Project Hipster

From the first sentence, which is, let’s count them, 122 words long, it became clear that I would be in this novel for the long haul. A fair bit of my life has kind of fallen apart and shifted about and been rebuilt anew since I cracked that first page and read “Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware—the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen…” (that’s not a close approach to the first landmarking Period, not by a long shot) but never mind that collapse. We carry on the Project. You may notice in that Excerpt that there are a great many Letters of the Capital Variety. Apparently this was a Trend in real 18th-century Writing, that almost every Noun is capitalized for Emphasis on its Importance (Tumblr does this too sometimes.) Apparently I haven’t actually read much 18th century writing, because I had to look this up to figure out why the fuck there was so much uppercase. Pynchon throws this style on the reader hard at first, going harder on it than the actual documents he’s emulating or parodying, and it slowly ebbs. The sim-historical prose gets easier, but that’s merely an er; I’d never say it gets easy, but it does get captivating. Reading Mason & Dixon involves a bit of immersion, as the reader must by necessity put aside their modern tastes for the English language and accept a process of compartmentalization, each word understood for itself, assembling into a clause to then be understood, then a sentence composed thereof, a paragraph composed hence of sentences contained within’t, and a page, an assemblage of assemblages of assemblages, takes on the feel of a genuine achievement ‘pon completion. And there are 800 of the things.

History is a puzzle, a maze of sources that may have nothing to do with modern thinking, and it’s very hard to find a single definitive True Story in all the stories that are told. That’s a major theme of Mason & Dixon, and that’s why we start with a frame narrative. That wintery scene of the first sentence brings the reader into a cozy family Christmas in the early years after the American Revolution. The children gather around the chair of their favourite uncle and storyteller, the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke. Pynchon loves his funny names. Rev. Spritecranberry here has told the children stories about “the escape from Hottentot-Land, the Accursèd Ruby of Mogok, the Ship-Wrecks in Indies East and West,” all of which I would also like to hear. But this snowy afternoon, the youngsters ask, why haven’t you ever told a story about America?

And so Rev. Vanillarootbeer begins a story about America, not in America. In fact we remain not in America for a long time, not in America for a quarter-thousand pages. First we must meet our two America-makers, figures whose names echo through the States’ divided history and culture unto its contemporary sundering, but whose lives are known to history only really in outline, allowing Pynchon to sketch characters within the lines.

I’ve never seen the Mason-Dixon line. Odds are that I won’t, anytime soon. I don’t have much of an impression fixed in my mind of how the eastern states are shaped in their precise borders. This is to say, I didn’t know that it was a straight line, perhaps the first border to lie perfectly east-west along a parallel for hundreds of miles. I did know, although I haven’t known it for especially long, I didn’t learn it in school or anything, that it divided the slaving South from the nominally liberated North; I did know that it was the line along which the meth lab downstairs was sliced in twain in its deadly civil war; and I did know that it remains the line roughly demarcating a crowd of populism, simmering racism, and lingering resentment, currently being exploited by the villains of our day to tear open and bleed the sutures of that scar.

I didn’t know that it took its name from two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who laid out the line to settle a dispute between the Penn clan (aha!) of Pennsylvania, and the Marylanders who don’t seem to equally be named Mary, in the years before the Declaration. Pynchon chooses to cast Mason as the pessimistic, gothic widower, a somewhat dismal character to follow as he is literally haunted by his lost love, but one necessary to the contrast of any great bromance. To the point of that contrast, here comes Jeremiah Dixon, a Quaker, whom we as modern folk are inclined to think of as gentle yet conservative oatmeal-box Amish types, forgetting that the original Society of Friends were universalist, progressive, anti-slavery, anti-monarchy, anti-hierarchy pacifist radicals. In fact, with their deck retro hats, I’d hesitantly say that the Quakers of Dixon’s time could be called a sort of pre-Génération Perdue proto-hipster. Pynchon’s Dixon, then, is a bit of a party animal, hitting the town wherever the pair of friends may go, to cavort and sing and drink in taverns and learn all there is to learn of fun in the 18th century. A good chunk of the fun dialogue, once the reader can figure out what the fuck they’re actually talking about, contrasts Mason’s gloom with Dixon’s cheer. The two will amicably argue over anything, too: wine or beer, coffee or tea, and further even more philosophical arguments.

Where they go, by the way, is first to Portsmouth, where… hang on, a fucking talking dog?

Yes, a talking dog, a sophisticated and intelligent Learnèd English Terrier, hanging out in a showroom at the back of a Portsmouth tavern and singing for meat. That’s a strange aside into surrealism that seems totally out of place in the early chapters, although we’ll come to learn that the magical and unscientific and impossible is pretty important in this hipper version of history. We’ll return to that.  Remember: per the frame story of Reverend Gingerale, this is a story told to entertain a motley family crowd by the fire in dark post-solstice days. So our narrator might just be adding in some silly stuff for entertainment’s own sake—right?

From Portsmouth, the pair trauma-bond when their ship, bound for Sumatra to observe the transit of Venus over the Sun, is fired upon by a marauding French frigate. Rather than Sumatra, the royally contracted astronomers (not yet surveyors, not at this moment at least) land in Dutch Cape Town. Here we see colonialism at its worst: morally bankrupt Dutch townies keeping slaves from beyond their walls while never venturing to discover if there might be any beauty or worth to that further country. In this walled isolation, slaves and children seem to seek pleasureless sexual sadism because what else is there to do when you’re too afraid of the land you’ve stolen and raped to actually venture into it? 

This admittedly harder to read early section builds to the Transit of Venus itself. Something is made here, I think, of how planets alone in the sky are deified points seemingly glowing from their own light, sources of magic and zodiacal force through all preceding human history; but in front of the Sun, the deity becomes a solid, dark, earthly sphere. The pursuit of science grants objective knowledge, but is something of the magic lost?

After South Africa, we sail to remote St. Helena, not yet the site of the yet-unborn Napoleon’s exile, where the relentless wind drives men insane. Then it’s back home to London, where there’s frankly somewhat dull politics and family drama.

But that’s where we are, thematically, when the contract arrives for Mason & Dixon to lay out the borders of the fledgling American colonies. We’re thinking about colonialism and the relationship of the colonizing class to the colonized land; we’re thinking about science in the Age of Reason and its imposition in a way on the preceding world of medieval magical mystery; we’re thinking about the worlds of the maddening wild vs the dull political civilized.

And off we go.

In Philadelphia there are some fun meetings with figures of later importance. Benjamin Franklin is of course a hipster magician-scientist, playing with electricity and eels. Even Pynchon can’t make George Washington all that interesting, if I’m being honest, although there’s some emphasis on his slaves. And Dixon gets a “Say that again?” moment with Thomas Jefferson.

And then, we come to it at last: the line, the line! Chains stretched between marked theodolite-sights, following the stars to find a perfect latitude, and a swath of trees chopped down around it in a perfect “visto,” at first through farms and flatlands, and then— look at those ripples—up and over the forested ridges of the Appalachians.

Here’s where the weirdness starts to creep into the story in force, and the book really takes off for its unpredictability. I don’t want to spoil all the delightfully surreal aspects—the aliens and anachronistic technology and impossible botany and geological revelations and secret colleges. The Swedish lumberjacks are not what they seem. It makes sense, looking back, that this would come in here. Even if it is Reverend Pineapplefanta adding in some storytellers’ liberties, it meshes well with our Surveyors and their ever-growing-and-then-dwindling camp of followers pushing into the wilderness beyond the coastal plain, passing over the mountains they never could in South Africa into the world of the wild, the uncivilized, the unscientific past.

Oh, and the invention of Star Trek.

Into the travelling party, as the ridges grow wilder, comes then a Chinese mystic to lay down some feng shui truth: an unnatural straight line is a conduit for bad energy, and the longer the line, the stronger its power. All of nature follows contours, but our surveyors are cutting the very representation of enclosure and geometric determinism into old, mystic mountains, dividing them, cutting it all in half like a fine-honed razor over the great turtle’s throat. The journey takes them into realms of magic, but its purpose is to slice it into civilized monotony, and so the mystic becomes tragic as its observers can only see it in bringing about its end. 

Maybe that’s the American tragedy.

I give this hipster book four miles, three chains, and seven links.

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the sixth result for "Hipster," "Hipster Lit: If You Haven't Read 'em, Pretend You Have;" which is to say, the list of books printed in Lanham, R, The Hipster Handbook, 2003.

Up next: it's milk again.

Hook is separated from the squad as night falls and tension breaks out into actual violence on the worn-brick Belfast streets. Here we’re into shaky cameras following characters at speed down tight alleys, and low shots lit by bursts of fire from molotov cocktails. There's a sparse, tense, synthy score. All of this is more or less the visual language you’d expect a 2014 movie to use for this sort of thing, but it’s well directed all the same, with coherent, claustrophobic action that conceals a tight budget.

In the night, Hook meets a radicalized young boy who’s sworn himself to the Loyalist side of the conflict. You know it, you love it, maybe you’re a bit tired of it after a decade, it’s the lone wolf and cub plot. The angry young lad calls the other side “Catholic bastards” or “Fenian bastards;” from an ignorant Canadian perspective, this latter is funny because that word is here most associated with a meme-level flop of a 19th-century rebellion, so it’d be like calling someone in the late twentieth century a fucking Decembrist. Then there’s the boy's people, a little Loyalist sect that he’s somehow connected to (his uncle is among them?) and that also has some connection to the army itself. The theme of corruption and the immorality of guerrilla tactics within nominally one’s own country would probably hit harder if I could figure out who was who. Because then there’s a little gaggle of Republicans— how’s that for a word that’s been corrupted on an international scale— including Barry Keoghan, an actor I always enjoy seeing but who isn’t given a ton to work with here. Keoghan plays Sean, a family teen “conflicted” (you can tell he’s conflicted because he stares into the middle distance a lot) about getting wrapped up in the escalating violence. Then there’s an already disillusioned ex-army man, and his daughter, and all of these factions have vague connections between various largely indistinct characters. It’s trying to be a sprawling interconnected thing, but aside from the boy, the father and Barry Keoghan, none of these many side characters are really distinct enough to hold their own in the little screentime given to them. In showing the complexity and tension of a city torn apart by politics and religion and history, and the human cost of violence, it sells it, but at the cost of every character individually. For that reason it’s hard for me to say the cast should be trimmed down, but hard for me to think it needs everyone it does. With stronger filmmaking throughout, maybe ‘71 could wield its big cast into being a proper big Scorcesian epic slow-burn. As it is, two hours is definitely enough.

The plot does build tension as the factions converge for an inevitable showdown in an apartment complex that sort of works but doesn’t give too much to really show off as a big final set piece. Heading into this climax, the movie transitions unfortunately into the olive drab colour grading that plagued movies of the period. The ending and resolution isn’t anything too surprising for Hook’s character as it’s set up, but it works alright. Really that’s what you could say about ‘71 as a whole: it works alright. Maybe my personal disconnect from the subject matter hindered my engagement with this movie, or maybe it helped.

Why is ‘71 hipster? I don’t really know. The thing about these lists is that I sometimes have to take someone’s word for it. I suppose because it’s a decently crafted movie that’s not a mainstream billion-dollar blockbuster.  Sure.

I give this hipster movie a rating of 71%

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the inaccurately titled sixth result for "Hipster," “Indie Films That Your Hipster Friend Watches.” You can tell that a Brit made this list because (a) they say “films” and (b) it has a movie about Northern Ireland.

Up next: the book I spent much of last year on, my first from an author of note.

Charles Bronson, for anyone who like me didn’t know, is one pseudonym of a many-named guy who’s apparently still alive in the British prison and psychiatric system, after some fifty years of consistently lengthened incarceration for random violence.

Apparently he liked the movie. Hardy chatted with the real Bronson, born Michael or Mickey Peterson, and it sounds like most of what this serial brawler wanted to make sure of was that Hardy was buffed up enough to represent him. He also later said that he thought Hardy was the strongest and most intense British actor of the time, which, at least strongly arguably, is correct.

Hardy as Bronson narrates the movie of his life onstage to an audience as a made-up Pierrot clown or a two-faced turning mime. He’s animated, he’s a performer of a timeless type, he’s a proper showman. It’s a fun frame that suits the character’s very showy personality and role as a performer within and featuring the violent outbursts of his real life. I guess that contrast and irony between the clown and the thug is what gives this movie at least alleged hipster status; plus that it’s pretty good and I haven’t heard of it or the subject in my mainstream North American ignorance. Within the story as told, it practically speeds through years of imprisonment, with violent outbursts shown as quick newsreel montages of photographed black-and-white bloodied fingers and Hardy’s screaming face at first. Later on director Nicholas Winding Refn does indulge in long choreographed ballretic beatdowns, though these are never nearly as interesting as the unpredictable tension leading into them. This is where Refn shines and his main career as a horror director is obvious. Hardy plays the character on a knife edge, and every scene from a tea service to an art class might end violently, or else not. There’s no real motivation for the violence other than that Mickey Peterson decides, on a whim, like how most people would decide to get a snack, to indulge his violent tendencies that simply seem to always perpetually simmer.

What Bronson never tries to do, probably for the best, is to dig into any sort of sympathetic backstory for Bronson himself. Aside from one point where he tries to strangle a pedophile during a gentle bit of easy listening record time, he beats and bites people just for the hell of it. Fighting gets him into jail, and he loves being in jail because he can fight. What he can’t stand is being assigned to solitary, or psych wards with peacefully spaced-out mental cases. The movie frames this as an interesting cat-and-mouse game with the government: they can’t arrest him, that’s what he wants, his sentences always run through, but he can hardly go free.

Well, the second act, one of freedom anyway, rappels the viewer into the movie’s best setpieces, a Lynchian red curtain lounge underground of drag queens and bare knuckle boxing, wherein Bronson takes on his name, after the lead actor from Death Wish (which I haven’t seen.) This is over in twenty minutes of montage, and it’s back to more of the prison stuff. It’s also about at this point that Bronson starts to feel a bit samey, and the viewer becomes maybe grateful that there isn’t a full hour left. It’s good that the movie doesn’t try to redeem or justify Bronson at all, but that also means there isn’t much character development to go off of. We do get some pretty cool animated sequences, and the closest brush towards development, when Bronson discovers a love of surreal drawing.  Also, dude hangs dong, and by the end he looks like an only slightly more psychotic though significantly more muscular Anthony Fantano.

You see this too, eh, I'm not going crazy, at least not more than normal, yeah?

And it’s a well directed movie shot on film, so it looks pretty damn good even when you’re looking at Tom Hardy’s dick for five minutes. There’s a Magritte reference. Maybe it’s an indictment of the prison system, but I don’t think Refn is too worried one way or another whether you think that. He just wants you to watch lots of slow-mo shots of Tom Hardy beating up guards in the nude.

I give this hipster movie a rating of three Wagner needle drops. The trick is, I’ll let you choose three out of how many.

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the fifth result for "Hipster," "Films Your Hipster Friend Has Made You Watch.”

Up next: another movie I’ve never heard of. Something Irish, I think, if it’s still up. 

It’s funny reviewing this after my last two Project Hipster movie reviews, 12 Angry Men and Donnie Darko (pre-scheduled for closer to Halloween, of course.) Those are both small-scale, small budget endeavours, but both trying for grand thematic ambition through self-serious dialogue, for the former to unquestionable success, for the latter to, well, wait for Halloween (call it mixed.) On the other hand, the dialogue in Napoleon Dynamite is pretty much masterfully written and delivered, just as every shot is masterfully shot, to be as awkward, strange, and straight up deadpan funny as any sentence could ever be. That’s why any reference to it, online or in real life, will instantly devolve into quoting pretty much the entire movie. The crew and from the sounds of it about half of a cast (they filled in the rest with random locals) spent a month kicking around Jared Hess’ sleepy hometown of Preston, Idaho, recreating scenes from his childhood, everything from a hand-dancing club to crappy chicken farm workdays and a roadside cow shooting, and stringing it all together with a loose class election story that I guess you could say takes something from 1999’s Election. You could say that, but I won’t.

And that’s the attraction. The charm of Napoleon Dynamite is multifold; for one there’s the perfect visual language, wide shots of orange vans framed in the emptiness of grassy foothills and orthometric colour-coordinated Wes Andersonesque shots of characters framed by school lockers; the twinkly royalty-free music; and then there’s the charm that everyone, even the attractive and popular kids, is a little busted and weird by Hollywood gloss standards. It looks and sounds and feels a lot more like real life. If the indie and the hipster is the rejection of that which is so polished by mainstream crowd-pleasing as to become artificial, Napoleon Dynamite is a great showcase of how to follow the indie hipster line of thought and still create an absolute crowd pleaser. 

Napoleon himself is a dweeb of course, but also a chronic liar, generally apathetic to most things, not that there’s much to be passionate about, who throws back defensive snark (or what he thinks is snark) against bullies and family alike. Our hero, though this is a distinctly nonheroic world, not in a grim way, just in a slow and dawdling way, is a bit of a Holden Caulfield type in that sort of defensiveness, though that seems a weird comparison because there’s absolutely none of the attempt to project cool, or at least, not much success therein. Napoleon’s slack jaw, sweat pants, and weird little run aren’t exactly what the kids would call aura farming; though all of his t-shirts, and the thrifted suit, are awesome. Deb on the other hand kind of slays with her side ponytail, pastels, and big homemade puff sleeves. Pedro of course has his sweet bike jumps. There’s not much to really be heroic about in 2004 rural Idaho, though what there is to do is to make friends and stand together with the even more mawkish outcasts of this mawkish world. And to lay out the stylistic template for the next decade or so of hipsters. 

The core trio of Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb are the obvious characters to reach for when talking about alienation and a tone of gentle awkward loneliness pervading everything, but even the kinda-antagonists to Napoleon are steeped in it too. There’s Kip with an online love interest that we never see until the end, and Uncle Rico, who lived in a van on the wrong drainage slope of the Northwest and a decade too early for that to be cool, plotting to time travel (always remember to add the crystals) back to his glory days of high school football, days which don’t even sound particularly glorious in his reminiscences.  That side plot also gives us the iconic shot of Jon Heder getting nailed in the face with a greyish beef steak. Even the school bullies often seem more like they’d just rather be anywhere else. 

The final saving grace of Napoleon Dynamite (the guy and the movie both) is a charmingly positive ending, not in grand gestures (ok, so there’s one grand gesture involving a horse, which is, delightfully, hidden at the end of the credits, and of course the dance scene) but in a first date that in a wholesome twist of expectations refuses to be cynical about online interracial dating, in a simple tetherball game against prairie skies. In connection.

In conclusion,

I give this hipster movie a rating of friggin’ sweet

Project Hipster is a futile and disorganized attempt to dive into the world of things that the internet has at some point claimed "are hipster," mostly through ListChallenges search results.

This review comes from the fourth result for "Hipster," "The Definitive Guide to Hipster Movies.”

Up next: something about boxing, I think. This new organization of the lists is throwing a lot of movies at me. But sooner or later I’ll get back around to books, and music, and different kinds of milk.