’s real life. So maybe, mission accomplished?’ — Kevin Jagernauth

Charlie Says (2018)

‘Much of the strength of Charlie Says as a work of intricately empathetic moral testimony is due to its cast. Matt Smith’s Manson is appropriately captivating, smooth and strange and seductive, fluently vacillating across different registers: warmth, brooding, vitriol, and ultimately explosive violence. As a kind of counterbalance to Manson’s manic gravitational pull, Merritt Wever gives a careful, lived-in, emotionally precise turn as Faith, generously anchoring the framing prison narrative in the young anthropologist’s compassionately inquisitive perspective.

‘Harron’s film is at its most thoughtful, and its most useful, in moments where it presents itself as an exploration of young women in thrall to a charismatic, deeply egotistical leader who thrives on their willing submission. An insistently, desperately outsized personality, Manson persuades his followers that “death of the ego” is necessary for enlightenment, but as Charlie Says demonstrates, this is merely a way of demanding that his followers sacrifice their agency to him. How are such women to reclaim their sense of themselves in the aftermath of breaking free from him, and to account for the moral consequences of their own actions while under his sway?

‘The stark binary that undergirds the film’s visual logic—contrasting rosy infusions of light on the sun-soaked ranch with the hard, sterile grays of the prison cell—serves a moral purpose as well as an aesthetic one. Harron’s cool artistry evokes the intoxication that can result from a heady synthesis of environment, personality, and historical circumstance, all of which carries a heavy burden of menace, and braces this vision against the literally sobering—alienating, disorienting, and frequently terrifying—experience of being removed from those circumstances. The jarring fact of this psychic whiplash must be confronted head-on, the film asserts, in order to arrive at an objective understanding of truth, justice, and one’s own self.’ — Madeline Whittle

Dali Land (2022)

‘American Psycho filmmaker Harron has been working on the Dali project for a number of years. The pic originated with producers Edward Pressman and David O. Sacks, and the director says she was initially reticent to get involved because she saw similarities with her Andy Warhol film – 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol – and didn’t want to retread similar ground. However, her husband John Walsh, who penned the screenplay, convinced Harron there was a way to do the movie and put their own stamp on it. The fact the story revolves around a married couple gave it an intriguing angle for the pair, the director tells Deadline.

‘“It’s about the beginning and the end of someone’s carer and marriage. It’s bittersweet and there’s a lot of comedy in it,” says Harron. “Dali and his wife Gala had this legendary marriage, but it was a marriage without sex. It was based on her incredible belief in his art, she was a voyeur and had sex with other men. But she had absolute faith in his genius.

‘Despite the film’s high calibre across its cast, director and producer, this was an intensely independent production. Harron says they begged, borrowed and stole to get everything they needed for the shoot, which was complicated by the Covid restrictions on set.’ — Tom Grater

 

 

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p.s. RIP bell hooks. Jael Richards, a regular reader of this blog, wrote to me recently asking if they could put together a post about Mary Harron, and I said, ‘Absolutely’, of course, and they sent me the fantastic Harron overview you see just north of these words. Please use your local time to investigate Harron’s oeuvre, spare a word or so for your guest-host if you don’t mind, and thank you, and thank you ever so much, Jael. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Friday … tomorrow! Not bad, postponement-wise. Things are fine enough here. I’m mostly working on things, some text for a new Gisele Vienne piece and a lot of brainwork re: getting Zac’s and my new film’s funding up to par. Speaking of, our piece ‘Crowd’ is playing in Paris right now, so I’ll go see how it’s doing. You good and busy in the best-for-you way? Thank you for the emo farm VIP pass. My Xmas is made. I promise to shoot a little documentary with my iPhone while I’m there and sneak it to you somehow. Love paying the whostheboss crew to go door to door in your neighbourhood singing Xmas carols, G. ** David, Hi. Ha, I’ve come across a a number of escorts in my searching over the past year+ who go by ‘quaran-teen’ but usually with ‘slut’ or ‘cumdump’ or such terms fastened onto the end. I wonder what the going rate is for being burned? I have a slave coming up who looks all burned up, but, of course, being a slave, he doesn’t charge for it. No ironing of my clothes either, as anyone who hangs around with sloppy me could tell you. ** Misanthrope, I was going to say make David pay you to fix it until I remembered that would just mean you taking money out your own wallet and putting it back in. Shitload of reasons not to be obese. Jesus, that’s fucked up about your extremely limited holiday off-work time. Kind of criminal if you ask me, but that’s why people don’t ask me. Tough it out, I guess, and you will, but still. ** _Black_Acrylic, Um, yes, I think it’s very safe to assume that i-need-mo-ney has had a considerable amount of work done on his face. From what I could tell from the photo, he looks like he’s close to his goal. He just needs to lose some muscle and body weight and maybe have skeleton reduction surgery if that’s even possible. I just read something about that Ben Wheatley film that kind of vaguely intrigued me. And after your review, I remain vaguely intrigued. ** Bill, Hi. Maybe Gaspar wanted his neck and paid him with faux-film stills? That’s not entirely impossible. I would doubt that ‘scort reads Gary, but hey. ‘There is No Death, There are No Dead’: Wouldn’t that be nice? Well, actually I guess the world would be like living in a giant anthill after millions of years sans deaths. So maybe not. ** David Ehrenstein, You don’t even like ‘The Singing Detective’? ** geymm, Hi. Yes, but that particular bisexual guy just wants you to drink his snot, which, not to be presumptuous, doesn’t seem like your thing? Ah, WS stands for ‘water sport’ aka piss. Being pissed on or in by someone, or pissing on or in someone. ‘Only’ implies no shit, just piss. I always think I have seen ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’, but I have zero memory of it, so I think it might be that I just assume I must have seen it, given what it is. I’ve used GIFs from it in a GIF novel or two of mine, I know that. Time to find out. I will. Maybe even today. Okay, maybe not today ‘cos I need to work, but … tonight? Yeah, maybe tonight. I hope your week is flying by assuming flying sounds good. ** Brian, Hi, Brian. Yes, there he is, in the photographed flesh. What do you want to bet that emo farm doesn’t actually exist? Or, if it does, that it’s hardly a farm. Oops, re: the late breaking unhappy booster surprise. Eek, I have to get mine in the next couple of days or my vax pass will go defunct. Interesting re: ‘West Side Story’. Its weird, all the reviews were weirdly ecstatic for the first few days, and now every review seems to be tearing it to pieces. I can’t imagine watching it. My favorite Spielberg is ‘Close Encounters’. There are some terrific moments/stretches in ‘A.I’, but I think they must be the Kubrick-dictated parts that Spielberg somehow didn’t manage to ruin. All the luck there is re: acing that paper. Have you? Thanks, man, re: the film shit. We will, even if it’s painful. Happy happy Thursday! ** Okay. Get yourselves all cozy with Mary Harron until I see you next: tomorrow.