Black Clock Editor-at-Large Anthony Miller is participating in Literary Death Match tonight, September 6th. If I were a betting man, and if there existed a sports book that released odds on semi-competitive literary events, my money would be on Miller. His contribution to the most recent issue of Black Clock, “A History of the Cinema 1920-2014,” is the sort of writing meant to pulverize the LDM competition. Each entry in the alternative timeline packs a sharp, nearly deadpan punch, like a Steven Wright one-liner. They are paraprosdokians that bend the dry rhetoric of most film histories into fantastically absurd contortions. Ronald Reagan stars in The Maltese Falcon; Alejandro Jodorowsky directs the megahit Dune; and John Cassavetes adapts Pynchon. As Miller explains below, in the first part of our two-part interview (part two can be found here), his timeline is “a love letter to timelines and the kinds of stories timelines tell.”
Besides Black Clock, he has written for Bookforum, LA Weekly, Los Angeles CityBeat, and Poets & Writers, and is currently at work on a novel and “a book about encyclopedic novels and secret histories.” The back of issue 15 enigmatically identifies him as its “conceptual progenitor.” In all of his Black Clock work, Miller uses short, mostly nonfictional essays to tell stories as strange and expansive as any novel. His pieces are punch-drunk valentines, heart-shaped capsules dedicated to preserving and celebrating obscure, beloved cultural flotsam and jetsam, both high and low. Safire’s Political Dictionary; David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing; Chris Farley’s Oscar-winning turn as Fatty Arbuckle (Black Clock issues 9, 12, and 15 respectively). What do these things all have in common? There’s an obvious through-line connecting everything Miller has written. But those connections aren’t really identifiable; they’re more intuitive or synaptic, like a game of black magic or Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography. You can’t necessarily define it, but you just know an Anthony Miller subject – whether it’s an encyclopedia of political history, postmodern sports analysis, or an impossible pop-cultural moment – when you see it. You will see it when he reads tonight at Busby’s East.
As much as it’s a love letter to movies, the piece also feels like a send-up of the way people have written about movies, especially with its stern, wrought title, “A History of the Cinema: 1920-2014.” Why start at 1920, with Caligari, and end at 2014, with Nicole Holofcener’s post-feminist remake of The Maltese Falcon?
I appreciate that you read it as a love letter to cinema. It’s also a love letter to timelines and the kinds of stories timelines tell, whether it’s in the appendix of a book or on a museum wall. As for the title, it was the only thing I could have called it. The dates were simply where I began and ended in this particular version. Among the many film books on my shelf is A Concise History of the Cinema, Volume 1, edited by Peter Cowie (The Tantivy Press, 1971), which I consulted a few times during the writing of my chronology.
I considered creating not just an alternate timeline of the movies but an alternate timeline of science, one in which film stocks and cinema projection were invented in 1850. The resulting Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan films of the Civil War were so gruesome that they forever altered our consciousness about war and violence. Then I realized that was absurdly Pollyannaish and the whole concept of an entirely other universe was too complex and multifaceted for a mere timeline. Maybe I’ll do it in a novel—and throw in some vampires. That’s the ticket to writing a bestseller these days, isn’t it?
Finally, not that I was thinking about this at the time, but Caligari is an expressionist movie about a mad somnambulist. What better way to usher us into a kind of cinematic dreamworld?
I feel like one of the pleasures of reading your piece is how it speculates on the idea of this secret, disappearing history becoming the dominant one–if Louise Brooks had become the biggest star of the thirties, if Uncle Boonmee became a Disneyland ride, etc. (It also feels in a way like this great, big inside joke.) How and why did you choose each of these events?
The real challenge was just how many directions I could have gone, just how many tentacles this beast had. I wanted to be authoritative, but eventually realized that would be a trap. My choices were definitely not random but they were, ultimately, utterly subjective. That’s the beauty of speculative histories: Everybody’s world would look completely different. Steve [Erickson, Black Clock Editor-in-Chief] really wanted me to make Idris Elba the star of Tarantino’s James Bond movie, and I refused. No disrespect to Stringer Bell—The Wire is one of the great TV shows—but even though he might have been 007 in Steve’s crypto-cinematic consciousness, this was my timeline and I didn’t envision it that way.
If the timeline can be read, as you say, as a “great, big inside joke,” it’s one that’s made up of little jokes, or at least knowing nods in certain directions. In my universe, it’s Manny Farber, not Pauline Kael, who picks up the first National Book Award for film criticism. (Kael becomes an actress in Altman’s Nashville and other seminal films of the 1970s.) Books such as The Dolly Dolly Spy, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Flicker have their moment on the big screen. I found places for obscure filmmakers like Joycelin Shrager, whom I borrowed from an entrancing Thomas M. Disch short story I read in a collection called Hollywood Unreel.
Steve wanted the timeline to serve as the introduction, the portal, the wormhole to this issue. It’s like Zack Snyder’s alternative-history credit sequence for Watchmen (unquestionably the best thing about that misbegotten film) where we see moments in twentieth-century history transformed by the presence of superheroes. The Louise Brooks entry was one of my first. Her decision to play the lead alongside James Cagney in The Public Enemy was one of the scenarios described to potential Black Clock 15 contributors to give them a sense of the issue we were imagining. It seemed like an easy way to alter an entire decade with one actress.
The Uncle Boonmee entry—one of the very last entries to find its way into the timeline—originated because I figured Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul shares a certain fanciful sensibility with Walt Disney. There’s a jungle setting, a talking catfish, a princess, and a monkey ghost—think of it as “The Wonderful World of Weerasethakul.” Wouldn’t you be far more curious to climb aboard an Uncle Boonmee ride than a Transformers ride?
All the entries feel like pieces in a giant, intricate puzzle; each date contingent on the next. What was the process of getting those pieces to fit together?
It demanded a basic curatorial sensibility that is demanded of all writers: not too many films from any one genre, not too many films from any particular decade. I edited for rhythm, sequencing short and long listings. With only a few exceptions, each director was assigned a single film. You wanted a more profound answer than that, didn’t you? Really, it was a practical problem—a jigsaw puzzle, like you said.
Initially, the timeline was MUCH longer. (I would like to find a home for the more extended timeline, one that would cast out beyond the cinema.) I tested a number of entries out on my very patient friends; the ones that got the best reactions, I kept. One reader later described the timeline as “fantasy football for film nerds.” It was great fun to contemplate how an invented film or a recasting of an existing one could alter the course of cinema, whether it was a minor shift or a seismic realignment. After a conversation with Bruce [Bauman, Black Clock Senior Editor] about recasting The Wizard of Oz, we decided it would be funny if Bill “Bojangles” Robinson played the Scarecrow to Shirley Temple’s Dorothy. In 1980, this would then convince Michael Jackson, who felt he hadn’t done enough in The Wiz to eradicate Robinson’s minstrelsy, to accept a role as a gay man in A Chorus Line. (His potential participation in A Chorus Line is mentioned in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s phenomenal essay “Michael” in Pulphead.) I also deliberately preserved a few real films within my timeline.
At first, I created entries as they came to me, with little regard for chronology. I had a number of different tracks running at once: The Movies That Might Have Been, The Sequels That Never Were, Movies From Novels and Movies, Movies About Richard Francis Burton (who makes an appearance in my essay in Black Clock 4). I worked in some entries based on some of the other stories in the issue including (with the author’s extremely kind permission) Geoff Nicholson’s truly brilliant inspiration of casting Buster Keaton to star in Andy Warhol’s Read. I had an inkling of what Mark Z. Danielewski was doing with “Clip 4” and incorporated and embellished details about the mysterious filmmaker Darc as I saw fit. On the flipside, a number of the films from my timeline make scattered appearances in “Clip 4.”
Which of these movies would you have most liked to have seen actually happen?
So many of them: Sergei Eisenstein’s Unterwelt, Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness, Maya Deren’s Spellbound, Jean-Luc Godard’s Ubik, John Boorman’s The Third Policeman, Jacques Rivette’s Life A User’s Manual, the Wachowskis’s Invisibles trilogy, Terrence Malick’s Zoolander prequel Hansel. I shouldn’t forget Shaft in Space or any of the Matt Helm movies with Elvis Presley.
Of the ones that actually had the tiniest foothold in our reality, I have to go with Jodorowsky’s Dune. For one thing, you wouldn’t have to get high to enjoy it. I say this as an enormous David Lynch fan who back in 1984 saw a midnight preview of Dune where we received a double-sided glossary of “Dune Terminology.” (I still have it.) Lynch would have given us Ronnie Rocket instead. I think Jodorowsky would have made the ultimate psychedelic epic. His Dune would have been a work of genius or a crime against cinema. Either way, it would have been unforgettable.
By Sam Freilich
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
