Kala Ghoda panel on films and literature

If you're in Mumbai on Feb 8, do try and drop in for a panel discussion on "films and literature" at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival at 8 pm - I'll be on it, as will be Anuvab Pal (who wrote the Disco Dancer book for the Harper Collins film series), Samit Basu and Zac O'Yeah (who are known to enliven anything they participate in) - that's a fine lineup of people, even if I say so myself. And yes, the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book will be available at the venue too.

Full schedule of literature events at Kala Ghoda here.

In Jaipur with Biharis, Swedes and all the other 'chuts'

“At a festival this chaotic,” a friend remarked during one of our many chai breaks on the Diggi Palace lawns, “you have to keep a look out for the small pockets of pleasure – a clever remark made by a favourite writer at an otherwise middling session, an impromptu conversation with someone you chance to meet over lunch. Seize that moment and use it as oxygen to tide you over the next few hours.”

I spent most of this year’s Jaipur lit-fest in a haze, looking for sitting space and finding none, being shepherded hither and thither by a sea of people, or fretting about the panels I was moderating. More than once, I envied the hundreds of book-lovers who had come with plenty of time on their hands and with absolutely no agenda other than to sit down and hear authors talk. For such people, the JLF must be heaven. Not so much for the reporters hunting for “exclusive” quotes or filing multiple stories on harsh deadlines. Or for someone, like yours truly, who can only take so much of crowds.

So after a while, I decided that the only way to survive the madness was to take my friend’s advice and greedily accumulate as many of the nice little moments as possible. A few personal highlights, randomly listed:

– In the course of a warm discussion with Zac O’Yeah, the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell told a funny story about his experiences in a Mozambique town where a police force had only just been introduced, and the protocol between the confused young men who were inducted as policemen and the small-time thieves they had to apprehend was unclear. Thus, you might see a policeman walking down the street holding a freshly caught thief by the scruff of his shirt, but then casually stopping to have his shoes polished – while ordering his detainee to fetch him some cigarettes from a nearby shop, with the latter dutifully complying.

For Mankell, a writer who trades in methodical police procedurals with clearly drawn lines between detectives and civilians, this must have been quite an eye-opener; no wonder he remarked, “It’s fashionable nowadays to say that the world has become very small, but that isn’t true at all – it’s still just as big as it is, and people in one part of it can’t begin to imagine what daily life is like in the other parts.”

– There was also the pleasure of hearing Martin Amis speak about “the myth of decline” – the tendency to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, going as far back as pre-historic cave writings that lamented “Where are they now, the heroes of old?” Discussing the supposed death of the novel, Amis quipped that when the second edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published in the early 17th century, there would have been critics who said, “Well, that’s it, that’s the end of the novel – it has no future.” (Note: if the human mind is hard-wired to think of the past as being forever glorious and the present as being bleak, little wonder I spend so much time reminiscing about the cosier days of the Jaipur lit-fest.)

– Amis being sardonic during his introduction of a talk dramatically titled “The Crisis in American Fiction”: “I’d like to begin by asking these three struggling, panicking American novelists about the ongoing crisis in American fiction.” The writers he was speaking to? Richard Ford. Junot Diaz. Jay McInerney.

– I was unhappy about missing the “Cinema Bhojpuri” session moderated by the incomparable Amitava Kumar, but was gratified when I later heard (from Amitava himself) that he said “Dabangg ek Bhojpuri film hai, behanchod” during the course of the session. (On the other hand, it wasn’t nice to hear about the censoring of Faiza S Khan's reading at the “Pulp” session.)

– Thoroughly enjoyed Jeet Thayil’s reading from his forthcoming novel Narcopolis at a session where I introduced him and CP Surendran. (I think this was shortly before poor CP was attacked by an offence-taking sardar.) Jeet’s reading included a lengthy stream-of-consciousness passage where the word “chut” is used almost as a poetic refrain; the drug-addled narrator employs it to describe all varieties of Indians (except for Maharashtrians). After the session, an audience member asked Jeet the inevitable question “If you hate India and Indians so much, why do you continue living here?” Sigh.

– Had a brief chat with the novelist Marina Lewycka, who joked that when she wrote serious books that intended to probe the human condition, they ended up being nominated for comic prizes, and vice versa. Lewycka, incidentally, leads a fairly quiet life in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and she looked understandably dazed by the largeness of the festival. (While on that, poor Ruskin Bond! He probably saw more people in a single day in Jaipur than he has his entire life in Landour.)

– Following the Popcorn Essayists session, a group of schoolboys came up to me and asked me to sign their lined registers. “Sir, are you involved with Bollywood?” one of them asked as I scrawled my name for the third time. I considered telling them I was Aamir Khan but instead shook my head. Boys and registers vanished in a puff of smoke.

Such was Jaipur.

[If you don’t already have festival reports coming out of your ears, try Google: there’s plenty of media coverage, good and bad. Some really good photos on Mayank Austen Soofi’s blog, for example (the ones above of Kiran Desai and Martin Amis are from him). And the official website is putting up videos of sessions, though some of the links are wrong.]

Literature without the books that comprise it

Excellent post here by Chandrahas about Open magazine's slapdash approach to literary journalism. I've been a fan of Manu Joseph's writing for a long time (and was part of a jury that took approximately 45 seconds to give the Hindu Fiction Award to his novel Serious Men) - in his own work, he shows a sharp eye for detail as well as a natural talent for shaking up long-held notions and providing an off-kilter view of familiar things. But some of the magazine's recent editorial pieces about literature have read like watercooler chats gone awry; forced attempts to be sensationalistic for the sake of it, without thinking an argument through. (When someone sweepingly dismisses books that he hasn't actually read on the basis that the titles "speak for themselves" ... well, I'll just be polite and say that I sweepingly dismiss his rant after having at least done it the courtesy of reading it.) I hope the magazine becomes a little more discriminating soon.

(To Open's credit, it also ran this candid and to-the-point piece by Pramod Kumar KG, the director of the first Jaipur Literature Festival in 2006 - an event that Chandrahas and I attended back when the world was younger and more innocent. Here's a short interview I did with Pramod exactly five years ago today.)

And Chandrahas's observation about tabloidish journalism during the Jaipur lit-fest is spot-on too; more than once, I got the impression that young reporters had been given the brief to cut well-known authors down a peg or two because it would make for piquant copy. Tch.

Random observation...

...from sending dozens of tennis-related SMSes to friends over the past two days: when you type the first four letters of "Amritraj", the text predictor changes it to "Borg". (Now that's what I call an automatic upgrade.)

A compilation post: links, books, films, etc

Off to Jaipur for the lit-fest soon and won't be online much till the 25th, so here are a few reminders/notes about the fest and other things:

- The "Popcorn Essayists" session of readings and conversation with Kamila Shamsie, Anjum Hasan, Namita Gokhale and Jaishree Mishra will be on the 24th, at 10 AM in the Mughal Tent - so if you're at the festival, please try to come for it. (More here.)

- Later on the 24th, I'll be moderating a session with Jerry Pinto and Jaishree at the Baithak; they will also read from their latest work. And I'm in conversation with Kiran Desai on the front lawns on the 22nd afternoon.

- Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 is still available on Flipkart and, I'm told, doing reasonably well. Astonishingly, it can also be found in a few bookstores now (I thought the day would never arrive) so do spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested in narrative writing about cinema. Reviews and general media coverage are on the blog's right sidebar.

- I did this short piece about Jaane bhi do Yaaro as a "concept film" for the Hindustan Times last Sunday; they asked me to do it to accompany a review they were carrying.

- Vinay Lal's Deewaar book is now on Flipkart too. Here's an interesting blog-post by Lal on "the act of writing in Deewaar". (A bit more on that theme in this Time Out feature). And here's a very old post I wrote about Deewaar, a film I intend to see again soon.

- Meanwhile I made my first ever online books purchase a few days ago (from Flipkart): got a replacement copy of an old favourite, Joy Gould Boyum's Double Exposure: Fiction Into Film (a superb analysis of movies adapted from literature), and am waiting eagerly for Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions to be delivered.

- A few things I've been reading: Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the elegant Penguin Modern Classics editions of R K Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets and Waiting for the Mahatma. Will try and write about some of this if I get the time.

- Movies recently seen include Victor Erice's beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive (which I need to see again and perhaps write about). Have also re-watched Satyakam, Aranyer Din Ratri, Out of the Past and The Apartment, and there's been a superb mini-fest of Chaplin films too: City Lights, Modern Times and Limelight. Very satisfying.

Cultures of Peace at the IHC, Delhi

If you're in Delhi this month, Cultures of Peace: A Festival of the Northeast is taking place at the India Habitat Centre on Jan 28 (9.30 AM-6 PM) and Jan 29 (3 PM onwards, with a music concert by the Shillong band Soulmate at 6.30 PM). It's being organised by Zubaan and you'll find information about it on the Facebook events page. Participating writers include Mamang Dai, Sanjoy Hazarika, Mitra Phukan and Temsula Ao. The fest is open to all and no passes are required. (Enlarge pic to see schedule.)

Anonymous and wanting too much: on Andheri and The Naked City

Watching a short film titled Andheri recently, I thought about movies that attempt to capture the character and pulse of a big city. Perhaps the only way to do this is to look at individual stories – at the fears and hopes of the people who populate a metropolis and make it what it is, but who also have an uneasy relationship with it.

Andheri, directed by Sushrut Jain, is a spare, simply told story about a young live-in maid, Anita, who runs away with dreams of leading an independent life. In a bus, she meets a newlywed Muslim girl who has just arrived in Mumbai with her husband, and they strike up a conversation. Then something happens that makes Anita realise how foolhardy it is to try and survive alone in an impersonal world.

I wish the film had been a bit longer (the running time is under 20 minutes and the ending feels a bit abrupt) but I liked that it didn’t try to underline its central point with needless talk. The story is told through the uncertainty on the faces of the two women and their tentative smiles, through images of crowded colonies and tall buildings flashing by, and the comical way in which total strangers collide with each other whenever the bus stops abruptly. But by the end, there’s no escaping the contrast – from Anita’s point of view – between the cold anonymity of life on the streets and the cosy familiarity of the flat where she has to work for a sharp-tongued old woman but where she at least has someone she can call her own (and watch Kasautii Zindagi Kay with). At the same time we get a fleeting sense of the loneliness of the old lady who is probably also, in a different way, a victim of city life.

A video essay on the film’s website mentions that the city of Mumbai, “the most densely populated place in the world, is home to millions of stories of hope and despair”. This observation reminded me of the famous closing line of one of the most vivid “city films” I’ve seen, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” says the film’s narrator at the end, “and this has been one of them.”



The reference is to the population in 1948 of New York – where the film was set – and the line would later become the catchphrase for a popular TV series of the same title (a forerunner of detective/police procedural shows such as NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues). Dassin’s movie, inspired by a book of photos by Arthur Fellig, follows a homicide investigation: when a young model named Jean Dexter is found murdered in her apartment, a team of 10th Precinct detectives headed by the Irishman Lieutenant Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) get to work. A chronic liar who was close to the dead girl soon becomes the chief suspect, but some twists and turns lie ahead, and this entails a lot of legwork for the youngest member of the team, Jimmy Halloran - who, we are told, “had walked halfway across Europe with a rifle in his hand" during the War, and who must now "play Button Button in a city of eight million”.

As Halloran walks the streets and an invisible narrator (journalist-turned-producer Mark Hellinger) comments on the city’s bustling life, the tone of the film starts resembling that of a documentary. This impression is strengthened by the extensive location shooting – very unusual in a mainstream American film of the time – with its many shots of sweaty office-goers taking the crowded train home, and children hosing each other down on the streets. (As Hellinger tells us at the beginning, “This is the city as it is...the hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup.”)

This narrative is consistently engaging (if also a little precious and self-consciously literary at times), but for me one of the most telling scenes is the one at a morgue, where the dead girl’s parents have to identify the body. These are small-town people whose daughter had – in the face of their disapproval – run away from home and become involved with the wrong sorts of people, and the mother initially tries to be detached, then contemptuous, about her wayward child. ("I hate her, I hate her.") But she fails and breaks down, and in her grief we see how the lure of city life can divide families and presage human tragedies. (“Wanting too much – that’s where she went wrong.”) Eventually Jean (not her real name - small-town girls change their names when they move to the city!) became just another statistic, just one of the millions of “stories”, soon to be forgotten. For all the beauty of the film’s locations, it’s possible at this moment to see the city as a mechanical monster greedily gulping down its victims while holding its arms wide open for more.

[Did a shorter version of this for my Business Standard film column. Here's a post about another Dassin film, Brute Force]

A rambling tribute to Red River

Howard Hawks’ 1948 classic Red River is usually described as a Wild West version of Mutiny on the Bounty, and this is certainly true at a superficial level. Basic plot: in the 1850s and 1860s, the single-minded Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) builds a cattle empire and then initiates a drive – with a herd of thousands of animals – from Texas to Missouri. Along the way he becomes so tyrannical and insensitive towards his men that his adopted son Matthew (Montgomery Clift) leads a rebellion against him.

But there's a lot else going on in this multi-layered film. It's a psychological drama built on ambition and lust for power. It’s also an intriguing (though not fully developed) look at gender and familial relations – about fathers and sons, about men who haven’t had a strong female presence in their lives, and about women who shake them up. The film buff can see it as an identifiable Hawks creation, with some of the motifs that ran through this great director’s varied body of work. And there’s even a bit of horror movie buried in it, with innocents being pursued (and haunted in their nightmares) by a seemingly omniscient bogeyman, ready to jump out of the darkness. Who knew that John Wayne could be a prototype for Freddy Krueger!

All that said, Red River is first and foremost a brilliant Western, with everything you could want from the genre. It has an acute sense of history – the struggles of the pioneers and visionaries of the Old West, the constant need to shrug off painful losses, look ahead and move on – and strongly written supporting characters, such as Dunson’s old buddy Groot (played by the always-wonderful Walter Brennan). The location shooting is outstanding; there are cattle-drive and stampede scenes that equal any of John Ford’s action setpieces. (What an experience it must have been to see all this on the big screen!) The film is driven by visual storytelling, a point underlined by the fact that though we get occasional glimpses of a scroll of paper with a handwritten version of the narrative on it, the scroll rarely appears on the screen for more than two or three seconds. It dissolves in and out before the viewer has had time to read the full page – you’re left with a basic impression of the first couple of sentences, which is all you really need, because the camera is speaking so eloquently.


Much of the interest in the film today centres on the contrast in acting styles between old-school leading man Wayne and the young, introspective Clift, who was one of Hollywood’s first major performers from the Method school. Actually the contrast isn’t as pronounced as you might think, because Wayne smartly underplays his role, especially when he portrays Dunson as middle-aged. Here, the swaggering, crinkly-eyed Western hero of the 1930s is replaced by a terse, tight-lipped man, and there’s no doubting Dunson’s hard-headedness. In his overall demeanour one sees something resembling the dogmatism of the religious fundamentalist, and indeed his modus operandi is to calmly outdraw and shoot someone, and then nobly read from his Bible over the dead body. There’s something vaguely touching about this the first time he does it (the victim is the henchman of a powerful land-owner, and at this point Dunson can still be seen as a heroic figure), but soon it becomes creepy. Incidentally the Bible theme leads to an amusing monologue, delivered in a sing-song voice by one of the other men:

Always planting and reading! Fill a man full of lead, plant him in the ground, and then read words at him! Why, when you’ve killed a man, why try to read the Lord in as a partner on the job?

Montgomery Clift's Matthew, on the other hand, is dreamy-eyed and often smiles shyly. He’s a sensitive, almost new-age Western hero who sighs “I’m sorry” after he happens to raise his voice slightly during a conversation – compared to him, even Henry Fonda’s reticent Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine seems like a rugged frontiersman. Despite the Mutiny on the Bounty comparisons, Matt is no Fletcher Christian. Shortly after leading the mutiny, he says of Dunson, “He was wrong”, but then adds with a conflicted look on his face, “I hope I’m right.” This introspection and self-doubt is in direct opposition to Dunson’s proclamation “I’m the law.”

The emotional vulnerability of Clift is on view throughout the film, but one sees a different sort of vulnerability from Wayne, and it’s especially effective because this is the old-world macho man who doesn’t usually show weakness. Wayne is startlingly good in the scenes just after Dunson leads the shooting of three men who were talking about quitting: watch the paranoid way in which he jerks his head around and says “Where are you going?” when he sees Matt walking away, or the way he looks at another man who he thinks might be reaching for his holster. You get the sense that Dunson inwardly realises he is being unreasonable, but that he can’t swallow his pride. Soon he becomes a control freak, refusing to sleep so he can keep an eye on all the men, all the time (this is, of course, an indication that he realises he can no longer trust anyone).

The sleeplessness motif will be repeated later in the film, when Matt and his men are plagued by nightmares about the vengeful Dunson tracking them down. (“Every time you turn around, expect to see me, because one day you’ll turn around and I’ll be there.”) You won’t see many other great Westerns populated by insomniac and fearful men, but like I said, this film is a genre-bender. The fog in the night scenes also creates a look and atmosphere that is very unusual for a Western – you can cut the tension with a knife.

In fact, some of the later scenes in Red River remind me of two other great films made in the same year: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (with gold prospectors driven by greed, eventually in danger of losing their sanity) and – would you believe it – Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet. Think about the Danish prince being approached on a misty night by his father’s ghost, and then watch the scene in Red River where Matt wanders restlessly about on a foggy night, dreading Dunson’s arrival.

In Olivier’s film, the role of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude was played by an actress who was more than a decade younger than Olivier – this underlined the story’s Oedipal theme, turning the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius relationship into a twisted romantic triangle. In Red River, the main female character Tess has a similarly ambiguous relationship with both Dunson and Matt.

Men, women and Hawks

Many of Hawks’ movies are about men who live in a confined, emotionally limiting world, surrounded mostly by other men (or, in one memorable case, by dinosaur bones!) until a woman comes along and becomes a disruptive force, or a stabilising influence, or both. (On occasion, it’s possible to read the male relationships as being deeper than just strong friendship – watch the way the young cowboy Cherry Valance looks at Matt the first time they meet, and the subsequent gunplay between them, and tell me it isn’t vaguely homoerotic.)

There are two women in Red River; they are never seen together, but there is a strong symmetry in their roles, and in how they affect the central relationship between Dunson and Matt. Very early in the film, the young Dunson loses his girl Fen in an Indian attack (after he’s told her not to accompany him – he’ll return for her later). The very next morning, the boy Matt comes into his life, eventually becoming his adoptive son. Fourteen years later, shortly after the conflict between Dunson and Matt, Tess (Joanne Dru) enters the picture, becomes romantically involved with Matt, and sets about playing agony aunt and relationship-mender (in a striking scene where she wears a flowing black gown, she looks very much like a maternal, Madonna figure).

When Matt leaves Tess behind, promising to return for her later, it’s a repeat of Dunson’s promise to Fen, but with a twist: shortly afterwards, Dunson arrives and agrees to take Tess with him. He’s showing some flexibility for the first time, which represents a major progression in his character – it should help the viewer prepare for a reconciliation and a happy ending.

Unfortunately, the actual climax – with Tess breaking up a display of machismo between Dunson and Matt – is too abrupt, and jarringly shifts the tone from grand tragedy to homely farce. I think this same ending could have worked better if it had been drawn out a little more, and if the Tess character had been given more importance in the lead up to it. Perhaps she could have been played by a bigger star – someone like Barbara Stanwyck, or even Olivia De Havilland – so that she became the film’s belated third lead. (And how about Lauren Bacall, who had stood up so well to Humphrey Bogart in two earlier Hawks classics, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep?) But the role as it’s written is too marginal – almost an afterthought – to sustain such an idea. Tess isn’t quite the equal of the “Hawksian women” from other films. (While on that, see this piece by Germaine Greer.)

If it were possible for an otherwise great film to be ruined by its last one minute, this would be a candidate. But Red River is such a complex and satisfying movie in other respects that it almost doesn’t matter; when you think about it a few days after watching it, you’ll only remember the good bits. And wish you could see it in 70 mm.

Related posts: on the John Wayne star persona in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and on A Streetcar Named Desire (which also had two leads who represented different acting styles – also see the comments discussion).

The all-encompassing review, and related thoughts on film writing

Baradwaj Rangan has a great piece here about reviewing - do take the time to read it all the way through if you're at all interested in what a good review can and should be. I've touched on some of these points myself at various times on this blog, but he brings them together superbly.

Incidentally, a few weeks ago I was speaking with Baradwaj about the ways in which people react to film reviews, and we agreed that one of the most annoying varieties of feedback a reviewer can get is when someone says, “Nice piece, but you didn’t say anything about the music [or about such-and-such song]”. Or “Nice piece, but why didn’t you mention XYZ’s performance?” Or “Nice piece, but what about that shot – you know, the one where Aishwarya dangles artistically from the tree branch before falling in slow motion?”

This sort of thing derives from a long-established culture of mainstream movie writing in India, where reviewers are expected to touch on every imaginable element in a film in 400 or fewer words (while not saying very much of worth about anything) – in other words, to be a one-stop shop for information. The idea of a review as an analytical, personal take on a film, where the writer might selectively discuss the things he found most stimulating – and ignore everything else – is sadly still a radical one.

Of course, even a lengthy film review in a journal usually doesn’t run beyond 1,500 or so words and I think most people would ultimately concede that there are a limited number of things you can write about in that space. But what happens when you do an entire book about a single film? In such a case, can the writer still concentrate on what he chooses to, or does he have some sort of moral obligation (all those poor trees!) to be “holistic”, to present the mythical Complete Picture?

I’ve had to think about this question ever since I started working on the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book. JBDY is a very interesting movie to write about, with many potential talking points. It was made by a group of people whose ideologies reflected the times they lived in, as well as the discontent of a generation that came of age in the late 60s and early 70s. And because it’s a polemical film in some ways, I’ve been asked a few times already if I’ve written at length about the socio-political backdrop of the time.

My answer is no, I haven’t written explicitly about this, though it is lightly woven into the main narrative, which is about the circumstances that led to the making of the film against many odds. I found the movie’s back-story, with its many twists and turns, fascinating: to begin with, I was intrigued by the series of events that led someone like Kundan Shah – a man from a business family – into a creative field. I was also intrigued by the strange workings of the moviemaking process and by the very different sort of movie Jaane bhi do Yaaro might easily have become, given what its original English-language script was like. Those are talking points too, and though they might not appear to have the “wider relevance” that a socio-political focus would have, they can tell us interesting things about how a work of art comes into existence, and why it strikes a chord with an audience in a particular time and place.

Besides, eventually, I had to do the sort of writing that I was confident of doing – and which employed my own strengths as a journalist/reviewer – rather than force myself into writing the sort of book that I might not be best suited for.

I know people who are bemused by the idea of a book about a single movie: how much can you write before you simply run out of things to say? But to the contrary, I think it would be possible for 20 writers to produce 20 good books on the same film, taking entirely different approaches, and without at all intruding on each other’s space. (This would have to remain a hypothetical situation, of course – no commercial publishing industry would permit such an apparently self-indulgent venture!)

In the best-case scenario, the books that would emerge wouldn’t just be “about the film” in a narrow, confined sense – they would be at least equally about the authors, and about the many ways in which it’s possible to respond to a creative work. (One of my favourite film books, Peter Conrad’s obsessively detailed The Hitchcock Murders, was as much about the author’s private fears and paranoias – and how Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema had tapped into them, intensified them and occasionally even provided a form of release – as it was about the movies themselves.) Film writing of this sort, when done well, can be very rewarding for the writer as well as for the reader. And it has no pretence to being all-encompassing.

Popcorn essays at the Jaipur Literature Festival

Update: the schedule for this year's edition of the Jaipur lit-fest is now online - check this link. And here's the line-up of participating writers and speakers.

On January 24, Anjum Hasan, Kamila Shamsie, Namita Gokhale, Jaishree Misra and I will be in a session centred around The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies Do to Writers, the film-essay anthology I've edited for Tranquebar. The ladies will read from the pieces they've written for the book (topics include 1980s Bollywood gossip, the Kaurismaki brothers, the case for censorship, and the relationship between the language of prose and the language of film) and there will be a light discussion as well, hopefully with much audience participation. Do try to drop in for the session - it should be fun (with the side-benefit that you might just run into Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee or Junot Diaz sipping kulhar chai on the lawns outside!).

P.S. Here, for anyone who missed it earlier, is Manil Suri's piece for the anthology, excerpted this month in Caravan magazine. And here's his Helen dance which, sadly, will not be replicated at the Jaipur fest.

Noir’s arc - notes on an excellent anthology

I don’t spend much time in bookstores these days (it’s the old conundrum: most of my reading is for review purposes), but one of my favourite recent buys was the anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. Thirty-five stories in all, beginning with Tod Robbins’ 1923 “Spurs” (this quaint tale about a dwarf’s obsession with a beautiful bareback rider formed the basis for Tod Browning’s creepy film Freaks) and including such writers as Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.

“The thrill of noir,” writes Ellroy in his Introduction, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.”

And then: “The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.”

Making doom fun – that’s a good way of putting it. Noir, French for “black”, was thoroughly incorporated into American popular culture in the 1940s – through a series of pulp novels and “film noirs” – until it came to stand for the dark and unknowable places in the human heart, and the character types are familiar even to readers who don’t know the genre well: the femme fatale who spins a fatal web around her victim; the morally weak patsy who helps her get rid of her husband for the insurance money; the hard-boiled detective with demons of his own. Needless to say, there are few happy endings in this world.

It isn’t easy to do a comprehensive review of an anthology that contains 35 stories, most of which are very good, so here are some short notes:

– I used to think of noir as relevant mainly to literature and films produced between the 1930s and 1950s, and indeed this book includes some solid, representative work from that period: I particularly liked Steve Fisher’s “You’ll Always Remember Me” (1938), David Goodis’s “Professional Man” (1953) and James M Cain’s bucolic, darkly funny “Pastorale” (1928) about a murder followed by problematic attempts to dispose of a bodiless head. But to my own surprise, some of the most impressive stories are from the past few decades. Twenty-one of the 35 pieces included here were written from the 1970s onward, and some of them intriguingly challenge the reader’s expectations of the genre and its tropes.

For example, Thomas H Cook’s intense “What She Offered” begins with a very familiar scenario – a weary, self-consciously cynical male narrator being approached by a mysterious woman in a bar (“What she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman”). But from here, the story heads in a completely unexpected direction – it turns out that what this woman really has to offer the narrator is the emasculating knowledge that “her darkness is real; mine is just a pose”. I thought there was also a sly little observation about self-important writers and their knowing readers, and the story's beginning reminded me a little of Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".

– Some of the recent stories are more sexually explicit and daring than stories written in the 1930s could be. Take Andrew Klavan’s “Her Lord and Master”, a disturbing take on the power equation in gender relationships, with a female protagonist who preys on men by stoking their appetite for violent sex games. The classic theme of the femme fatale using her wiles on a gullible sucker is given a very different spin here, and I doubt that the old masters like Mickey Spillane, Mackinlay Kantor and Cornell Woolrich (all of whom also feature in this collection) could have published something like this, even though much of their work was often controversial and politically incorrect in its own time.

– A special word for the longest story in this collection: Harlan Ellison’s powerful and literate “Mefisto in Onyx” is about a black man with a very special – and, to him, a very troubling – ability to “jaunt” into the minds of other people and scan their mental “landscapes”. To Rudy’s dismay, an old friend – a woman with whom he had a sexual liaison once – asks him to scan the mind of a convicted serial killer, whom she believes to be innocent. (The premise is slightly similar to that in Tarsem Singh’s excellent film The Cell.) I won’t give much away, except to say that the story climaxes with a fascinating game of one-upmanship and one twist following on the heels of another. It’s also one of the very few pieces in this collection that has anything resembling a “happy ending”, though given what has led up to it one can never be too sure. Incidentally, Lawrence Block’s gripping “Like a Bone in the Throat” is also about a series of mental games between two men: a rapist/killer and the brother of one of his victims.

– And some personal favourites that I haven’t mentioned above: David Morrell’s “The Dripping”, Brendan Dubois’s melancholy “A Ticket Out”, Chris Adrian’s “Stab”, and especially William Gay’s very dark and poetic “The Paperhanger”, about the strange disappearance of a little girl while her mother was just a few feet away. Also, Ellroy's own "Since I don't Have You", set in the 1940s and prominently featuring real-life figures Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen.

The Best American Noir of the Century is a reminder that though the themes and narrative arcs of noir might appear to be limited in scope, their treatment isn’t. Reading these stories you never get a sense of repetition: in nearly every case, the characters’ actions and choices lead to the inevitable cul de sac, but it turns out that there are different ways to get there - as well as many forking, unexplored paths that might just have led them to a sunnier place.

P.S. The Windmill Books edition I have is missing four of the stories that were in the original publication, including one by Joyce Carol Oates. Pity.