The Melancholy of Resistance
Oh My God, That's My Daughter
I think hope and suspicion are an ouroboros. Two lizards, hope and suspicion, eating each other simultaenously. And I think I must be the hope lizard, because I swear to God I constantly feel suspicion following me around and biting my ass. At this point it’s even gotten so bad that I enjoy it in a Stockholm sort of way (the city not the syndrome… have you ever been to Sweden? jesus christ). It’s like that quote from Mad Men - “it’s a business of sadists and masochists, and you know which one you are.”
Suspicion feels great. I love the feeling of being alive through the act of suspecting that soon you won’t be. You have to feel wanted to suspect that you actually aren’t. And I especially love the warm little darkness that spills over you when your suspicions are confirmed. When life takes something you’ve always suspected and spells it out for you in big bright letters. The slow blissful death of the hope lizard. Like a mammoth sinking into the primordial tarpit. There’s a cozy sort of satisfaction in the knowledge that you are for certain at last disappearing, that it is not just your imagination, you’re not delusional, you really were right to be Bugmode. A brief moment of revenge taken out upon the Self - the most deserving target you can think of. As twisted as it can feel, sometimes I think the greatest days given to us are these brief opportunities for legitimate self-loathing, a thing you already do 24/7 but rarely with any real justification. For just a little while, you’re given cosmic permission. Feels great!
Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr, 2000)
I’m not always that miserable I promise. God dammit I’m gonne beat the Depressing Blog allegations. By nature I’m the hope lizard! I sit halfway consumed by the suspicion lizard and yet I’m always crawling around on my belly, facing outwards, looking off into the distance at the pretty things. So I really connected with this movie I saw recently; Werckmeister Harmonies. A movie about the hope lizard. A movie about blackness and suspicion caught dead in the act of consuming you and choosing nevertheless to look out at the sun and think about how nice and warm it is. There’s a reason it’s based on a novel titled The Melancholy of Resistance (László Krasznahorkai, 1989).
A quick summary of the book and the movie is that the main character, Valuska, lives in a small town in Hungary, which, at the risk of being redundant, is a dismal shithole. Everyone sucks, the world sucks, the city is bleak, there’s no sunlight, it’s all bad - in addition, paranoia threaten to completely overwhelm the town. The suspicions are never fully articulated; they’re less a reality and more just an abstract emotional product arising from the general state of misery and hopelessness. They become driven by their suspicions simply because they have nothing better to surrender themselves to.
Valuska, however, is heroic, and not because he is driven to action, but simply because he has the capacity to see beauty even in (shudder) Hungary. The opening scene of the movie shows Valuska in a bar, using the patrons to demonstrate grand astrological patterns, and in doing so he soon has them dancing around the pub; it’s a sweet, poetic little moment about the hope lizard - how lucky we are to come into contact with the unfathomable forces of the cosmos, how privileged we are to observe them!
And then, demonstration finished, he leaves the bar and heads home in a long, slow tracking shot. Drawn-out, painful, terminal, bleak, melancholy - there are million words you can use to describe it but none of them seem to match the desolate weight of the camera. And that’s just the opening scene! I’ll put it below this section and I really urge you to spend the 10 minutes on it. It’s like the fifth best scene in the movie! Won’t spoil the rest but fuck the ending really moved me. It all really moved me. Can’t stop thinking about it these days. Keep on crawlin’, hope lizard! The sun will always come back to shine again!
Recommended Werckmeister Harmonies to a few friends the last few weeks and let me tell you - the reviews are in! Word of mouth is getting around baby!
Folks you just can’t buy press like this
Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979)*, and
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985), and
First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017), and
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021),* and
Master Gardener (Paul Schrader, 2023)*
I’ve been trapped in Des Moines, Washington, dogsitting for my parents. So it’s only fair to reason I’d finish watching all the Paul Schrader movies I’d never got to (plus a rewatch of some of the essentials). Didn’t include rewatches of Schrader scripts directed by Martin Scorsese because Marty brings a different sensibility to those collaborations; among other things, Scorsese can actually compose an image worth a damn, so I consider movies like Bringing out the Dead (1999), Raging Bull (1980), and Taxi Driver (1976) to be separate from the works above. Should be mentioned though that a lot of the same themes run through both of these categories.
Not really interested in talking about the general quality of these films. At least not right now. Some are pretty bad, a few are masterpieces, and most fall somewhere in the middle. I’ll get the damn ranking out of the way now so I can talk more about Paul Schrader, the consummate Suspicion Lizard.
PAUL SCHRADER RANKINGS
GENUINE MASTERPIECES:
Mishima
Taxi Driver
First Reformed
Bringing out the Dead
Raging Bull
FLASHES OF BRILLIANCE
The Card Counter
Blue Collar
ONE OR TWO GOOD SCENES
Hardcore
Master Gardener
if it’s not on there I haven’t seen it. ok great so now that we’ve got that out of the way -
Paul Schrader is an extremely consistent filmmaker. Not consistency of quality or execution, however - his is a consistency of ideals. Ever since Taxi Driver, Schrader has been writing about lonely, isolated men burdened by a rage society placed on them, struggling to find a release. They all write in journals; they’re all inexpressive; they’re all ascetics; they all encounter women like how the earth might encounter an asteroid - sudden alien impacts crashing from some distant Venus. His best films avoid sex scenes and his worst ones tend to try and have women meaningfully written-in. He’s just not good at it. He just can’t comprehend women at all, except as some inscrutable oasis. They’re never humans, they’re just places of rest with boobs. When I saw Master Gardener’s sex scene I genuinely laughed out loud - in Mishima, which as contrast is almost entirely homosexual, the film’s eroticism is tenderly and deftly handled. Is Paul a huge gayboy? No, certainly not, because gay guys would never fear women this much. Or if they did, it would be a disdainful fear. Schrader views women as salvation; as such, his fear of women is fear of his own salvation. The fear that somewhere out there in the world, there waits for him a possible redemption, a cure for his self-loathing (perhaps this is the cause of most of Schrader’s ever-present Catholic Guilt). Scary thought, for sure, because Schrader is the ultimate Suspicion Lizard. He is by nature nihilistic. Hope has never been anything more than the thing that devours him. I think this is why First Reformed is his modern masterpiece. It is the most successful, pointed articulation of his principles - an extremely succesful, moving piece of art.
But everyone knows all that already. There’s nothing I said there that hasn’t already been said on some podcast where they talk about how much they love Michael Mann. What actually grabbed me the most is Master Gardener, the worst of the movies I watched by a healthy margin. It’s fundamentally a remake of his previous film, The Card Counter, a brutal (and good!) movie about the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the ultimate irredeemability of man. But the twist is that some time during the writing of the script for Master Gardener, Paul got sick as fuck and had to be hospitalized. For those devoted enough (loserrrrs) to follow Paul on Facebook (loooooooserrrrrs), lying on what appeared at the time to be a deathbed seems to have actually instigated a change within him. What I mean to say is, Master Gardener is surprisingly hopeful. Narvel, the protagonist, actually finds meaningful redemption. He is forgiven. He uses his past sins to instigate effective positive change on the world, and, god forbid, he is even able to be loved by a woman.
Even if it is the funniest sex scene ever. Like… I know I dig on Paul Schrader’s Big Virg energy all the time but seriously. Quick tangential story - here’s a quote from IMDB about the filming of Schrader’s movie Cat People (1982): “Director Paul Schrader and lead actress Nastassja Kinski had an affair during the production of this movie. Schrader fell in love and planned to propose marriage to Kinski at the wrap party, but she didn't show up and cut off all communication with him. After three months Schrader finally tracked Kinski down in Paris, where she bluntly told him, "Paul, I always fuck my directors. And with you it was difficult.”
fucking LOL. and his immediate followup was Mishima, the weeb incel school shooter anthem pic. if 4chan was around Paul would be out there like “dont come to school tomorrow”
Anyways as funny as that is, Schrader’s a legitimately excellent artist, despite being maybe a bit uneven and repetitive. He articulates isolation and loneliness in a way I think nobody but Bresson ever could, and he doesn’t have to go around casting desperately fuckable waifs and twinks like the latter did. His characters have always dedicated themselves to lives of self-effacement; lives dedicated to the holistic expulsion of hope. And so, for me, watching his art age, slowly, into this little glimmer of happiness near the end of his life, carries satisfaction for not just that film but for an entire functioning body of work. Something similar happened when I watched Tsai Ming-Liang’s Days (2020) earlier this year.
Master Gardener wasn’t good. But it didn’t have to be good, I guess, because Paul Schrader seems to have found some sort of peace, if only a little bit. He is infintesimally more free; he is no longer the suspicion lizard. Takes guts not to be self-effacing all the time. Even if it feels pretty great, in the moment, to erase yourself. Paul has never been farther from the touch of a woman, but he’s never been closer to some future state of grace; it’s lying there in the distance like the castle in Soria Moria.
Paradise springs eternal in the breast of the hope lizard. There’s a palace of gold out there brothers. And this too is a sort of suspicion; a glittering, ephemeral suspicion. Suspicion of a world beyond the bugmode. Suspicion of a love sequestered all around you. Suspicion of a utopia just over the horizon, waiting for you to find your way, even if you have to crawl around on your belly to get there.
hey i said there were some really good scenes in werckmeister, ok? but i stand by it being, as a whole, mostly insufferable
is everyone on substack from sweden or something