The Writing Life Too

Dusk is falling and there is a slight drizzle here in the valley with snow in the mountains. A few weeks ago someone I know mentioned that if he could live the life he never dared he would have been a sports writer. He studied engineering and repairs copiers for a living now but is the kind of sports enthusiast who can quote statistics on just about any team, player, coach, or series. He imagines getting paid to follow teams around and put his sports knowledge to use. Since my brothers and father can quote stats going back 50 years, this doesn’t strike me as unnatural. But sometimes I wonder about what I would do if I wasn’t writing the books I write and teaching the writers I teach. Brain or psychological research—an endless fascination for me, or some other form of research would have required a much different course of study.

Last night I was listening to All Things Considered as I cooked a pot of chili and Matthew Sturm, a senior research scientist and snow expert with the Army's Cold Regions Research Laboratory (http://snow.usace.army.mi/l) came on and talked about snow. I never knew much about snow researchers and immediately starting wondering about this odd profession. Then after I went to their web site, I discovered that there is annual snow conference—who would have thunk? The site has beautiful photos of snow and magnified shots of snow flakes. It seems that the main purpose of their research is to track contaminants since in high altitude and polar regions where snow rarely melts, the continually depositing layers of snow serve as a historical record of contaminants.

Sturm explained that snow is a mineral and each flake has a dust mote at its center. While there are 30-40 general snowflake forms, that there are six basic forms such as prisms, plates, and dendrites most often seen on Christmas cards. You gotta wonder how someone gets involved in studying snow.

But if I didn’t go into research (and I shudder to imagine all the math courses and dry lectures involved), I’d love to be a film critic which seems one of the best jobs in the world, although there are so many dreadful movies made these days I can see the down side. Which brings me to the movie I saw most recently. It’s been years since I’ve read Cormac McCarthy although I was certainly aware of the buzz around No Country for Old Men. Then I started hearing about the buzz the movie and now understand it. If this film doesn’t win some Oscar nominations there is no justice.

In this film the Coen brothers are at the top of their game with a film that is so eerie, arresting, and fraught with tension that although my friend and I both needed to go to the bathroom half way through the movie, we were stapled to our seats until the final moment. However, if you cannot handle blood and gore, for god’s sake, stay away. It has some truly lurid scenes and there were several times when I looked away because my stomach could not handle, the uhm, medical details of the moment.

It’s also bleak, unfailingly bleak, and the themes are about mankind’s depravity and evil nature. As someone who has just rewritten my chapters on villains and sociopaths I was particularly interested in the antics of the character played by Javier Bardem as a cattle-gun-toting pitiless psycho. To say he’s an effective villain is to say the night sky holds lots of stars. He makes savagery look so easy that he’s pretty much convinced me never to set foot in Texas if I want to get out alive.

Although set in the barren plains of Texas the film is more crime thriller than Western since it involves a drug deal gone sour. But then sour is too wimpy a term. Since the fallout is horrific and everybody ends up dead, even the pit bulls. (You weren’t expecting Golden Retrievers were you?) A day or so later when the bodies have been baking and bloating in the Texas son the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and his deputy go out to check things out.

The dialogue in this scene and many others is terse and effective and spooky.

Deputy: “It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?”

Sheriff: “If it ain’t, it’ll do ’til the mess gets here.”

The film has an astonishing amount of detail and each scene is brilliantly framed and even the most desolate landscapes are displayed with a strange beauty. The cast is well-chosen and Kelly Macdonald is great as Josh Brolin’s trailer-park wife and Brolin makes for a convincing Vietnam vet turned bad ass after stumbling onto the crime scene while hunting.

However, the wanna-be film critic in me needs to complain a bit. You see, there are two extremely crucial and climatic scenes that happen off-stage and for the life of me, I cannot imagine why. I won’t tell you what they are, but I will say that they’ve left a lingering disappointment in the midst of an amazing cinematic experience. Instead the film ends anti-climatically with Tommy Lee Jones describing a dream of his dead father. It’s an odd and tender moment with his wife played by Tess Harper with such concern for his happiness etched on her face that it almost broke my heart.

Perhaps in these days of such political corruption and a country falling apart, a story like this is apt—a terrible allegory for terrible times. I don’t know. I get up every morning hoping for some redemption, some glimmering humanity lightening my days. Apparently the Coen brothers don’t see things that way.