Sometimes when I’m browsing the library DVD section I let Mr. Alphabet pick out my movies, or at least narrow the field, which is how I wound up this week with W.C. Fields’s The Bank Dick, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, and a British television miniseries from the 1970s called The Brontës of Haworth. Blowup was the only one I had seen before, but I saw it so long ago that it was almost as if I had never seen it at all. I did have this vague memory of hearing my dad call it one of his favorite movies, which might not have happened but really should not surprise anyone if it did because my dad is a man, and Blowup is for men, especially men who were in their early 20s in 1966, when it came out, like my freshly minted father.

Not to knock the cinematography, which is rather gruelingly pretty, and the soundtrack, which boasts the Yardbirds and Herbie Hancock, and the overall stylishness of the whole Swinging London package, but I’m going to risk my rewarding career as a Facebook public library DVD critic and say something that is guaranteed to make people I like think less of me. Here goes: Blowup is kind of dumb. (But pretty! Like Twilight the movie or certain Vashti Bunyan songs!) It is dumb in the same way that paperback romance novels and chick-flick rom-coms are dumb, and don’t let any dude who condescends to those art forms tell you that Blowup is a great movie, fancy Italian director notwithstanding. What it is is the ultimate male fantasy movie, and it’s not so bad if you’re a lady either. Watching Blowup at its best is like coming across a stack of mid-‘60s British Vogue magazines, or having that dream again, the one in which you suddenly have perfectly straight bangs and extralong eyelashes and your boyfriend is the young Ray Davies. Watching Blowup at its worst is really not so bad at all, as long as you can engage in the same suspension of disbelief practiced by soap-opera viewers and Penthouse Forum readers, not to mention mime fans, for whom the last 10 or 15 minutes of this movie must be the ultimate porn.

It’s about this guy, Thomas something, who lives in the coolest time in the world, in the coolest city in the world, with the coolest job in the world. He photographs high-fashion magazine models and other pretty young women when he’s not lying on top of them or teaching them how to move or making them close their eyes while he leaves the studio for more exciting activities. In addition to a glamorous career, a dreamy convertible, and a full head of golden hair, this Thomas fellow is a serious artist. When he’s not getting paid to grind himself against emaciated women, he’s taking serious pictures, the kind championed by bearded gallery curators: black-and-whites of starving prisoners, war victims, doss house denizens. But Thomas, it turns out, despite having the perfect job and the perfect life, is not satisfied. Like so many great artists before him, he takes the longer, more transcendent view, the one that includes threesomes with aspiring teenage models and possible blackmail but does not rule out angst about same. At one point in the movie, Thomas says, “I’m fed up with these bloody bitches. I wish I had a ton of money. Then I’d be free.” It’s like he’s singing the universal dude anthem. It’s “life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money” for the Carnaby Street set. Thank you! Yes, I would like my bare breasts and marijuana pipes with a side of mimes and Mary Quant outfits.

In 1966 it must have all seemed intoxicatingly edgy, the strung-out model who falsely maintains that she is in Paris, the naked girls play-fighting, the young Jeff Beck smashing his guitar against his malfunctioning Vox amplifier (Antonioni, it turns out, couldn’t afford the Who or even the Velvet Underground), and, oh, yeah, spoiler alert, the MIMES playing tennis. To 2009 viewers the iconic closing scene may seem a little pretentious, but it pays not to be too picky. Blowup is one of those movies that you can watch for the clothes, or the cars, or the possibility that you’ll trigger the beautiful dream again, the one with you and your bangs and Ray Davies, your boyfriend.

Let the Right One In is a very beautiful film about shame and suffering. First we get the merciless whiteness of Sweden, the silvery birches, the sparkling snow, the incandescently Caucasian boy-hero reflected in a window overlooking more snow—and then, suddenly, the immaculate is maculated: A regular middle-aged human, of the murderous psychopath variety, hangs a kid’s body upside down from a tree so he can drain the blood from the dead kid’s head. He uses a funnel. A funnel! Somehow this ordinary household object makes the scene more horrifying than a football field of fangs.

And also funny! The carcass is discovered by an extravagantly coiffed white Standard Poodle named Vicky, who laps up the bloody snow. This is also horrifying, also funny. And then we get to the real story, which is just as much romance as horror. Oskar, the almost-albino 12-year-old protagonist, spends much of his free time exacting revenge on imaginary enemies, proxies for the boys who bully him at school. While stabbing trees and practicing his tough-guy repartee in the playground of his Socialist Moderne apartment complex, he meets Eli, a reluctant vampire who resembles a pubescent Polly Jean Harvey. One of the first things Oskar says to her is, “You smell funny.” (It turns out that she kind of starts to rot after she hasn’t eaten for a while.) They fall in love. She teaches him to punch back. He kisses her gore-spattered mouth. In what might be the sweetest love scene ever filmed, he shivers against her naked body and asks her if she wants to go steady. To which she responds, “I’m not a girl.” To which he responds, “Oh. Do you want to go steady or not?”

Let the Right One Inis not so much about how vampires are terrifying as it is about how terrifying it is to be a vampire. Eli, it turns out, is living with the homicidal funnel guy because she doesn’t want to kill for the blood she needs to survive. When she finally gets hungry enough to hunt down her own prey—a flannel-clad nice guy whom she lures under an overpass—it’s a little scary, but mostly it’s just sad. After feeding, she breaks his neck quickly and efficiently, to put him out of his misery (and spare him hers), and then she sobs over his corpse. Later, a fortyish blonde woman, another one of Eli’s victims, wakes up and realizes that she has become a vampire. How does she know? The morning sun is excruciating, and the traces of blood around the puncture wounds in her neck smell unexpectedly delicious. She kills herself, which is, I suspect, what most people would do in this situation. Somehow Eli seems even braver and more tragic by comparison, even though it is technically all her fault, since killing herself would have prevented her from turning the fortyish blonde woman into a vampire who needed to kill herself.

Turning people into vampires is bad, it’s true, but most of the evil in Let the Right One In is human generated. The boys who torment Oskar are both perfectly cruel and perfectly ordinary. Such boys breed like flies in middle schools, and they kill more kids than vampires ever have. We know that to see them bleed would be Oskar’s greatest bliss, but he holds back, trembling. Apart from one triumphant scene on a frozen lake, Oskar is the one who gets hurt. His submission to this role is the measure of his character, if not his heroism. One of the questions Let the Right One In asks, and variously answers, is, “What is the proper response to evil?” Depending on the circumstances, the best choice could be (a) just stand there still and stoic while the mean boy whips you in the face with a stick; (b) smack the mean boy really hard with a steel pole and rip his ear off; (c) wait for your missing vampire girlfriend to chop off the head of the mean boy before he is able to drown you.If it sounds like I’m making fun of this movie, I’m sorry that I’m not doing a better job describing exactly how great it is, in all of its gooey, gobbety little particulars. Vampires are, after all, pretty disgusting, and gussying them up into Debussy-playing, professionally mussed tween idols, à la Twilight, is a bit of a cop out. Let the Right One In never denies the disgusting: the dark clots that stain Eli’s face, the strange odors, the shame (all perfect metaphors for menarche, if finding metaphors is your thing). What makes Let the Right One In more than another silly kill flick is its humanity. Yes, people are cruel and stupid, and they exude all manner of revolting fluids, but they’re worth loving, even when they’re as hopelessly Other as a girl vampire, an exhausted girl vampire who has to kill to live.

Pockmarked, miserable,

Hides his paunch in pleated pants.

Fela Kuti fan.

For reasons that I won’t begin to explore but that probably have a lot to do with prescription painkillers, I rented and watched Last Days last night, which is GVS’s Kurt Cobain movie, except there’s no Nirvana music in it. I think I read somewhere that this is because GVS couldn’t get permission, but I’m inclined to think that it’s all part of GVS’s filmic perversity, his libido for the tedious, because, whatever your feelings about Cobain, a few examples of what he did best would have livened up this movie considerably. Maybe GVS was thinking that showing Cobain in a mostly music-free context would bring out other, more interesting facets of his personality, but the fact is, muttering, cross-dressing, guitar-abusing indie-rock dudes on heroin don’t have a lot of facets. Invite one to crash on your couch for a few days, and you’ll see what I mean.This is not to say that Last Days is completely music free. Michael Pitt, the actor who plays Blake, the character based on Cobain, indulges in some laughably subpar Nirvanaisms, in addition to some slightly more interesting noise/improv attempts, and there’s one scene in which his chemically altered bandmates and their fuckbuddy bliss out (predictably) to the Velvet Underground. There is also a very strange, very long shot that consists of an entire Boyz II Men video, as seen on a television set being watched by Blake. I had to keep checking the DVD box to see if Last Days was supposed to be in real time, like 24 or something, because I could have sworn at least 48 hours had elapsed by that point. According to the credits, Thurston Moore was the music consultant for the movie. I wish I could Twitter him (“B2M? WTF!”), but I can’t, so the no doubt fascinating boy-band/grunge connection will forever remain a mystery.

But there’s no denying that GVS movies are pretty, and it’s not just because he stuffs them with pretty people and pretty landscapes (this one also has a lot of pretty furniture, but I can’t say that’s a constant in his movies). I think, when it comes right down to brass tacks, I must like GVS movies because I find them soothing. As a director, he would make a very good still-life artist.

OK, I’m about to return my DVD of Alban Berg’s Lulu to the St. Louis Public Library, and having just finished watching it (three acts, almost exactly three hours) and then scanning through to watch certain scenes again, I want to take this opportunity to urge everyone to obtain this DVD by any means necessary. (Production details appear at the end of this post.)Here are three reasons you owe it to yourself to watch this opera:

1. The story, based on two once-banned plays by Frank Wedekind, is perfectly sordid and perfectly insane. It’s about a woman, the eponymous heroine, who is so desirable that she destroys everyone who falls in love with her, which amounts to everyone who has anything to do with her whatsoever, from a doofy schoolboy in shorts (voiced by the sturdy and sparkling Patricia Bardon) to a statuesque, raven-tressed countess, to the professor son of her doctor husband, whom she shot to death with his own gun (granted, in self-defense). Lulu is sung by soprano Christine Schäfer, luminous in her strawberry blondness, flapper dresses, and melting coloratura. The story’s premise, of course, is deeply antifeminist–yet another femme fatale-gets-hers plot–but the relentless gorgeousness of Berg’s music, especially Lulu’s arias, makes it impossible to do anything but love, admire, and, yes, love Lulu. Her amoral innocence is the purest thing onstage, and it’s easy to see why all her inferiors would ruin themselves for her. Berg makes her irresistible and then, in the usual ways (e.g., death, penury, alcoholism, madness) punishes everyone for failing to resist her. It’s like one of those Eve setups, but there’s no fortunate fall. Lulu goes from being a grande dame to a circus acrobat (in a very fetching tutu) to a boho slut to a prisoner to a fugitive to a lowly street hooker, and then, money shot, she gets murdered (offstage) by Jack the Ripper. That, hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère, is entertainment.

2. The DVD box refers to the score as “intensely beautiful,” and that phrase pretty much sums it up, as long as you give the adverb and adjective equal weight. Like a lot of twentieth-century music, it definitely has its dissonances, a kind of craggy inaccessibility, the melodies lurching off like sad alley drunks, the high notes sharp as ice picks. However, there are also shiver-generating lyrical passages, usually when Schäfer is singing, and they’re all the more beautiful, intensely beautiful, pressed up against the atonal parts.

3. The lyrics (not being a German speaker, I’m relying on the subtitle translations) will slay you, I promise. Just a random selection: (1) “When I look in the mirror, I want to be a man. I want to be my own husband.” Lulu confesses this cheerfully, without a hint of shame; her son-in-law, her husband’s adult son, who is, like everyone else, in love with her, knows exactly what she means: “You envy him the pleasure you will bring.” (2) “Divinely gifted people like you make criminals of the rest of us.” Lulu gets blamed for everything, but everything is most expressly not her fault, since you can’t blame someone for being divinely gifted. (3) “There are moments when one’s innermost self seems to collapse before one’s eyes.” How true! How German! (4) “Don’t forget I killed your father.” The allure of that line goes without saying. (5) “You animal, you drag me through the gutter to die a martyr’s death.” Because such statements are what make opera opera and not major-network situational comedy.

The London Philharmonic, conductor Andrew Davis, 1996/2003, Kultur.com

Listening: Dawn Upshaw: White Moon, 1996, Nonesuch; Lydian Quartet: Charles Ives, String Quartets; Super Furry Animals: Dark Days/Light Years; Neko Case: Middle Cyclone.

Reading: Alice Munro: The View from Castle Rock (short stories).

Common Grace

Common grace differs from special, in that it influences only by assisting of nature; and not by imparting grace, or bestowing anything above nature. —Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light”

A drop of mercy from your forehead:

You, naturally, above me. If I struggle

it’s because you love to see me give in

to your gift, collecting this other grace.

I flatten like doctrine, a vessel for the exchange

under nature.

To this they fell, and we accept the strange fruit

left-overs, their posterities of sweet decay. The skin

salts over

in response. So much body: to touch is to cross Kansas,

to fall

shuddering by the highway, burying pieces of the

beautiful abomination. You only want to come

home while flesh covers bone. No grace is imparted

to mask this delicious terror, to preserve

our faces falling to softness.

Nothing is delivered here but ordinary mercy.

—René Spencer

(A note: This qualifies as juvenilia for sure, with every pretension the term implies. It actually was published in a Washington University Literary journal, the name of which I have forgotten. I think it was published in 1988 or 1989, when I was still an undergraduate. And not yet married; hence the short byline.)