John Huston
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Albert DeSalvo
Not only does Claire Denis’ 2013 neo-noir masterpiece Les salauds calculatedly borrow from Sanctuary, William Faulkner’s most provocative and controversial novel, the instrument and venue for a horrific act of sexual violation that neither work depicts directly, but Denis could like Faulkner also in general be said to utilize crime fiction elements for elevated purposes whilst masterfully unfurling a sophisticated narrative characterized by ellipses and effervescent ripples of uncanny causation. All readers of detective novels know that criminal investigation gets all its cables crossed and tangled as matter of perfunctory routine. Anybody with a cursory knowledge of Hollywood and its lore will be aware of gregarious, larger-than-life director John Huston, son of the legendary actor Walter Huston. A born showman. John Huston also had a deeply sinister side. A problem drinker and womanizer, to be sure, but I’m afraid it would appear to extend beyond even that. He was friends with Los Angeles doctor and Venereal Disease Czar George Hodel, a man who would go on to marry Huston’s first wife Dorothy and later be credibly implicated by his own ex-homicide-detective son Steve Hodel in the extremely famous murder of Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—as well as a flabbergasting array of other homicides. George Hodel’s daughter Tamar would not only accuse her father of engaging in an incestuous sexual relationship with her, accusations backed up by first-hand witnesses, but would also accuse John Huston of heinous improprieties. Consider in this light the fact that Roman Polanski, of all people, would cast Huston as an utterly prurient plutocrat who has an abusive incestuous relationship with his own daughter in 1974’s Chinatown. Additionally, Susan Tyrrell, who had a bad drinking problem herself and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her performance in Huston’s 1972 masterpiece Fat City, would later accuse the director of assaulting her in a car during pre-production for that film. When something notably bad happens in a densely populated area worthless accusations come poring into the call centres. In her book The Boston Stranglers about the so-called Boston Strangler and the railroading of Albert DeSalvo, who was never formerly charged or tried, author Susan Kelly very quickly gets into the business of serving up a basically perfect true crime saga for the quantum age because it is impersonal and multi-perspectival, certainly, but also because Kelly has no choice but to remain largely agnostic with respect to the material over which she’s combing, every last detail stress-tested from six angles by one form of freshly emerging insanity or another. We have eleven or thirteen murders in the first half of the ‘60s in Boston, a very large city teeming with dynamic human enterprise, and we never figure out if it was one or two or three people who committed these strangling murders…or if it was closer to eleven or thirteen. Every time we look at an individual victim new sinister dimensions appear to reveal themselves. We know that Albert DeSalvo, seduced and flattered by his attorneys and the Strangler Task Force, confessed to all of those early-‘60s stranglings, though he couldn't have committed many, if any. What do you even do with guys like DeSalvo and Henry Lee Lucas who just won’t stop confessing? They’re almost like gambling addicts.
Histoire de Marie et Julien (Jacques Rivette, 2003)
In "The Last Wolf, ” one of many, many pieces by the beloved Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai the germinal seeds of which can be traced back to the influence of Austrian curmudgeon Thomas Bernhard, consists of not just a single paragraph but, indeed, a single seventy-six page sentence which superimposes time frames and ingeniously situates the entirety of the digression within the context of its retelling, like a lengthy digression from a 19th century English novel. In Krasznahorkai there is an implacable sense that man is a monster, and a grave danger to himself. Susan Sontag called him approvingly a master of the apocalypse. The hunter dutifully clocks his own extinction. There is a taped interview I love very much in which the filmmaker Jaques Rivette, having been asked by his interviewer about the “fantômes” in his film Histoire de Marie et Julien, grows extremely animated, insisting no, no, no, they are not fantômes, they are revenants. Different mythologies; different “space-times.” One of the key things that separates the revenant from the fantôme, insists Rivette, is the former's corporeality, indeed its carnality, explaining as this does the lovemaking in Histoire de Marie et Julien. Krasznahorkai’s 2016 novel Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming is about three revenants, the second of which is the eponymous Baron: “when still in his forties the doctors had told him that this would happen, that he would become an idiot …” The Baron desires nothing more, apparently, than to return to the Hungarian town of his youth so as to reconnect with his first love, Marika (or Marietta). An emblematic revenant, the Baron Wenckheim is spectral, unnerving, in some sense hardly there at all. He cannot stand to be touched, he presents as aphasic, maybe borderline demented. Finally arriving at her domicile, the Baron does not recognize Marika as herself though he does note a passing resemblance. She’s pretty cheesed about it: “was it possible something had really happened with the Baron’s mind?! because it just wasn’t possible for him to come here, to sit down in front of her, look at her, and not remember who she was, that simply wasn’t possible …” It proves to be a cataclysmic encounter, cosmic outer-atmosphere payload by the kiloton. Marika is shattered. More calamity is on its way, all of it pooling together, sure as the frost on the pumpkin. The Baron, escaping a diabolic meddler, walks into the forest and effectively out of the novel. The third revenant arrives subsequently, in the form of a poison pen letter, signed by the Baron but certainly not written by nor in any way sanctioned by him. Poison. Pen. The letter constitutes a blistering, categorical judgment, and it will lead to the immanentization of the eschaton and scorched earth every which way but loose. “The whole thing will go up in flames.” Krasznahorkai’s cosmology figures the universe and the human being within a constitutive condition of extreme agitation. We're standing upright on two legs like grubby teetering imbeciles…and we can get unpleasantly emotional. The Professor, internationally prominent specialist on moss, will have cause to ruminate, even entering intimate philosophical colloquy with a dog, though he has previously been known to kick dogs. He will bemoan that “the world is nothing more than an event-lunacy,” and, meditating on eternity, will himself briefly become analogical equivalent to the bird standing pensively in the Kamo river at the beginning of 2008’s Seiobo There Below; “the proper method of liquidating thought,” avers the prof, “is the standing position, that is our basic stance, in motionless observation, because only from here, only from this stance, do we have a chance, perhaps …”
The very short third paragraph of Gustav Flaubert’s 1881 novel Bouvard and Pécuchet—his best and his funniest—bearing all the curt gravity of fresh cataclysm announced: “Two men appeared.” Take note, Samuel Beckett. “One was coming from the Bastille, the other from the Jardin des Plantes. The taller one, wearing a linen suit, walked with his hat pushed back, vest unbuttoned and tie in his hand. The shorter one, whose body disappeared inside a brown frock coat, lowered his head beneath a cap with a pointed visor.” A special Parisian windfall having unexpectedly fallen, Bouvard and Pécuchet, granted to do wither they wilt, genuine in their zeal, committed in their puttering fashion, countr'fied, and forced into tenuous alliance with a farmer and his wife, set about fussing tirelessly at the immediate surroundings, setting their hungry eyes on mastering agronomy, which they will bungle imaginatively, repeatedly, and exhaustively, aghast and vexed at their inability to bring anything off in a manner that corresponds to expectations. “The wind enjoyed flattening the beanstalks.” It is not long before Bouvard is making scandalous use of cadavers for purposes of fertilization. Sheep are dying in considerable number after being forced to undergo his amateur phlebotomies. A focus on agronomy will tend to splinter off absentmindedly into peripheral disciplines, this a mode that will be repeated with numerous fantastically dynamic variations over ten more or less full chapters. “The worm that grows in the sheep’s brain and causes its death has an anatomy just as complex as the sheep itself,” argues Bouvard the Philosopher, sanguine at least for the moment. The distinctive physiognomies are the generative ground for the differentiation of these two imaginary men, closer than close. Thin, anxious, adult virgin Pécuchet becomes the physical and moral expression of suppressed trauma or a related complex, the implication being that the prude of the pair may have good reason to be gun shy. Controversy and acrimony can only inflame ardent bonhomie. “They tried to find solid bases for reasoning. The bases collapsed—and suddenly there was no more idea, the way a fly skitters off the moment you try to catch it.” Getting right with information means getting right with time, which is the embodied time—pulsed and non-pulsed—that you have on the earth. The spending of time becomes the spinal column of an individual style, the one-off aberration and wonky singularity that each of us constitutes itself constituting that little bit of vibrating difference, love, compulsion, and/or desire roping us into one another and into things. “Their words flowed tirelessly, remarks following upon anecdotes, philosophical musings upon personal observations. They denigrated the Public Works department, the Tobacco Authority, business, the theatre, our navy, and the entire human race, like men who had suffered grave disappointments. Each one, listening to the other, rediscovered forgotten parts of himself. And although they had passed the age of naïve emotions, they both felt a new pleasure, a kind of blossoming, the charm of affections newly born.”
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