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14 may '00
13 may '00

14 may '00

House of Leaves, a novel by Mark Z. Danielewski

I am just plumb crazy for this puzzle-box of a book. It is an audacious melding of elements of The Blair Witch Project, Pale Fire, and the Children's Hour chapter of Finnegans Wake.

But first and foremost, it is a ripping good ghost story, one that is scarier in its introduction than anything that Stephen King has produced recently. To summarize the story from the inside out: in 1990, Pulitzer laureate documentarian Will Navidson moves his family from New York to an indefinite location in the exurbs of Virginia. He decides to film the story of the family's settling into its new home, in obsessive detail, mounting motion-activated cameras in every room.

On their return from a trip, the Navidsons discover something distinctly peculiar about their new house: it has acquired an additional bedroom closet, one without any useful hardware and with walls that are "perfectly smooth and almost pure black -- 'almost' because there is a slightly grey quality to the surface." (p. 28) Much horror lies beyond that shade of grey, which comes to be the color of darkness itself.

Before long, a hallway has opened up in the living room, leading... where? Navidson's chilling exploration of the hallway and the malevolent rooms that it leads to becomes the new focus of his documentary film, which is released in 1993 as The Navidson Record.

An old man, the mononymic Zampanò, has drafted an over-erudite work of film criticism of The Navidson Record, stuffed with footnotes that reference other (fictional) critiques of the movie, but which nevertheless conveniently recaps Navidson's story. When he dies in January 1997, his manuscript is found by a burnout tattoo parlor apprentice who calls himself Johnny Truant.

Stoner Johnny falls in thrall to the manuscript and its story. Between episodes of paranoia and debilitating nightmares, he edits and annotates Zampanò's book, publishing it privately in 1998. The second edition of the book, published in 2000 by Random House, is the volume we have in our hands, augmented by an Index and another layer of notes signed by "The Editors."

What's wrong with this picture? To begin with, Johnny tells us in his Introduction that the film doesn't exist, which becomes easier to believe when we learn that Zampanò has been blind since the middle of the century and couldn't possibly have anything to say about its images. We meet Johnny's friend Lude, and when we tease out the associations of his name (dude, allude, Quaalude, the root of the Latin for "to play") we see that the book's structure is a literary jungle gym, an obstacle course of rebuses to be solved.

Not since Gilbert Sorrentino has the plane separating reality and fiction become such a slippery slope, a mirror, a window into a self-referential world of holograms. Johnny tries to supply translations for Zampanò's quotations from French, German, and Latin sources, but his notes often slide into multi-page excursions detailing his sex life: the crucial "Labyrinth" chapter is footnoted by a Rabelaisian description of a particularly satisfying encounter with one Tatiana, one involving anal penetration.

Johnny is not the most scrupulous of editors: he restores deleted passages, he admits that he's being arbitrary:

I couldn't care less how you read any of this.... I've come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. (p. 31)

So when we read "heals" for "heels" three times in the course of 710 pages, we know there's another game on. Elsewhere, "key" is misspelled "kye," and the misspelling appears in the incredibly perverse Index (the prepositions have entries!) next to one of Johnny's girls, the polymath Kyrie. Narrative gaps in Zampanò's book are breezed over: Navidson's brother Tom departs for Charlottesville on page 56 and is back in the house on page 61. A particularly apt pun on page 72 pays off on page 618.

Some passages seem to be constructed just to keep graduate students occupied. A footnote that begins on page 64 is a solid wall of names of genuine photographers (taking off from Brassaï), but the wall is eroded by intrusions of names of Vietnamese photographers, almost all of them certainly fictional. It will be the job of some obsessive dissertationist to verify each reference. In note 360 on page 387, Esther Harlan James

describes her own addiction to The Navidson Record: "I never shook the feeling that the film, while visceral and moving, must pale in comparison to an actual, personal exploration of the house. Still, as Navidson needed more and more of that endless dark, I too found myself feeling the same way about The Navidson Record. In fact as I write this now, I've already seen the film thirty-eight times and have no reason to believe I will stop going to see it."

And many of the tempting hallways of the book are dead ends, like absurd names in the footnotes (Talmor Zedactur?!) that prove not to be anagrams.

Then there are the passages that represent literally Navidson's exploration of the maze, in a concrete poetry that suggests Lewis Carroll on Ecstasy: the text runs upside down and backwards; a single word "sn-a-ps" across three pages; footnotes fold in on one another, clarifying other footnotes that appear pages later; it's a typographical mine disaster.

At the core of Will Navidson's house, there is a spiral staircase of infinitely variable length. This is a funny, horrifying book that will take your mind to the bottom of that staircase. You have been warned.

13 may '00

Porgy and Bess, Virginia Opera, Center for the Arts, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia

This production is trimmed to an audience-friendly 2:28 performance time, and I was disappointed by the cuts. The crowd scenes are lively, and the choral work sparkles, especially during the storm scene. The numerous scene changes were handled very well. Alvy Powell brings a rich, well-articulated voice to Porgy.

There is some good news about Battlefield Earth: it's at least ten minutes shorter than The Phantom Menace.

Adrenaline Drive is a Japanese It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World with bad subtitles. The nebbishy leads get the better of a cartoonish yakuza gang in a contrived chase after a pile of money left behind after an accident with a gas stove. But the exuberance of Shizuko (Hikari Ishida) dancing on the furniture -- nearly swimming -- in a luxury hotel suite is winning.

Frequency: it's got a time warp, father-son bonding, and baseball. What's not to like? Well, the juddery camera didn't sit well with my already flu-queasy stomach.

Tom Tykwer's Winterschläfer (Winter Sleepers) shows many similarities with his better-known Run Lola Run: there are the direct overhead shots, the strong woman leads, and the plot driven by chance meetings. This romantic action pic is fine, but it's not the extraordinary film that Lola is.

And the good news about The Virgin Suicides is that it's not the clinker I was expecting. Sofia Coppola finds some nice moments of the awkward comedy-tragedy that is adolescence (the rat-poison pie, the scene under the bleachers). Kathleen Turner and James Woods (with his little math teacher ties) submit absolutely selfless performances. But I can't help feeling that Coppola felt that the burning of Lux's record collection was the biggest tragedy of the story.

La fille sur le pont (The Girl on the Bridge) is a charming romantic comedy/fairy tale from Patrice Leconte that packs a lot of reversals into its 90-minute running time. It's shot in velvety black & white; scored to a wonderful mix of bouzouki, swing, and Marianne Faithfull; and keeps you on your toes with its shifting rhythms. And it stars the melancholy eyes of Daniel Auteuil.

Another 90-minute wonder is Mike Figgis's brilliant, utterly exhausting Time Code. It is composed of four continuous takes, shot on high-resolution video, each of them an hour and a half long. The screen is split into four panels, one for each shot, and we gradually learn that each camera is following a different aspect of one complicated multi-character story of love and betrayal. Surprisingly, what makes this work is the audio mix, which brings up one or two of the panels as they assume narrative importance. Figgis also helps us out with a music score. Nifty bits from Holly Hunter and Steven Weber.

If I see the trailer for Screwed one more time, I fear I shall commit a felony. What an embarrassment for Elaine Stritch.

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