The Road: Visions Of Gehenna

According to legend, Terrence Malick tried to shoot as much of Days of Heaven as he could at the “magic hour,” those brief, beautiful minutes of the day just after the sun has set but there’s still light in the sky. I don’t know what you’d call the opposite of the magic hour (the tragic hour?), but that’s the time of day when most of John Hillcoat’s The Road takes place. (The cinematographer was Javier Aguirresarobe, who has a very different movie opening this week: the Twilight sequel New Moon.)

It’s some unspecified number of years in the future, and the world has fallen victim to some unnamed global cataclysm that has wiped out all the plants and animals and turned everything else to ash. The only living creatures are a handful of human beings, most of them far from home, aimlessly wandering this landscape of mud and cinders and trying to stave off starvation. Some stay alive by robbing others, some have resorted to cannibalism, and some — like Viggo Mortensen and his 12-year-old son Kodi Smit-McPhee — try to abide by some semblance of a moral code even as they forage through the ruins of civilization, shivering in their trashpicked clothes, hoping that maybe, by some miracle, they’ll find a can of food somewhere that everyone else has overlooked.

I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s original novel, although I saw it with a friend who tells me that it’s a pretty faithful adaptation, give or take a few minor Hollywood concessions. I found I responded to it mostly as a thought experiment: if all the plants and animals were wiped out overnight, how would the devolution of the human race play out? On that level, I found The Road to be an unsettlingly convincing vision of the future: the bandits, the demolished homes, the mud that seems to have soaked through everyone’s clothes, right down to their bones. And that lonely image of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee at the “end” of their journey, huddled together on a grey, dismal beach under a piece of plastic sheeting, wondering if there’s another father and son on the other side of the ocean doing the same thing, hits just the right note of bleak yearning for the comfort of strangers. The scene that moved me the most, though, is the one where Mortensen and Smit-McPhee discover a piano in an abandoned beach house — something about the idea of art and music and all other forms of human beauty being lost forever just tears me up inside.

At the same time, I’m not sure what the point of a movie like The Road is, other than to watch numbly as the last few sparks of humanity fizzle out before you. I can handle a good cinematic bummer with the best of them, but there’s something so relentlessly grim and airless about this movie right from its basic conception that I found myself resisting it even as I admired the haunting images of crumbling highways and burned-out buildings, and respected the way Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall refuse to milk any moments for sentiment. (Although in the final scene, they do seem to be straining to supply a concluding note of uplift.) I get the feeling that McCarthy’s book would offer me a little bit more in the way of ruminations on the nature of survival and the legacy of the human race that go missing when you boil the book down to the essential incidents of the plot.

And even as I say that, I’m wondering if I’m being a philistine — isn’t one of the purposes of art, after all, to force you to confront difficult truths? And it’s true: partly because it envisions such an extreme, hopeless setting, The Road does make you feel the full, elemental horror of the possible end of humanity in a way that other post-apocalyptic stories don’t. (My God, even Omar from The Wire is barely hanging on, and if motherfucking Omar is having trouble surviving, what chance do the rest of us have?)

Simply getting a movie this bleak made and into movie theatres, I suppose, represents some kind of accomplishment. But unless it turns into one of those fluky movies, like The Passion of the Christ, that audiences connect with on some masochistic level precisely because they are so punishing, I can’t see The Road being an accomplishment that many people will share.

Not Quite Hollywood: The Tradition Of Koala-ty

My "HIdden Gem" DVD pick this week for CBC Radio is Not Quite Hollywood, director Mark Hartley's high-octane documentary about the golden age of Australian exploitation movies. I tend to recommend a lot of movies about movies in these segments, and I don't know if that's something listeners find a little tiresome, but Not Quite Hollywood contains so many amazing stories and captures such a wild-and-woolly period of filmmaking history that I couldn't resist. I don't know how interested I'd be in watching a steady diet of these movies — especially the sex comedies, which look pretty dire — but when they're all edited down to 30 seconds of highlights, they can't help but seem pretty exciting.

And I do have a lot of fondness, personally, for one of the titles Not Quite Hollywood lingers over: Dead End Drive-In, which was the very last film to play the Hyland theatre in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. Some of my favourite teenage moviegoing memories take place there, from its days as an arthouse cinema (allowing me to see everything from Betty Blue to a revival showing of Brian De Palma's Sisters on the big screen) to its later years as an exploitation house, where I once saw Trancers on Christmas Eve, perhaps one of my favourite movie nights of all time. Dead End Drive-In seemed like a fitting farewell to the old place — of all the movies in Not Quite Hollywood, that's the one I wound up feeling most eager to rewatch.

Meanwhile, you can click here to listen to the CBC segment. Enjoy!

The House Of The Devil: Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Marked For Death

So many directors are remaking classic horror movies from the ’70s and ’80s, and yet it’s occurred to almost none of them to do what Ti West has done in The House of the Devil and come up with an original horror story but set it in the ’80s. In fact, judging from the scene in which the main character bops around to The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads to Another” (on cassette!), I’m going to precisely peg the film’s setting as early in the winter of 1983. With that one creative masterstroke, West removes his story from the world of cellphones, text messages, and irony and places it in the golden age of urban legends, of seductively eerie stories about Satanic cults operating in pleasant New England neighbourhoods, of serial killers with hooks for hands, razor blades in Halloween apples, and babysitters who find out the phone calls are coming from inside the house!

And in fact, The House of the Devil begins with its heroine, a young woman named Samantha (played by a pretty newcomer named Jocelin Donahue, who recalls such “perfect girlfriend” actresses from the early ’80s as Karen Allen and Brooke Adams) answering an ad for a babysitter. But when she arrives at her clients’ huge house somewhere out in the Connecticut boondocks, the husband (Tom Noonan) tells her there’s actually no baby — she’ll be taking care of his elderly mother-in-law while he and his wife (Mary Woronov) go out for the night.

Something doesn’t quite add up with his story — he insists that the mother is so private and self-sufficient that Donahue probably won’t even need to check in on her, but he’s also desperate enough to pay her $400, which is a ridiculous babysitting fee today, and even more so in 1983. And as a cash-strapped college student, Donahue can’t turn down that kind of money, so she swallows her misgivings and resolves to spend a few hours in Noonan’s big old creaky-spooky house. And did I mention it’s the night of a lunar eclipse?

It’s obvious from very early on that Noonan and Woronov are setting Donahue up as some kind of Satanic sacrificial lamb, but West holds back on providing just enough details to make every moment she spends in that house, prowling around half-lit corridors and slowly opening all sorts of squeaky-hinged doors, feel exquisitely suspenseful. I did some house-sitting when I was a teen, and there is definitely unusually unnerving about being alone at night in someone else’s home — even if you have their permission to be there. Factor in, as The House of the Devil does, the presence of some mysterious, unseen old woman who keeps making the floorboards creak and the plumbing moan, and you’ve got a total creepfest on your hands.

Aside from a couple of unconvincingly choreographed action beats during the climax, The House of the Devil also manages to deliver a satisfying payoff to all that ominous buildup... and the way West packs that payoff into the final three words of dialogue suggests a writer/director with a real flair for old-fashioned horror storytelling. I bet that if The House of the Devil actually had been made in the ’80s, people would still fondly remember it as “one of those movies that scared the shit out of me when I was a kid.” Luckily, it was made this year, so we probably won’t have to endure the shitty remake until at least 2029.

The Musicgoer: Connie Kaldor's Postcards From the Road

CONNIE KALDOR
Postcards From the Road
(Outside Music)
** (out of 5)

There’s a fine line between eloquent simplicity and mere banality, between familiar shared truths and shopworn sentiments, and far too often on Postcards From the Road, singer/songwriter and Canadian folk festival mainstay Connie Kaldor can be heard settling for the latter. These are songs about how hard it is to say goodbye, how hard it can be to put your finger on why you love the people you do, how your life might have been hugely different if you’d chosen another path, and how nice it feels to be in love. All perfectly legitimate subjects for songs, of course, but Kaldor doesn’t ring any fresh changes on them. Love is like a mountain. It makes your heart flutter like a bird. When romance ends, it leaves a hole inside you.

Kaldor’s warm, supple voice can make even weak material sound good, but even so, I'm afraid there's very little on Postcards From the Road that's worth writing home about.

The Damned United: Football Antihero

Peter Morgan is one of the few screenwriters who appears to have no ambitions to become a director, but whose scripts have such consistent themes that he practically qualifies as an auteur anyway. A typical Morgan script will dramatize a little-known footnote of ’70s history, and use that story as a springboard for pitting a cocky, callow, but likable young hero against a faded but still formidable legend. In The Queen, Tony Blair faced off against Queen Elizabeth; in The Last King of Scotland, a young doctor who had to square off against Idi Amin; and in Frost/Nixon... well, that one’s right there in the title.

In his latest film, The Damned United (and it feels right to call it a Peter Morgan film, even though Tom Hooper directed it), the two main characters will be less familiar to North Americans than to Brits. The cocky hero this time is football manager Brian Clough (Michael Sheen), whose leadership transformed Derby County from a laughingstock to contenders for the First Division title. His rival is Don Revie, the beloved manager of Leeds United, whose brutal style of play made them the dominant force in British football in the early ’70s. He also snubbed Clough during their first match against each other, and Clough has dreamed of revenge ever since. And so, when he’s hired as Revie’s replacement, Clough is more interested in repudiating Revie’s legacy than in winning games, or endearing himself to his new team.

And so the stage is set for one of the great fiascos in the history of British sport. Clough lasted a mere 44 days as Leeds’ manager before his poisonous relationship with his players and the Leeds fans resulted in his ouster... and cost him not just his friendship with his invaluable right-hand man, Peter Taylor but almost his entire sports career.

You don’t have to know anything about British football — God knows I sure don’t — to enjoy The Damned United. Morgan has always been more interested in character than setting, and he makes the film less a sports story than a study in bad management techniques. Michael Sheen, Morgan’s favourite leading man, is terrific as usual, especially in the scenes where Clough’s blinkered overconfidence gets the better of him. And with Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney as Don Revie, and Jim Broadbent as Derby’s tightwad team owner, the cast is practically an all-star team of ruddy-faced Irish and British character actors. Minor, but very entertaining.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Vulpine Intervention

Every frame of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s first foray into stop-motion animation, is so filled with wonders, you hardly know where to look. A book on a shelf, leaning against a TV set, titled Spices of the Jungle. A stalk of wheat worn in the breast pocket of a corduroy suit instead of a pocket handkerchief. A literal soapbox, which Mr. Fox climbs up on to make a speech. A painting in a badger’s law office that seems to suggest badgers fought in the Civil War. I think my favourite detail, though, pops up in the scene where young Ash Fox goes swimming with his cousin Kristofferson — if you look closely, you can see that the towel he’s drying himself off with was stolen from a hotel.

And Mr. Fox probably doesn’t feel a twinge of guilt about it. As voiced by George Clooney and embodied by a charmingly stiff-jointed armature of fur and wire, he’s a man who isn’t happy unless he’s pulling some kind of caper — preferably one with multiple phases, allows him to wear a bandit mask, and ends up with him dining on freshly killed chicken.

He’s a vulpine version of two previous Clooney roles, Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven and Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou? — a nonchalantly overconfident rogue, a little too much in love with the sound of his own voice, perpetually cooking up impossible schemes, but lucky enough to have a wife who keeps his most dangerous impulses in check. She’s named Felicity, she’s voiced by Meryl Streep, and she’s a fellow thief who demanded that they give up crime when she got pregnant. But in an eyebrow-raising moment (for a kids’ movie), we learn that Felicity was once a wild girl, “the town tart,” so perhaps she can empathize with her husband when he misses the old days when he could let his animal instincts off the leash. (Her hobby of creating landscape paintings of lightning storms suggests a woman still in love with the wild side of nature.)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is based on a book by Roald Dahl, and it preserves his mordant sense of humour, especially in the characterization of the three scowling farmers Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, who become Mr. Fox’s mortal enemies when he begins brazenly raiding their chicken coops and ciderhouses. They are all pretty mean customers, but Bean (voiced by Michael Gambon) is the worst of the lot — he looks more like an undertaker than an apple farmer, and he even employs a giant rat (voiced by Willem Dafoe) as his head of security.

But The Fantastic Mr. Fox is also clearly a Wes Anderson movie, with the same meticulously framed sets, flat compositions, and beautifully chosen soundtrack music (this time, old Burl Ives records rub shoulders with The Rolling Stones and The Beach Boys), the same distinctive tone of melancholy whimsy, and the same tension between moody sons and flawed father figures as any of his live-action pictures. I’ve been a big fan of all of Anderson’s pictures — even less beloved efforts like The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and the underrated The Darjeeling Limited — but I can see where his detractors are coming from when they complain about his arch tone and his fussed-over sets and costumes choking off the emotions of his stories.

But in The Fantastic Mr. Fox, that fussy, obsessive quality is inherent to the form, and a filmmaking style that might seem oppressive when live actors have to submit to it becomes thoroughly delightful when all the characters onscreen are puppets. Just seeing the fur on Felicity’s face “boil” as the unseen animators adjust her expression is captivating: you’re seeing something move that shouldn’t be able to, and if you’re like me, it’s all you can do to keep from clapping your hands with pleasure at every nifty magic trick Anderson’s team of animators so deftly execute. The animation is arguably at its most charming when it’s at its most artificial — the stiff yet spry dance numbers, or the cross-section, ant-farm shots of the foxes tunneling at top speed through the earth.

In the film’s final scene, Mr. Fox gathers his family — which, like the families in most Wes Anderson movies, is not limited to blood relatives — in the aisle of a supermarket and gives a speech that captures the full spirit of the film. It’s a tribute to, of all things, the pleasures of artificiality. He holds up a hybrid piece of fruit — an apple genetically modified so that the skin has a white pattern on it, a little like Christmas wrapping paper, and says, “This apple looks fake, but it has stars on it.”

The Fantastic Mr. Fox is fake too, just like all storybooks. But it has talking foxes in it. And flaming pinecones. And an electric train. And a badger who’s also a secret demolition expert. It’s the most instantly enchanting movie I’ve seen in many a fox-month.

The Musicgoer: The William Blakes' Wayne Coyne

THE WILLIAM BLAKES
Wayne Coyne
(Speed of Sound)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The Danish rock band The William Blakes may have named their debut album after the lead singer of The Flaming Lips, but judging from these 12 songs, Coyne is the least of their influences. The opening track, “Secrets of the State” conjures up memories of ’80s synth bands like Talk Talk and Blancmange, “Beginnings” has a room-filling sound that recalls The Arcade Fire (right down to the mid-song shout of “Let’s go!” just like in “No Cars Go”), and even on the track called “Wayne Coyne,” lead singer Kristian Leth frenetically quotes the “ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-se, ma-ma-makossa” breakdown from Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

It’s a magpie album, in other words, and even if it’s hard to get a firm grasp on the band’s true identity, Wayne Coyne has a big, lush pop sound that will pass the time until they figure it out. My favourite track is “On Fire,” whose mix of jaunty melody and apocalyptic lyrics compares favourably with Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere.” Originality is overrated, anyway.

Planet 51: Gleepnorp, We Have A Problem

Most computer animation studios don’t actually aspire to be Pixar. Pixar turns out one entertaining, moving, visually spectacular, critically acclaimed, and ridiculously profitable animated film after another, and that’s a task no sane studio would ever assign itself. No, most fledgling animation houses would prefer to be Blue Sky Studios, the company that made Robots and the Ice Age pictures — formulaic, visually ugly cartoons that nevertheless made hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office without even having to be any good.

Which brings us to Ilion Animation Studios, a new computer-animation factory that Sony Pictures has set up in Spain, and to Planet 51, their debut feature, an uninspired sci-fi spoof that will delight no one, but which will probably turn a modest profit in theatres before being promptly forgotten by everyone who sees it, and probably many of the people in the voice cast too.

The premise is a twist on 1950s alien-invasion movies: it’s set on a faraway planet that resembles the United States in the ’50s in every way, right down to the backyard barbecues, the black-and-white TV sets, and the rockabilly music on the jukeboxes — except the inhabitants have green skin, they ride in hovercars, and they keep miniature Giger-esque aliens as pets. (I forgot to check whether these creatures appear on the girls’ skirts instead of poodles.) But this peaceful world is thrown into chaos when a spaceship lands in the middle of town, and an “alien” emerges — actually, a square-jawed human astronaut named Charles (voiced by Dwayne Johnson). With the alien army looking to capture him, Charles convinces a teen named Lem (Justin Long) to hide him until he can sneak back onto his rocket and return to Earth. Low-grade hijinks ensue, as do several lame movie spoofs and a bunch of already-stale jokes about iPods, Facebook, and the macarena.

Even though he seldom appears in good movies, I’ve always liked Dwayne Johnson as an actor, but here’s he stuck playing an obnoxious character (think Buzz Lightyear without the charm) that prevents him from using any of his considerable natural appeal. Meanwhile, Lem — whose name appears to be an unwelcome tribute to the author of Solaris — is a thoroughly generic character, bizarrely more interested in asking Charles for romantic advice than getting information about life on other planets.

The most obnoxious scenes, though, deal with an alien hippie named Glar who keeps singing protest songs and organizing peace demonstrations. The last time we see him, he’s getting a Rodney King-style beatdown from some alien cops — a moment the movie plays for slapstick laughs. The tastelessness of that gag is the only thing about Planet 51 that pierces the stratosphere.

Amreeka: Falafel Immigration

When divorced single mom Muna Farah’s application to emigrate from Palestine to the United States is unexpectedly approved, she balks at leaving her familiar surroundings, even as she knows it’s an opportunity she can’t refuse — if only for the sake of her teenage son Fadi, a bright kid who deserves a shot at a professional future that simply won’t be available to him if they stay where they are.

But soon after their arrival in Illinois, it appears that Muna may have simply traded in one set of indignities for another. True, she no longer has to endure the daily humiliation of being stopped at checkpoints on her way to work, but now she must put up with having to flip burgers for minimum wage at a White Castle. (It’s the best job she can find, even though she worked for 10 years at a bank in Palestine.) Also, the days immediately following the invasion of Iraq weren’t the best time to be an Arab in America — Fadi’s classmates nickname him “Osama” and even Muna’s brother-in-law, a successful doctor, has begun losing patients.

Amreeka is the debut feature from Cherien Dabis, a Palestinian-American writer/director who, judging from the closing dedication to her family, was inspired by her own relatives’ experiences adjusting to life in the United States. Dabis is at her best in the film’s first half, efficiently sketching in the mundane oppressiveness of being a citizen of an occupied country, and capturing how disorienting something as simple as shopping for food can be when you’re new to American life, and the nearest Arab neighbourhood is a 90-minute drive away. Nisreen Faour, who plays Muna, is very good in these early scenes, especially when she talks to prospective employers, her eagerness for work and her nervousness about her imperfect English making her seem clumsier and more overbearing than she really is.

It’s too bad Dabis doesn’t bring the same fresh eye to the second half of Amreeka, and settles instead into a predictable series of crises, arguments, and cross-cultural reconciliations, all leading up to a final scene in which Muna’s family (plus Fadi’s kindly Jewish principal, who’s taken a shine to Muna) gathers around the dinner table. Dabis certainly has her heart in the right place, but the image is a little too familiar, a little too ready-for-Sundance, to have much impact. I also could have done without the repeated, heavy-handed shots of the sign with the missing letters outside White Castle that reads “SUPPORT OUR OOPS.”

Still, Amreeka has a warmth and a fondness for its characters that’s easy to respond to, and it’s always a pleasure to see any film with Hiam Abbass (from The Visitor) or Alia Shawkat (from Arrested Development) in the cast. Dabis’ family should be proud.

Window-Peeper As Witness To History: An Interview With James Ellroy

“Scripture-pure veracity and scandal-rag content. That conjunction gives it its sizzle.”

That’s how the narrator of James Ellroy’s stunning new novel Blood’s a Rover describes the 600 pages that follow — but that description would apply equally well to any of James Ellroy’s books, which include 13 novels, a few collections of short stories and reportage, and a memoir, My Dark Places, in which he describes his real-life investigation, nearly half a century after the fact, of his mother’s murder back in 1958.

Taken together, those books form a massive, bloody, secret history of Los Angeles — a town shaped by corrupt cops, sex criminals, power brokers, bagmen, gossipmongers, gangsters, and the occasional doomed noble gesture. Ellroy published his first novel, Brown’s Requiem, in 1981, but it was his seventh novel, 1987’s The Black Dahlia — an obsessive mixture of historical fact and densely imagined fiction — that was his true artistic breakthrough. As Ellroy’s plots got more complex (he claims the outline alone for Blood’s a Rover was 400 pages), his prose got more condensed: with 1992’s White Jazz, he adopted the terse, telegraphic writing style that has become his signature ever since: his 2001 novel The Cold Six Thousand is practically written in point form.

Blood’s a Rover concludes Ellroy’s most ambitious project yet: the sprawling “Underworld USA” trilogy, in which he moves beyond L.A. and tackles American history as a whole: Vietnam, black militants, Cuba, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, laced with outrageously funny cameos by Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon. But it’s also the story of Donald Crutchfield, a callow young dipshit with a dream of becoming a private eye, a thing for older women, and a habit of peeping into strangers’ windows. He goes sniffing after some stolen emeralds, and ends up with horrible scars, both literal and metaphorical. He’s based on a real-life detective, but he’s also perhaps the most autobiographical character Ellroy’s ever written.

Ellroy says the book is a work of genius and probably deserves the Nobel Prize for literature, but as an avowed “Tory WASP heterosexual,” he doesn’t expect to win it. He’ll have to content himself with having solidified his reputation as one of the greatest American writers alive — not bad for a man who, by his own admission, was once a homeless, panty-sniffing alcoholic.

I recently had the great pleasure of interviewing James Ellroy over the phone from Los Angeles. Here’s our conversation.

James Ellroy: Before you ask me a million questions, can I ask you something? Did the last hundred pages rip your heart out?

Q: It kind of did! I don’t want to give away what happens to anyone reading this interview, but the book shifts its focus from the men we’ve been following for 500 pages to a female character — and it’s heartbreaking in a way you don’t really expect from a James Ellroy novel. Was this book any harder to write than the two that came before it, American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand?

JE: It was easier. It’s much more emotional. It’s less densely layered, and considerably less stylistically rigourous than The Cold Six Thousand. That was very much the critique of my ex-wife, the novelist Helen Knode. She said, “Listen, it’s a great book, but it’s too difficult stylistically.” Well, Helen and I got divorced, I had a nervous breakdown — which is where I got the character Dwight Holly’s nervous breakdown from — and I fell in love with a woman named Joan, and it kicked the shit out of me. I’ll never see her again, she’s moved on with her life. So this is the book you write when your world burns down and your women kick you loose.

Q: What made you want to make Don Crutchfield a central character in this story? He’s certainly not the character you’d bet would survive to the end.

JE: It’s the idea that the dipshit kid is the voice of American history. In reality, Crutchfield is 10 years older — I did all the peeper shit. That was me. I grew up in that neighbourhood, Crutchfield did not. He grew up in Culver City and fell under the wing of [private investigator] Clyde Duber and got to be a wheelman and follow people around in a souped-up car. I never got to do any of that stuff, and I could not have written the book without him.

Q: You have this very distinctive style: extremely complicated plots told in very simple sentences. Is that limiting at all as a writer?

JE: No, it’s liberating. It allows you to exposit more information at a greater clip. It requires more concentration on the part of the reader, though. You know, my girlfriend got me that book by Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it just seemed flabby to me. Flabby. I could see where it’s going pretty quick. Corporate intrigue. All corporations are evil. Paramilitary intrigue. A crusading journalist with a past gets together with a tattooed punk rock chick. I could see it from the get-go. You could not see Blood’s a Rover from the get-go, could you? I don’t want to write a fucking book you can see from the get-go. I have a significant readership for very, very difficult books, and I am proud of that.

Q: It’s an almost psychedelic novel at times. A lot of it takes place in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which allows you to bring in these images of zombies and voodoo hexes, you have people taking these mind-altering potions, and you have this image of the stolen emeralds running throughout the story, which are almost like the mystical treasure in a fantasy novel.

JE: It is my most deliberately iconographic book. It is my book about women, it’s my book about race and gender, you have the character of the gay black cop, who has this weirdly equitable relationship with a white racist cop. They like each other, in their psychopathic way.

Q: Do you think American history was shaped more by rational decisions — by laws, elections, leaders — or is it more the result of irrational forces — by emotions and hexes and bad juju and woo-woo, to use your words?

JE: Well, history is always held in check by the democratic process, which has served us very, very well. There are certain inequities in society, and as the world’s dominant power, America is almost always at war, as the new fellow in the White House is learning, despite his idealism. It might have been nice for him to turn down the Nobel Peace Prize, don’t you think? Anyway, back then, the races were coming together, everyone was bombed. I was bombed. I sense history percolating in the margins, and it took me many, many years to put together a book pertaining to it.

Q: Would you change the way history is taught in schools? Is there something kids need to know about American that they’re not getting from their teachers?

JE: Well, I’ll say this. We have a preposterous discourse going on in America right now of left versus right — all this bullshit. We have not had an American president who’s been an ideologue in my lifetime, except Ronald Reagan. If you look at American democracy, almost nobody is who you think they are if you look at them through the prism of popular culture. Roosevelt was willing to exclude blacks and women from the New Deal until Eleanor convinced him otherwise, which would shock most doctrinaire liberals. When he was governor of California, Ronald Reagan signed into effect the most permissive abortion rights law in American history. Try telling that to a liberal feminist! She will not believe you. People have very dumb ideas on politics.

Q: Would you call yourself a feminist?

JE: You know, my girlfriend, who is a brilliant woman, a journalist — she’s appalled by my politics. I’m right-wing. I’m conservative. But I’m a feminist. But I have reservations about abortion. I’m opposed to gay marriage, and she’s appalled by that. I believe in American military hegemony, on the grounds that we’d better rule the world or someone worse than us will. I’m more of an authoritarian than a permissivist. And I’m not a liberal, and that shocks people. Blood’s a Rover is a book about a bunch of right-wing goons who turn left-wing, and no one knows what to make of that.

Q: There’s a strong moral streak that runs through your books. What do you think of American culture in general? Are we in good shape?

JE: It’s depraved. It’s nothing but horror movies and teenage comedies about bombed-out kids on weed. I know this because I drive down Beverly Boulevard all the time and I can read billboards.

Q: Hasn’t it always been this debased, though? Isn’t pop culture always mostly junk? Or is this something new?

JE: There are actually a lot of iconic movies that I think stink. Like Chinatown. I think it’s full of shit. It’s bad mise-en-scène, contrived, full of plot holes. And nihilism of the worst sort. I’m thrilled they got Roman Polanski. Thrilled. My mother was raped and murdered. So there you go. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think you should molest children.