THE BLACK DAHLIA

DUMAS: Maybe we should begin by talking about why we're doing this thing, taping this ridiculous conversation.

HAYNES: Well, it seems reasonable to start by saying that -- at least a couple of days ago, we were anticipating the usual torrent of negative reviews, especially from the American press, all of which would say the same things --

DUMAS: DePalma is all flash and no substance, he can't handle characters --

HAYNES: Plus the inevitable comparison to L.A. Confidential --

DUMAS: Yes, which is unfortunate because L.A. Confidential is really a puny film in a lot of ways. It's straightfaced and tasteful, which is just incorrect with Ellroy.

HAYNES: Completely incorrect.

DUMAS: I mean, Guy Pearce is correct and Russell Crowe is adequate, but Kevin Spacey is never believable, and Danny DeVito is never believable, and Kim Basinger is utterly false and therefore Oscar-worthy, and the direction is really pedestrian. Therefore, it's an sanctified official Hollywood masterpiece and a popular favorite and a model of what Hollywood is capable of.

LABARTHE: Well, but the fact is that L.A. Confidential was adapted correctly, whereas The Black Dahlia is not.

DUMAS: Yes.

HAYNES: Sadly, yes.

LABARTHE: I mean, whoever did the L.A. Confidential adaptation made the correct choices in terms of how to scale the work to a two-hour multiplex picture, and the fact is that Josh Friedman did not make the correct choices.

HAYNES: No, he didn't.

LABARTHE: In fact, it's as if he didn't make any choices at all. It's a matter of -- the sin the film commits is its misled faithfulness to the book. Yes, there are elisions and streamlining measures, but all the wrong things have been maintained, and a lot of important things aren't there.

HAYNES: That's exactly right. And there's not nearly enough DePalma.

LABARTHE: No, there's very little.

DUMAS: The film needs to be three hours long. Just as much, if not more than, Scarface, this film needs to sprawl.

LABARTHE: It does sprawl.

DUMAS: Yes, but sprawling does not necessarily mean shapeless.

LABARTHE: Exactly.

HAYNES: What strikes me immediately is the missed opportunity to play to DePalma's strengths --

LABARTHE: And connective narrative tissue is not one of DePalma's strengths.

HAYNES: No, although when he's working from one of his own scripts, or a well-structured script from someone else's hands, you know, maybe someone outside the factory --

DUMAS: Carrie, The Untouchables.

HAYNES: Yeah, and Scarface. When he's working from one of his own scripts, he can build his own gaps and fissures into the structure, and linger over the things that matter. For instance, in the book, there's that scene --

LABARTHE: He should never, ever, ever again make a movie from someone else's script.

DUMAS: Oh, God, please don't let him do that Untouchables prequel.

LABARTHE: No. He really needs to do Toyer next.

HAYNES: Yeah. I was going to say that I miss the scene, which I presume was neither scripted nor filmed --

LABARTHE: Right.

HAYNES: -- the bit, or I guess bits, where the cops are brutally torturing these petty criminals who probably don't have anything to do with the murder, and of course there's an agenda behind it that Bucky isn't privy to. That would seem to be one of those things that DePalma would automatically include, because it would seem to dramatize so many of his themes all at once.

DUMAS: Or the Mexico sequence. I understand that it had to go for reasons of narrative efficiency and probably budget as well. But the solution they found, which is the staircase sequence -- it's a solution to a narrative problem that maybe shouldn't have been treated as a problem.

LABARTHE: But then the film would have been three hours long --

DUMAS: It should have been.

LABARTHE: But you know as well as I do that that wouldn't have been possible.

DUMAS: I don't know that that's the case. But, in any event, obviously I need to see Dahlia again, since I went in with preconceptions about it. But I just don't know. I don't know what I just saw.

HAYNES: I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but I find myself agreeing with the critics who said that Josh Hartnett was inadequate --

LABARTHE: Now, see, I completely disagree. I thought he was just fine. The performances weren't the problem. I think the three of us are in agreement that DePalma is actually an excellent director of actors. He almost always gets the performances he wants.

DUMAS: Yes. People seem to think that Craig Wasson does a bad job in Body Double, but it's exactly the right performance and it was obviously what DePalma wanted, this sort of castrated whimpering goofy guy, and the same for Deborah Shelton. Now, I don't know if Josh Hartnett was as good as, say, Ben Affleck --

[laughter]

DUMAS: Yeah, he didn't take Venice, but I didn't dislike him on screen. He definitely came across as very young, which is probably the desired effect. Whereas Scarlett's character should not have come across as so young -- I mean, this is a woman who has had some pimp's initials cut in her back, and she comes across like Joan Fontaine in Rebecca or something. She definitely could have been a little bit more solid.

HAYNES: Now, Fiona Shaw --

LABARTHE: Good heavens.

DUMAS: That must be the single most over-the-top performance in any DePalma film. It's even past Lithgow in Cain.

LABARTHE: She was definitely potent.

HAYNES: It was good to see William Finley again, if only for ten or twelve seconds.

DUMAS: But no Amy Irving.

HAYNES: Gregg Henry in two shots. And you figured out earlier that Bucky's father was the bank manager in Murder A La Mod --

LABARTHE: It's a real reunion, but no Dennis Franz? I mean, come on. He should have played the Papa Linscott role.

[laughter]

LABARTHE: Or the role that DePalma himself played, the Otto Preminger type offscreen.

HAYNES: Speaking of Murder A La Mod, I couldn't believe how many --

[laughter]

DUMAS: Oh, god, I know.

HAYNES: Yeah, all the parallels. The screen tests, which are so clearly the soul of Dahlia, and which are the opening moments of Murder A La Mod --

LABARTHE: Trying to get a girl to take her shirt off on camera.

HAYNES: And the focus on the girl's anxiety. There's also the shot in Murder A La Mod where the action is in two planes, top and bottom -- with one action in the foreground crucially going unseen by the participants in another action in the background, which is exactly like the corpse-reveal shot in Dahlia.

DUMAS: The elevator from Dressed To Kill, with the buttons. The staircase. The fast-motion chase hurtling down, through the hallway, from Phantom of the Paradise.

HAYNES: It's kind of amazing that the three of us all thought that Murder a la Mod was more satisfying than The Black Dahlia --

LABARTHE: It was unexpected.

HAYNES: I mean, The Black Dahlia is recognizably DePalma -- there are dozens of examples of the prototypical DePalma visual motifs, like the use of the split-diopter --

DUMAS: Or the Dutch angles, or the sort of slow-motion triangulation around characters and objects, like the matchbook that returns from The Untouchables.

LABARTHE: I was sure we'd get the Empty Shoes In The Closet.

DUMAS: That was the whole movie.

[laughter]

DUMAS: But seriously, we're all so crestfallen. Did we all hate it?

LABARTHE: I really enjoyed most of it. I mean, it's not a good DePalma film, but it has its pleasures. It's just a missed opportunity.

DUMAS: What disturbs me the most is that the rhythm was off. Every single DePalma film, even The Bonfire of the Vanities, has a consistency of tempo or at least an attention to tempo -- each one just hurtles forward, even when it's being contemplative, like Casualties of War or even Obsession. This just didn't have that. Even Snake Eyes, which as we know is a damaged text -- even when you feel the jumps in rhythm that come from its having been severely truncated in post-production, you experience them as aberrations. This just felt like -- it just didn't have any rhythm at all. All those fucking dissolves.

HAYNES: Who edited this one? Was it Hirsch or Pankow?

DUMAS: It was Pankow.

LABARTHE: There are definitely signs that this one was boiled down in the editing room too. Did you notice that for the first, oh, half an hour, all the wipes and dissolves are on movement, and that more or less stops at some point?

HAYNES: Yes, I thought I detected something like that, but I wasn't sure.

LABARTHE: It's good evidence that there was an attempt to shoehorn the film into a two-hour box. Although the first half-hour feels just right.

DUMAS: The curtain wipes and dissolves really did seem to work against the rhythm. The bit where the guy with the eyebrows, the guy from Mulholland Drive, leans into the lens and begins lecturing, and it just fades away -- it's as if that scene went on for another two minutes, and DePalma said "it's not working, let's just get out of it somewhere -- how about right here."

HAYNES: That happens a couple of times. There are also some scenes where the characters seem to be motivated by things that happened in scenes that were cut. Like when Hartnett comes in to tell Scarlett Johannessen that Eckhart is hopped up on Benzedrine, and Hartnett is just shaking --

LABARTHE: Yeah, that was puzzling.

DUMAS: Or the scene where he's in bed with Hilary Swank, and she confesses that she slept with Elizabeth Short and he smiles and then suddenly freaks out and jumps out of bed and grabs his clothes and calls her a slut --

HAYNES: And just runs out of the door.

DUMAS: And the continuity errors, too. Early on you see a newspaper with the word "Dahlia" in eighty-point type in the headline, and then ten minutes later someone is talking about how some police publicist just came up with the idea of calling her "the Black Dahlia" after the Alan Ladd film.

LABARTHE: It definitely feels like it was rearranged in the editing room.

DUMAS: And even when they have been rearranged in the editing room, DePalma films never feel that way.

HAYNES: Get to Know Your Rabbit is like that.

DUMAS: Well, but even there, the images have room to breathe. This just felt like a Michael Bay film. With dissolves instead of cuts.

LABARTHE: It wasn't quite that bad.

DUMAS: Well, but DePalma never, ever, ever, ever misuses punctuation. He never uses a dissolve unless it is exactly appropriate to use a dissolve. And this just felt grammatically scrambled. Not like Raul Ruiz films are grammatically scrambled, but -- it was just off in some way. God, should we really be taping this?

[laughter]

LABARTHE: I don't think any of us were expecting for this to be so funereal.

HAYNES: It feels like one of those moments... like, I guess, the failed teleporter experiments in The Fly, where he gets out the video recorder...

[laughter, then long silence]

LABARTHE: Well, unfortunately -- and this is probably the biggest disappointment -- there's just not really much to say about it. It's just not that interesting. Even more than so than his quote-unquote director-for-hire projects, this felt like a director-for-hire project, which is just odd, given the genesis of it, but...

HAYNES: We've been talking so incessantly about it the last couple of days, going into it, that it is a little bit difficult to sort out how...

LABARTHE: Well, ultimately, I think... there was so little of DePalma in it that there's nothing, really, to talk about.

DUMAS: None of DePalma's signature concerns, other than the most superficial. All the reviewers are talking about how nasty and dark it is, and how typically DePalma it is because of that, but that doesn't mean that DePalma is necessarily engaged with it just because it's dark and nasty. He's not making In the Bedroom, he's making a detective picture.

HAYNES: And yet I'm encouraged -- I'm holding onto your [Labarthe's] semi-positive reaction to the movie as a -- almost like a life raft. Because I really want to like it, and I want to find something in it that --

LABARTHE: Well, I don't -- I'm not going to have a coherent argument for why it's a quote-unquote Good Movie, and I'm certainly not going to have any sort of argument as to why it's a good DePalma movie, because it's not really either. But I think, you know... there was a quite a bit of stuff that I found was enjoyable just on a basic moviegoing level.

HAYNES: Yeah.

LABARTHE: I thought that, like we said, the screen tests were great. Mia Kirshner's performance was, you know... I think she might actually get a nomination. I actually thought that Josh Hartnett was really good. I thought that Aaron Eckhart was okay...

HAYNES: In an underwritten role.

LABARTHE: Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Basically, and this is why there's nothing interesting to say about the movie, everything about it just comes down to talking about it in the way that Roger Ebert would talk about it.

HAYNES: Yes, I think that's true.

LABARTHE: Because it's just a safe punt down the middle.

HAYNES: A safe punt for DePalma?

LABARTHE: Yeah.

HAYNES: Except for the very conspicuous, I think, decision to keep the plot complex, which is ultimately a bad decision, or a futile decision --

LABARTHE: Yeah, exactly -- but it wasn't a decision to do that, it was just the lack of deciding not to.

HAYNES: Because I think if it had been winnowed down, if it had been organized around the actual Dahlia murder instead of the relationship between all of these -- well, these two guys, really, it would have been a much safer move, because it would have given it a coherence and a salability that would have been --

LABARTHE: Well, I mean, it would have seemed to some like a safer move, but for the filmmakers it would have been a more dangerous move, because then they would have had to actually make some decisions --

HAYNES: Yeah.

LABARTHE: -- and they would have had to say, "okay, Ellroy is not a storyteller, and we're going to have turn this into a story," and they sure as shit didn't do that. I'm reminded of Wonder Boys, the moment where Katie Holmes says, "well, you know, Professor, you always tell us that writing is about making choices, and it looks to me like you haven't made any choices, you just kept writing." And that's what they did here -- they didn't make any choices.

HAYNES: Yes, that's true. That's exactly right.

LABARTHE: With the script, that is.

HAYNES: Yeah. It's an interesting novel -- have you read a lot of James Ellroy's stuff?

LABARTHE: I've read The Black Dahlia and American Tabloid and... another one, I don't remember which.

HAYNES: This is an interesting book in his oeuvre, along with The Big Nowhere --

LABARTHE: That's the one.

HAYNES: It's a weird, transitional moment between his early, Ross McDonaldish -- well, that's not quite accurate -- his more conventionally structured mystery novels, the Lloyd Hopkins things -- and his historical novels, like L.A. Confidential and so forth... I mean, the novel is totally open, there's no closure in it, and it still works, whereas the film --

LABARTHE: But, even as Ron Howardish as the film L.A. Confidential is, and even as most of the casting and tonal decisions are wrong, they made a decision to close off the narrative, and to give it some impulsion throughout, which they just didn't do here. Which is not to say that DePalma and Friedman necessarily would had to have made a conventional narrative out of it, or a happy ending, or a one-two-three structure. They just didn't give it any structure.

HAYNES: I agree with that.

LABARTHE: Because you can be a structuralist without being a... well, without being Akiva Goldsman.

DUMAS: We're still in Roger Ebert territory.

LABARTHE: Well, sure. We could sit here and say, "the sets, blah blah blah, the actors blah blah blah..."

HAYNES: You know, a movie that DePalma maybe should have looked at before going into this project -- Summer of Sam.

LABARTHE: Yes, it gets the hysteria and it gets the feverishness of the community in a way that The Black Dahlia conspicuously doesn't -- and of course that's a departure from the novel --

DUMAS: And [Summer of Sam] has an extremely complicated plot, or rather an unusual amount of plot, that you can follow.

LABARTHE: Right.

DUMAS: But you knowthat DePalma watched it; he watches everything. But he probably looked at Summer of Sam and just said, "oh, this is terribly written," and didn't take notice of the way it's a mess. "I wish he hadn't shot on this film stock. I would have put the camera over there instead."

LABARTHE: Yeah.

DUMAS: "I wouldn't have let these two people natter on at each other for twenty minutes about their sex lives." That's one thing that DePalma thankfully didn't get from Cassavetes.

HAYNES: I've been annoyed by how much reference there's been made in the reviews so far to the actual historical event, the Dahlia murder, and how the film isn't accurate and so on. And yet in the Ellroy novel, too, there's all this business about why the Dahlia murder wasn't solved to begin with -- the fact that they had all these confessions that they -- they had to plow through all of these crazy admissions of guilt, which is sort of the most wonderful part of the book. And the most potentially DePalma --

LABARTHE: Yeah, that's right, I hadn't thought of that. I can imagine a DePalma montage of these confessions --

DUMAS: That's where he would have put Dennis Franz.

HAYNES: All these people coming in, and Josh Hartnett having to follow up all of these leads that just go nowhere. And this is a central aspect of the novel -- all these bars they go into, everywhere they go, there's some other seedy narrative that demands to be discovered. And the Black Dahlia herself is just the tip of the iceberg.

LABARTHE: Well, it's like that moment in Wonder Boys again -- where the protagonist learns his life lesson, blah blah blah, and this enables him to turn over a new leaf and earn his happy ending, and so on.

HAYNES: It's unfortunate that Curtis Hanson keeps making an appearance in this discussion.

[laughter]

LABARTHE: But that's just it. They made choices, they streamlined, and that's how they got L.A. Confidential to work, despite all the problems with it.

HAYNES: But at the same time, in making those choices, they bring in a lot more of the L.A. culture of the time than is in evidence here, especially the political material, all the racial stuff, the Black Christmas --

DUMAS: Yeah, if you're going to begin with the Zoot Suit riots, I mean, give us something.

HAYNES: Yeah.

DUMAS: Far more than L.A. Confidential, this needed to be a three- or three-and-a-half-hour movie. It should have been approached that way from the beginning. Apparently Friedman's original script was enormous, and maybe it should have stayed that way. I mean, Meet Joe Black? If they can make something like that and put it in theaters -- if they had really thought of this as a prestige project --

LABARTHE: Right.

DUMAS: And clearly they did think of it as a prestige project, but if they had really allowed it to unfold --

LABARTHE: But that's just another choice they didn't make.

DUMAS: I can't remember -- does the novel close out with the Fiona Shaw and William Finley figures having committed the murder?

HAYNES: I think so.

DUMAS: Okay, so that wasn't a condensation. But surely the scenes in which we find out that the Hilary Swank character was involved in Lee's murder --

HAYNES: That's definitely a revision.

LABARTHE: That's one of the worst things about it. It provides closure, but it's exactly the wrong kind, and it's so superficial.

DUMAS: You know, I'm having just the same reaction to this that I had -- well, not exactly the same -- a similar reaction to the one I had to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I felt definitely wanted to be a four-hour movie, and should have been.

LABARTHE: I've since come to appreciate it a lot more, but yeah, when I first saw O Brother -- that, at least, built a ramp, you know what I mean? This one didn't build a ramp at all. The Coens built a ramp, but never finished the construction project.

DUMAS: The gradient was too steep.

HAYNES: Yeah.

DUMAS: It needed, it wanted to have the kind of flow that -- that --

HAYNES: 1900.

DUMAS: Well, but better than that. Maybe The Leopard -- I know you [Labarthe] and I agree about that --

LABARTHE: It's turgid.

DUMAS: But it has that --

LABARTHE: That grandiosity. That sweep.

DUMAS: Yes, and to pull off that sweep, you need a certain kind of tempo -- you can't pull off that sweep if you're moving through a wall of -- a thicket of narrative at Bill and Ted speed.

LABARTHE: Yeah.

DUMAS: Which is DePalma's mistake here. Casualties of War, right? That's at the tempo that this should have been at. Or Carlito.

HAYNES: There's a kind of lack of courage or something, too -- touching on the, you know, the quote-unquote darker desires that this project unleashes, the whole depths-of-the-human-heart motif that would seem to be a major reason for DePalma to approach this project --

LABARTHE: Well, the strangest thing for me -- and maybe this is the key to the whole thing -- but Ellroy, or at least Ellroy's characters and Ellroy's narratives, they want us to react to all of this darkness with -- [makes disgusted face] -- you know, "ugh! Lesbianism! Ugh!"

[laughter]

LABARTHE: Which is exactly the opposite of DePalma.

DUMAS: Yeah, yeah, precisely. Because DePalma loves other people's pleasure.

HAYNES: Yeah.

DUMAS: That's what made Dressed to Kill so disturbing to so many people. I mean, he wants you to experience Angie Dickinson's orgasm, and then he wants you to experience her murder -- he wants you to go from one extreme to the other. He wants you to taste it. And also he wants you to feel the pleasure in his filmmaking, in his craft. You can tell that he loved having that lesbian floor show, even if that scene isn't the big Frankie Goes To Hollywood-type production number that we hoped it was going to be --

LABARTHE: Whereas Ellroy just wants to make you want to barf.

DUMAS: Ellroy's a hard Republican, right?

LABARTHE: I don't know about his specific politics.

HAYNES: I'm not sure whether he's on record about that kind of stuff. He's certainly reactionary.

LABARTHE: Yeah. He may not be conservative, but he's definitely reactionary.

HAYNES: He's always saying things like, "I'm NOT a liberal."

LABARTHE: Well, DePalma isn't either.

HAYNES: In The Cold Six Thousand, which is the sequel to American Tabloid, there's a deep sense of betrayal which I think is consonant with DePalma -- it's about the subversion of the civil rights movement and it's full of rage, and at the same time, there's this sympathy for the guys who are out there selling heroin to sedate the quote-unquote Negro population. And it's also Las Vegas, Howard Hughes, all these gangsters --

LABARTHE: Oh, that sounds very DePalma.

DUMAS: You know, the funny thing about The Black Dahlia was that we were all expecting it to be Blow Out taking place inside The Untouchables, but it's really The Untouchables taking place inside Femme Fatale.

LABARTHE: Yeah.

DUMAS: It has all the flagrant disregard for narrative -- I mean, the way he turns away from the murder even at the moment he's bringing it into the story --

LABARTHE: I was looking at the opening of Femme Fatale a couple of nights ago. And especially when you compare it to Mulholland Drive, Femme Fatale seems really straightforward in regard to the quote-unquote reality of the story, but the more you look at it, the more confusing it is, and the less it holds together, than any -- any! -- reading you can produce for Mulholland Drive.

HAYNES: Yeah. Which is its charm.

LABARTHE: There is no solid real story to stand on that satisfies everything. You just can't put it together.

DUMAS: But it's not meant to be a -- it's meant to hold together until the moment the film is done running through the projector. And maybe not even that far. I mean, the repeated title, "Seven Years Later" -- when I saw it opening night with J---- in Chicago, there were two completely opposed reactions from the audience at the same moment. The second time you see "Seven Years Later," half the audience groaned in disbelief and the other half just cackled with delight. I mean, "what?!?" It was a great moment at the movies.

HAYNES: Now, what was his film immediately prior to that?

DUMAS: Mission to Mars.

HAYNES: Mission to Mars, that's right. Well, he's had a pretty bizarre last few years --

LABARTHE: Well, his last fifteen years -- well, maybe his last twenty years -- or, fuck, maybe his whole career -- he's made a lot of stinkers. There's just no way around it.

DUMAS: Well, sure, but how many filmmakers have an unbroken run like Hitchcock or Verhoeven did a couple of times, with five masterpieces in a row? I mean, even Hitchcock had I Confess and The Paradine Case and all the late ones. I mean, Hitchcock made so many good movies over so many years, and he got to continue making movies, because he was the industry, personified. If ever there was a director who successfully managed to work within the confines -- I mean, there were battles, but after a certain point and up until Marnie, mostly it was just, "hey, whatever you like, Mr. Hitchcock." Whereas DePalma has never had, and never will have, that kind of --

HAYNES: Yeah. Even Polanski had Pirates.

LABARTHE: Frantic.

HAYNES: Frantic had a great first half.

LABARTHE: Frantic is fun, don't get me wrong. And The Ninth Gate is fun. I mean, Lena Olin --

DUMAS: My favorite line of Polanski dialogue is in The Ninth Gate.

LABARTHE: Which is?

DUMAS: Depp comes into a hotel or something, and there in the lobby he finds Emmanuelle Seigner again, sitting there. And he stares at her in astonishment, just goggle-eyed, and she looks at him and says, "I like books; do you?" It's heavenly.

HAYNES: I think I might have expected The Black Dahlia to be like The Ninth Gate. Now that you say that -- that tone, that moldy --

DUMAS: I think it's a terrific movie.

LABARTHE: It's a light movie, but it's far, far better than any of his mistakes.

DUMAS: Like Diary of Forbidden Dreams.

LABARTHE: I'll never watch The Pianist again. It's just not a movie you can watch twice. I think I'd classify it with his mistakes.

HAYNES: I would too, actually. Maybe The Black Dahlia is kind of like The Pianist in that The Pianist was the movie Roman Polanski was born to make, and yet --

LABARTHE: Yes, that's exactly it. And clearly this is supposed to be, should be, the terminal DePalma film. As everyone keeps pointing out -- the perfect match of director to material. It's his Schindler's List.

DUMAS: Now, wouldn't it be funny, then, if the three of us are disappointed in The Black Dahlia, and it opens at $28 million and only drops, you know, ten percent in its second weekend --

[laughter]

HAYNES: And goes on to win Best Picture.

DUMAS: Because it's so compromised. I mean, isn't that how it generally works? The Coens took their Oscar for Fargo instead of The Hudsucker Proxy --

LABARTHE: And haven't done a good thing since. Just like Spielberg with Schindler, which obviously destroyed him. There hasn't been a single good moment in a Spielberg film since then. Not one.

HAYNES: And with The Pianist, I mean, I thought they were going to give Polanski a Presidential pardon --

[laughter]

DUMAS: Maybe if it had been Clinton.

LABARTHE: Have either of you seen Oliver Twist?

HAYNES: No.

DUMAS: I remember you telling me it was magisterial.

LABARTHE: It's okay. I mean, yes, "magisterial" is the correct adjective for the tone of it -- it's good. I'd certainly watch it again instead of The Pianist. But ultimately it's one of his mistakes.

HAYNES: Would you say that Tess is one of his mistakes?

LABARTHE: I'd put Tess there, yeah. It's just dull. And Polanski shouldn't be dull!

HAYNES: No, he shouldn't.

DUMAS: There's something about making the movie you were born to make, like The Pianist or The Black Dahlia -- it's just inevitable that you flub it. You run up against your own symptom and you must necessarily fail there.

LABARTHE: Well, we've talked about Spielberg passing through "Spielberg" in making Schindler. That's the movie that destroyed him as a director. Everything he's done since then has been utter fucking crap.

DUMAS: Yes, the ashes of the camps just hang over everything he's done since.

HAYNES: Setting aside the auteurist thing, maybe there's just not room anymore for the kind of movies that these guys made their reputations on.

LABARTHE: See, I don't agree.

HAYNES: Well, but has there been a movie on the scale of what The Black Dahlia obviously wants to be since the mid-eighties, since The Untouchables, I guess? I'm trying to think whether anyone has managed to do it successfully. It just seems to me that now, if you're going to try to make that kind of movie, it'll necessarily be on a very different scale --

DUMAS: Well, the last time they...

[long silence]

LABARTHE: You may have something there.

DUMAS: I'm trying to think of the last time they made one.

HAYNES: No one in Europe or the United States, at any rate. Maybe Hero comes close --

DUMAS: That's a film that, because its politics may be inaccessible to us, to the lay Western viewer, you can see it without the encumbrances of the specific kind of complaints, the things you can't parse --

LABARTHE: Or The Lord of the Rings, even with all of its problems.

HAYNES: Yeah.

LABARTHE: Although ultimately, that will also probably prove to be the undoing of Peter Jackson in the same way. He certainly won't ever make a good movie again, after that.

DUMAS: King Kong was just an abortion.

HAYNES: Oh, yeah.

DUMAS: Headache-inducing.

HAYNES: And The Lord of the Rings is just so devoid of sexuality. Even in The Untouchables there's a sort of eroticism --

LABARTHE: There's sexuality in The Untouchables?

HAYNES: No, no, I mean the ambition, the erotics of the imagemaking, which is what DePalma is always about, even in, say, Mission to Mars. That's what Peter Jackson doesn't bring to The Lord of the Rings, and King Kong is the unveiling of that absence -- well, and Peter Jackson just doesn't connect with the strictly sexual aspect of the story, either. Even the 1976 King Kong is concerned with desire, maybe almost exclusively, and that's what holds it all together --

DUMAS: As opposed to the rehabilitation of the Other, the humanizing impulse that Jackson brings to Kong, I guess. The big loveable ape is like a child that needs a friend --

LABARTHE: For three hours.

DUMAS: Oh, it's just fucking interminable. That intense identification between Naomi Watts and this enormous child, the whole kindred-soul thing --

LABARTHE: He made King Kong into a puppy, basically.

HAYNES: Yeah.

LABARTHE: It's like she's being menaced by a big cocker spaniel.

DUMAS: It's just a terrible film. And it's another one that, you know, made a ton of money, and a lot of people feel passionately about it. I have a friend who called me after it was released and was just profoundly moved by it -- she was sobbing in the theater. "Oh, I cried all the way through it, it was wonderful." And I was completely puzzled, except for the fact that so many people like Harry Knowles were just having these concussive orgasms in their seats --

LABARTHE: I saw it with you. You were just suicidal when we walked out of the theater.

DUMAS: It didn't make me want to beat up the director, the way Signs did, or Vanilla Sky -- I mean, it wasn't an immoral picture. But it was completely without redemptive qualities. I mean, Jack Black was so embarrassing.

HAYNES: There's something about the whole Lord of the Rings project -- the fact that it's in three parts, it suggests that it's --

LABARTHE: It's something both more than and less than a movie.

HAYNES: Yeah. It's like he's not making a movie, he's waging a war or something, like Coppola.

LABARTHE: Like Bush waging the Iraq war -- he managed to get it started, and then it was like --

HAYNES: He couldn't keep track of all of the different elements.

LABARTHE: "Mission Accomplished."

DUMAS: Well, but if we're talking about these movies that are huge gestures, of the kind that aren't possible anymore --

LABARTHE: Which isn't to say that there haven't been masterpieces coming out of Hollywood.

DUMAS: Of course. Starship Troopers.

LABARTHE: Fight Club.

DUMAS: Raising Cain. And -- I'm gonna say it -- Mission Impossible. I love that film --

HAYNES: I do too.

DUMAS: And I know that there's a great deal of resistance to it, for the obvious and correct reasons. But, I mean, give me a break, it's a huge achievement.

LABARTHE: And I have to say that I really think it's a piece of shit. But it's got some enjoyable bits in it.

HAYNES: There's also Carlito's Way.

LABARTHE: That's one that I need to look at again.

DUMAS: It's a great movie, sure, and the French pissed themselves over it, but it does have Penelope Ann Miller, who's just awful, and she's a central weakness in the film, like Kim Greist in Brazil -- just a damaging presence in what's a really lynchpin role. I mean, if you don't fall in love with the woman on screen the way that Al Pacino or Jonathan Pryce fall in love with her --

HAYNES: Neither of them are Kim Novak.

LABARTHE: Back to masterpieces. I don't know if either of you guys will go for this, but: Lone Star.

DUMAS: I liked it a lot.

HAYNES: I remember bits of it -- well, actually, I'm not sure that I've seen it. You'd count that among the great movies of the last decade?

LABARTHE: Well, just following the logic of this conversation, that may turn out to be the great American movie of the last twenty-five years. Well, fifteen years.

DUMAS: And I'd say that the great American movie of the last twenty-five years would be Starship Troopers.

LABARTHE: No, we're talking about different things. Nobody liked Starship Troopers. We're talking about -- I mean, in the sense of a great, expand-the-mainstream-out-to-here, capital-c Classic, capital-g Great American film.

DUMAS: Okay.

LABARTHE: Starship Troopers is not that. Starship Troopers may be the most important political American movie of the last thirty or forty years --

DUMAS: Since The Manchurian Candiate.

LABARTHE: Yeah. And The Manchurian Candidate is a better -- as flawed and as bizarre as it is, perhaps because of its withdrawal from circulation and all the stuff that subsequently accrued around it, it's a G.A.F., Great American Film. Starship Troopers ain't that.

DUMAS: Did you say you haven't seen Lone Star?

HAYNES: I'm just not sure.

DUMAS: I've got it here -- I liked it a lot, and I guess one of the reasons why I wouldn't immediately put it in this theoretical category is because -- well, I guess because it became this sort of touchstone text in American Studies at some point after its release --

LABARTHE: I remember you telling me about that.

DUMAS: It became this reference point for what the discipline, the academic discipline, was supposed to be trying to accomplish. The attention to buried histories and connections across and despite racial and ethnic divisions, the permeability of borders, etc., etc. There was a certain amount of discourse about it.

LABARTHE: But any Great American Film is going to do that. I mean, how many American Studies papers about The Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind are there? A zillion?

DUMAS: Would you say it's the best John Sayles film?

LABARTHE: Yes, absolutely. Far and away. It's the only film of his that has any visual sophistication, for one thing.

DUMAS: Better than Matewan? It's got that Haskell Wexler --

LABARTHE: Matewan I like a lot, but it's not... it's just too direct in its politics. The whole movie is just too direct in a lot of ways. And that's the thing about Great American Films, they cannot, repeat cannot, be direct if they are to achieve that status, or else they become dated. Now, I loved -- LOVED -- Eight Men Out. I can watch that movie over and over again, and it will always make me cry, every time. That's one of the three movies that can do that to me. And it's one that I think should be a Great American Film, but it's not, because it's too tied up in the nitty-gritty. It's too quotidian. With a little more grandiosity, it could have been Chinatown.

DUMAS: I'd cite Chinatown in this fictitious category.

LABARTHE: Oh, yeah. It came out of the stable already varnished.

DUMAS: How about Carrie? It's definitely acquired that sheen --

LABARTHE: No. Because Carrie is a genre picture.

DUMAS: And Chinatown isn't?

HAYNES: I think it has something to do with the effectiveness with which someone tries to make a, you know, a Big Statement about who we are as a people or as a nation --

LABARTHE: And yet not make any kind of statement at all.

HAYNES: Right. Like The Godfather or something on that order, a zeitgeist kind of movie. Because nobody speaks for everybody anymore.

LABARTHE: That's exactly it.

HAYNES: You can't find that position anymore.

LABARTHE: Forrest Gump.

DUMAS: Oh, God.

LABARTHE: Okay, maybe Back to the Future. Well, but why not? Zemeckis has been trying to make nothing but Great American Films --

DUMAS: He's completely craven. But yeah -- I mean, 1941?

LABARTHE: Another candidate for most important American political film of the last thirty years.

DUMAS: Here's one: Raiders of the Lost Ark.

LABARTHE: Yep.

DUMAS: Even more so than something like E.T.. Raiders is definitely a fantasy about every single American -- who each of us is, deep in each of our golden melting-pot hearts.

LABARTHE: Yes, absolutely.

HAYNES: And of course we can't forget Hook.

[laughter]

DUMAS: Maybe Safe.

LABARTHE: Well, but Safe wears less and less well as the years go by. It's too specific and quote-unquote Independent, and its mood is too -- it just won't parse in twenty years.

DUMAS: Maybe.

HAYNES: No, you're right, Safe doesn't speak for everyone. It has to have that sort of -- it has to enunciate the national in some way. I guess Forrest Gump comes closer, although I hate to admit it -- it tries to speak for everyone, even if it makes that complicated gesture of embodying us, the audience, in this Jimmy-Stewart-does-Flowers-For-Algernon kind of figure.

DUMAS: So is it possible for a Great American Movie to be no good at all? I mean, it has to be technically proficient, at least, but can it be a totally bankrupt picture? Because Forrest Gump -- I just don't know what that movie is doing, even now. It is so completely opaque, just like every other one of Zemeckis's pictures.

LABARTHE: Well, but really the best argument against it is that, in ten years, Forrest Gump will probably be totally forgotten.

HAYNES: That's the problem, there's the issue of shelf life. It's too specifically topical. Who's going to remember what SDS was? Ultimately it's only speaking to, and for, the people who lived through all of that. Time will tell, I guess.

DUMAS: It seems that the consensus is that DePalma will be remembered in this specific way for The Untouchables, which is...

HAYNES: It's just crazy.

DUMAS: It's bizarre.

LABARTHE: But would you really expect that the canon could someday include Body Double? Not that it shouldn't be there, of course it should, but it's perfectly antipodal to the canon. It's exactly the kind of movie that can't be included in a canon without the canon disintegrating.

HAYNES: Antimatter.

DUMAS: Maybe if we keep talking about Body Double as a central film of the American century, we can convince --

LABARTHE: Oh yeah. You're talking about the utopian future where the people like Andrew Sarris write books citing Body Double instead of Vertigo.

DUMAS: Yeah, and Robot Monster and Bye Bye Birdie --

LABARTHE: And Kings Row instead of The Best Years Of Our Lives. But once you actually do that, you've shattered the evaluative machinery that --

DUMAS: No you haven't.

LABARTHE: Yes you have. You can't have every Roger Ebert think like Ado Kyrou, or else --

HAYNES: That's right, the whole idea of consensus becomes meaningless. But all the same, it's definitely strange that The Untouchables or Scarface will be the ones that play out in the American imaginary, although I guess it would just be strange for DePalma to achieve canonical status at all.

DUMAS: Well, but at the same time The Untouchables is a flawless picture, sure, which is no mean achievement. Most directors who manage a flawless picture in their careers only get one. DePalma has two. Spielberg doesn't have two. Only Hitchcock, I guess, and Powell and Pressburger have more than two.

LABARTHE: But what makes DePalma so interesting are precisely the things that most people will identify as flaws, like the willingness to put a picture together the way that Raising Cain is put together -- with characters waking up out of each other's dreams and so forth. Or taking care of the all the backstory and its exposition in a single shot, with Frances Sternhagen in the wig --

HAYNES: Okay, so why shouldn't we try thinking about The Black Dahlia in that way? Maybe a lot of the things we've been identifying as flaws are precisely the things that make it interesting.

DUMAS: Go for it.

HAYNES: I was looking at Snake Eyes a week or so ago, and -- I know we've talked a lot about what the original version was like, before DePalma was forced to cut it down, or chose to cut it down, or whatever, but perhaps that truncation was built into the picture too. I don't mean in terms of intent, of course, but -- think about that opening shot. The movie starts out being sort of aggressively omniscient, showing you everything, and it goes on for twelve minutes and it's as if the shot could just keep going forever. And then the rest of the movie goes about showing you everything you didn't see.

LABARTHE: Dismantling your experience of the film as you're having it.

HAYNES: Yes, and there's also that scene in Mission Impossible that causes everyone so much anxiety, where Tom Cruise is rehearsing a sequence of events in his head that completely contradicts what the narration is telling you --

DUMAS: Warren Report logic.

HAYNES: Exactly. Well, maybe The Black Dahlia is exactly the same thing, except the span of time it dismantles isn't twelve minutes or, you know, the span of time it takes to have one's cover blown. It's weeks or months. So you thought you were seeing the boxing match, but you weren't; you thought you were seeing his partner murdered, but you weren't.

LABARTHE: You thought you were seeing James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia --

HAYNES: But you weren't.

LABARTHE: No, we didn't.

HAYNES: Are you going to see it again?

LABARTHE: 8 pm.

DUMAS: I'll see it again.

HAYNES: Me too. Sunday?

DUMAS: Sunday.