Flaming Creature

When I started writing this blog, one of my biggest challenges was figuring out what kind of voice I wanted it to have. All I knew was that I wanted to adopt a style that was different from the voice I used when I wrote movie reviews, which I had grown to kind of hate. Well, maybe I didn’t hate my voice, exactly, but I was tired of the way my reviews slipped so often into the same boilerplate structure: quirky observation, plot summary, words of praise (or criticism), minor quibbles (or hey-it-wasn’t-all-bad silver-lining-finding), on-the-whole final assessment.

That’s why one of the things I most value in a film critic, even more than their opinions, is a fresh voice. That was what originally drew me so strongly to Pauline Kael, for instance: I especially loved those long, garrulous reviews she wrote for The New Yorker in the 1970s, where she seemed to be figuring out what she thought of the movie even while she was writing the review—on occasion even convincing herself of a position opposite from the one she began the article with. I love the confident, well-reasoned contrarianism of former Salon critic Charles Taylor, but I also adore the self-deprecating incisiveness of someone like New York’s David Edelstein.

But I’ve never read a film writer with a voice quite like Howard Hampton. He’s just published a new book of essays entitled Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales and Pop Apocalypses (Harvard University Press, $28.95), and it’s by turns exhilarating and confounding. Imagine Manny Farber on fast-forward, or Lester Bangs if he were addicted to Red Bull instead of cough syrup. Hampton is the master of that dense, can-you-keep-up-with-me style of writing that Film Comment specializes in: full of puns, wordplay and rapid-fire allusions to culture both high and low.

Here’s one of my favourite passages from Born in Flames—favorite not because I can make sense of it, but because it shows a writer really taking his style to the limit. (He’s talking about Pistol Opera, a 2001 movie by Japanese auteur Seijun Suzuki about a female assassin.) Wind Hampton up and watch him go: “Pistol Opera’s spatial harmonics and absurd lyricism suggest a cinematic equivalent to the songs of Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno, or “This Must Be the Place” in Stop Making Sense.... Suzuki employs deadpan visual cues the way Anderson uses verbal ones, and it’s as easy to imagine her adapting Pistol Opera into futuristic D’Oyly Carte Sprechstimme as it is to see him making a Dadaist thriller from Eno’s ‘The Fat Lady of Limbourg.’”

Every time I read that paragraph, Hampton’s casual confidence about how easy it is to imagine this elaborate scenario slays me. (I know, Howard: it’s a snap, isn’t it?)

Half the time, I have no idea what Hampton is talking about, but I feel flattered that he assumes I have the same working familiarity with the movies of Brigitte Lin, the essays of Walter Benjamin and the records of Pere Ubu that he does. In one essay, he uses D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature to analyze Buffy the Vampire Slayer; in another he maps out the overlapping history of Hollywood and porn, referencing everything from Catherine Breillat’s Romance to Joel Schumacher’s 8mm to Max Steiner’s Max 15: Street Legal.

Hampton is at his best at these history-of-a-niche-genre pieces: he provides brilliant insights into Elvis movies, assassination movies, Hollywood movies about rock ’n’ roll. Hampton, like the heroine of Pistol Opera, is better at quick volleys of gunfire—bringing his target down with one or two well-placed bullets—than at long, drawn-out battles. And these roving essays allow him to make short, devastating observations about movies that bug him and then jump acrobatically to the next topic.

Hampton is also a big fan of alternative rock and jazz, and his willingness to mention music in his film essays is another quality that makes him such a fresh voice—can you imagine Roger Ebert mentioning Cat Power or Sleater-Kinney in a review? (Hampton doesn’t compare Brian De Palma to Alfred Hitchcock; he compares him to Alice Cooper!)

And his discussions of music every bit as pithy as the ones about film. Just listen to him take down The Doors: “You name the drowning pool, and The Doors jumped into its contradictions wearing nothing but a cement inner tube. Leaving no cliché untouched, no myth unmolested, The Doors forged a city of the imagination as lesser morals might pass bad checks.”

“A stench is haunting young America,” Hampton writes in another essay, this one about heavy metal, “and it’s coming from the decomposing corpse of ‘youth rebellion’ itself, the same moldering dead parrot that glib salesmen like Guns N’ Roses keep trying to pass off as the living article. (‘Beautiful plumage,’ chimes an anxious Axl to calm the corpse’s newly dissatisfied owners.)”

A writer who can puncture Guns N’ Roses with a two-word Python reference? That’s my kind of cultural critic.