I have a recurring dream—not an uncommon one, I’ve gathered—in which I’m forced to go back to high school. A clerical error is discovered, some minor oversight, and it turns out I was a few credit hours shy of graduation, that I have to put in another semester, and that everything else that’s happened since has to be put aside so that I can skulk through the halls of my alma mater again, slinging a bookbag over a stooped 32 year-old shoulder.
I had a similar chilling feeling this week when I learned that I was apparently still a Voice Media Group contributor—this despite my not having appeared in the paper since the 20th of February. The news came courtesy my friend and colleague Steve Dollar—soon to star as Robert Altman in my film about the making of O.C. & Stiggs—who’d seen my name on the masthead in a NY Magazine item on the departures of VMG staff writers Nick Pinto and Tejal Rao. The same piece also summarizes the recent wave of defections and firings at the flagship Village Voice: New editor-in-chief Will Bourne and deputy editor Jessica Lustig resigned earlier in the month in protest to staff reductions proposed by the VMG’s Phoenix-based owner, Ming the Merciless, dismissals which were promptly carried out regardless. Once the smoke had cleared Michael Musto, theater critic Michael Feingold, and food critic Robert Sietsema had all received the heave-ho.
Most of the reportage on the employee shedding by Voice Media Group has been accompanied by some variation on the caveat “Disclosure: I used to work there,” which goes to show how essential a coming-of-age ritual logging some time at the Voice has been for aspiring New York journos. A reflection on this very point was recently posted by Zach Baron, a fellow alum I met briefly at a Voice Christmas party in 2008 or 2009. (At the last Christmas party I attended, in ’12, I think I was one of a dozen people over 23.) The piece, understandably perhaps, achieves a distance that I have not yet been able to muster—Mr. Baron left the paper in 2011, and since has placed his byline regularly in high-profile papers and magazines. I know continuing to give a fuck must but horrible for my health, yet I can’t sign off on Baron’s philosophical “So it is, so it has been, so it always shall be” thesis, which discounts the fact that things really can be ruined irreparably, and that there are people who should be held accountable for doing the ruining. I return, as I often do, to a line from Decline and Fall, Otto Friedrich’s account of the last years of The Saturday Evening Post, which folded not long after the last gasp of the New-York Tribune, in 1969:
“If all things in our system were as interchangeable as twopenny nails, this system might work better than it does, but the laws of profit make no allowances for time and tradition…”
The laws of profit, galloping greed, and the worship of Mammon are lately well-represented at the cinema with the appearance of a crop of lavish movies which have acquisitive lust as their subject, movies where the celebration of excess acts simultaneously as a critique of same, in much the same way that every anti-war movie can be said to be, for its visceral excitement, covertly pro-war. The old DeMille ethos rides high: Six reels of sin, one of salvation! Among the newly-erected cinematic Babylons are Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and, Coming Soon, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, about the operations of a real-life gang of teen girl burglars who, robbing from the rich and giving to the rich, terrorized the Hollywood Hills in the late aughts. (I was sure it was to be a split-screen endeavor, as I’d seen a chair set aside with Coppola’s name on it at a MoMA showing of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming some time ago, and assumed she could only be there to take notes.)
Luhrmann employs every other cinematic effect in the book, and his CG pop-up book vision of North Shore Long Island and Manhattan c. 1922 is quite the creation; as I wrote in a review for Sight & Sound, his Gatsby is suitably intoxicant, with a core of real, rueful sadness. My enthusiasm for the film seems to put me in the minority among cinephiles; I can take some solace, however, in having America’s newest critic-of-record in my corner.
No, you dummy, it’s not a woman! I am talking, of course, about James Franco of VICE Magazine, a publication that has done so very much to further the blase, shrug n’ smirk, couldn’t-be-bothered voice in American letters, establishing itself as a tastemaking organ while never discernably taking a hard critical stance on anything other than, say, deciding to pimp the Billysburg coke-party vacuity of A.R.E. Weapons. Franco has to date filed reviews of both Gatsby and Leviathan. For the actor/director/producer/novelist/artist/celebrity chef Franco—whose “Look at my shee-it” monologue in Spring Breakers has been frequently compared to Gatsby’s home tour and display of beautiful shirts by people with a passion for pointing out the obvious—nothing is worth doing if it’s not worth doing sloppily and haphazardly. His latest critical effusion, not quite up to the standards of most Letterboxd prose, is a pretty piece of work in which the 35-year-old adjunct English professor at UCLA includes the observations “I’m the biggest Moby Dick fan ever,” “I mean, WTF? How? How did the film’s makers achieve this poetry?”, and “At some point, a huge crowd of Israeli women filed in and overpowered the Daft Punk emanating from my headphones.”
It’s Franco, arguably the biggest dick ever, who actually has the spit-screen movie coming, an inevitably slapdash adaptation of As I Lay Dying, the 1930 novel by William Faulkner, who periodically headed to Hollywood from Mississippi homestead Rowan Oak to alleviate his money troubles with hackwork and to carry on a slightly dismal affair with Howard Hawks’s script girl, Meta Carpenter. Rest assured that Franco’s genius, unlike Faulkner’s, will not have to wait for wider recognition and compensation. And unlike the Voice, which never made any convincing effort to adapt to the new rules of the Internet, VICE is a well-oiled and beautifully integrated brand. (I fondly remember their mock Sell-Out issue of 2004 or so, which sent up blind obeisance to celebrity culture!) Through the reliable metrics that measure quality in the pageviews era, I can tell you that Franco’s review of Gatsby has to date accrued 903 Facebook Likes, while the Voice Film Club’s Twitter account (@VoiceFilmClub) sputters along with a measly 383 followers, thus we can reliably look forward to more such fine content from VICE for a long time to come. But I shouldn’t lay blame for the sorry state of things at the feet of the World Wide Web—why, only last night, my Twitter feed recalled to me this Faulkner-penned quote, from Hawks’s Land of the Pharaohs, spoken by Joan Collins’s Princess Nellifer: “I’m well aware of your hostility and enmity. May I say that the feeling is mutual.”
I mean, WTF?
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.