Dogville

I’d heard Steve Earle’s track on the Warren Zevon tribute album Enjoy Every Sandwich, so I decided to give his new album, The Revolution Starts Here a whirl. An intriguing CD, to say the least. I like the title track and several others, find the spoken word piece almost unbearable, cringe slightly at the twangy song about the trucker getting back to Houston, and laugh uproariously every time I hear F the CC, which delightfully curses several different U.S. alphabet agencies in a way that’s almost guaranteed to get Mr. Earle added to somebody’s watch list somewhere. He is so angry and profane that the song is effective and amusing at the same time. Where else can you hear the f-word sung so gleefully by the backing vocalists, except on the Pink Floyd The Final Cut album?

I finished up my 9000-word short epic story this morning after several intense rounds of revisions. Sometimes I wonder if I remove too many words, but at least I’ll never be such a ruthless editor that I’ll end up with something as unreadable as James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand, which I found to be completely unreadable. It might have an interesting plot, but the staccato writing prevented me from getting involved in the story. In the case of my story, The Belt of Orion, I winnowed my original 9600+ words down to a final 9200. I always get to a point where I think I’m done and will just reread it one last time to check for typos and missing words (I often accidentally delete extra words when I enter my revisions from the marked-up manuscript), only to make substantial changes during that last readthrough. I think that revising in manuscript and onscreen are two completely different processes. I’m more analytical when working on the printed page, less likely to change for style so much as for correctness. When I’m at the computer screen, I look at individual words and sentences more carefully, looking for better words, and deleting excess verbiage. Maybe some day I’ll discover that I’ve actually ruined what I started with, but for the time being I usually feel like the final version is vastly better than the original. I hope so, anyway.

My wife and I watched Dogville this weekend. I’d heard interesting and positive things about the film, and I’m not at all sorry that I watched it. Lars von Trier (director and writer of the original Riget on which Kingdom Hospital is based) has some interesting ideas about filmmaking and for this project he eschews sets. The entire movie is acted out on a sound stage with the titular town inscribed on the floor in chalk. Houses are represented by hanging windows and the occasional doorframe, but no doors, making the entire town transparent. When you’re watching what is happening in one location, what is occurring everywhere else in town may also be visible. Even the town dog is just a chalk outline on the ground.

The cast is impressive: Kidman, Ben Gazarra, Lauren Bacall, John Hurt and so on. Handheld cameras prevail, except for the occasional overhead shot (montages, actually) that capture the entire town at once. It’s a very austere looking film, but after the first hour or so (it’s three hours long), you stop noticing the stagelike setting for the most part, possibly at about the same time that the movie becomes very stark and brutal. This ain’t Our Town by any stretch of the imagination. The ending is unexpected and–for us at least–very satisfying. James Caan has some excellent scenes with Kidman toward the end and the story makes some interesting and damning commentary on…what? What exactly is von Trier commenting about? Many take this as an anti-American film, but I think that a person could dig deeply into this film and find all sorts of symbolism, intended and otherwise, to fit any number of different issues. If I had a ton of time on my hands, I’d love to deconstruct the film and write something long and profound about it–but I’m too lazy to do so, and most of what I’d write would be pure and utter B.S., just as most of Tom’s philosophical treatises in the film.

Anyhow, if you’re looking for something that’s a little out of the ordinary, check out Dogville, which is the first of a trilogy. The next film, Manderlay, will star Ron Howard’s daughter, who was the lead in The Village. Also, if you’re looking for some interesting insight into von Trier, search out some of the interviews he did for Dogville. You’ll learn, for example, that on his mother’s deathbed he discovered that his father was someone other than who he believed, and that his mother reportedly arranged his conception with someone artistic so she would have an artistic son! And this was nearly 50 years ago!