In the Shape of Things to Come | Greil Marcus | Talks at Google

I'd like to thank you all for coming. And I'd like to introduce Grill Marcus, who is a social commentator and cultural critic. He's the author of numerous books, among the Mystery Train, Lipstick, the Old Weird America. He's been a columnist for the Village Voice, Art Forum, Salon.com, new York Times, and Esquire Magazine. Marcos was the first review editor at Rolling stone magazine in 1969, and he rated Dead Men, Dead man, sorry, Singular with Johnny Depp as the best movie of the end of the 20th century. He's here today to talk about his new book, the Shape of Things to Prophecy and the American Voice. Join me in welcoming me. Ghrel Marcus.

I have a new approach to talking about this book first started doing this last year when it came out in hardback. I spent a lot of time trying to explain the idea behind the book and the arc of the philosophical arc that brought all different elements together and ended up with a, you know, a stunning conclusion. And I'm totally abandoning that. And I'm simply going to read briefly a passage or parts of the book that I hope are interesting. And if anything more comes out of that, fine. And if nothing does either. Because when you write a book, even if there's an idea behind it, even if there's a grand story or an argument you want to make when you're writing, what you're writing about is primary, and it's not about how it relates to the whole. It's trying to get it right, trying to get deeper and deeper into the subject. So if, for example, I've got a chapter in this book about four novels by Philip Roth that seem to me to say something completely fundamental about American identity and to enact a great struggle to come to terms with American identity as a blessing and a curse, all that's fine. But when I'm trying to get at a certain moment in one of those novels where you just have never felt such pain, such terror, all that matters is getting that right, and the rest of it all falls away. And so if this book has an overarching argument, it's an interesting book or it's a dull book, because on any given page something is happening on its own terms. So I'm going to read you a bit from a chapter called Bill Pullman's Face. It's about the movie actor Bill Pullman, and mostly in the David lynch movie Lost highway, which was made in 1997. It's called American Berserk, Bill Pullman's Face, and that phrase comes from Philip Roth's novel, American Pastoral, which was published the same year that Lost highway was made in 1997. And it's the story about a man called the Swede. And he's a guy who graduates from a mostly Jewish public high school in New Jersey. He in the 30s and he is tall, he's blond, he has blue eyes, he's Jewish, but he looks like a Swede. And he is the greatest athlete in the history of the school. He is the nicest person ever to graduate from this school. As he goes on through life, he attracts success and respect and not envy. Like a blanket attracts lint. It just comes to him and he dedicates himself. And he lives out the American pastoral, the life in the sylvan glade where everything is in balance. And yet he is going to be introduced, because of his daughter, into the other side of American life, American berserk, where no rules hold, where no expectations are ever satisfied, where no day is anything like the one before it, where the pit opens up. So out of that chapter comes Bill Pullman in Lost Highway. In Lost highway, he plays a jazz musician named Fred Madison who's tortured by fantasies that his wife is sleeping with other men. And out of that paranoia comes an extraordinary drama. And the movie opens with him sitting in a chair in his house. And everything about the shot is red. There's a red filter over it. It's almost as if blood is drenching the whole scene. And he's just sitting in the chair and he hasn't shaved for a couple of days. And his eyes are red and his skin is red and his hair almost looks red. And he's just trying to think. And you know how it is sometimes, whether it's early in the morning, whether it's late at night, the middle of the night, and there's something you absolutely have to concentrate on and you can't hold that. You can't even hold the number two in your mind. It just. It just dissolves. That's how that movie opens. I always saw something in his eyes. David lynch said in 1998, talking about Bill Pullman, the. Not the star of while you were sleeping, sleepless in Seattle. He's always playing these mild mannered guy next door characters who most of the time don't get the girl. But I saw the possibility for rage, for insanity, for a leading man. His eyes, his eyes. There was a lot more going on there than he was ever asked to play. Sometimes you can see the country you're living in by the face you're looking at and in moments, Philip Roth's American berserk has been present in Bill Pullman's face, a face out of a Western at times, but the Old west landscape upended and cracked by earthquakes and drought, the landscape now present simultaneously as a story and a ruin. Far more often, Bill Pullman's face has been so ordinary, so forgettable, are rather nearly impossible to remember to pick out of the crowd of the movies of the last 20 years that if anything, it stood for a country that has no need to recognize itself, the zombie nation that is Roth's American pastoral when it has swallowed the country whole. The country had a history, now it's just a place. Have a nice day is the limit of its conscious struggle, which is not nothing. So the citizens shoulder on their weapons and eagerness to please and a submerged resentment of the apparent fact that the country doesn't give back what its history has promised. So ordinariness rules, and an actor who can catch it gets work. You can see that ordinariness is a stage but on which a certain drama can be played out if the drama hidden in the face can change the stage or burn it down. This couldn't happen if the face came weighted with portent and significance or even the cliches that come with fame. Jack Nicholson's raised eyebrow, a sign of someone who's always in on the joke. This isn't a matter of. Of playing against type. It's a matter of playing an unknown against nothing. Bill Pullman's face is pushed down by a weight he suddenly realized he's carrying. His eyes shade themselves as if he sighted something on the horizon and he's trying to bring it into focus. A ship that only he can see. But what you're seeing is pure pressure. You, the weight coming down, the muscles in the face straining to hold it up. The face begins to close and then it stops and Pullman pulls back to think it all over, caught up in the joke or the horror of it all, wondering if somehow there might be more to the story, even if he knows there isn't. In Lost highway, but also in Malice, the Last Seduction, the End of Violence, the version of the Virginian in which he starred and directed the Guilty in Rick, a no singing version of Rigoletto set in a Manhattan consulting firm, and most unsettlingly, in his little role in Igbe Goes down, where he plays a man so fascinated by his own depression, his every expression is a rehearsal for the dissolution of the face itself. In all these movies, there are moments when Pullman's face and the weight pressing on it, the weight of the collapse of a marriage, the collapse of belief, the weight of a world that looks just as it did yesterday but no longer makes any sense at all. This becomes the whole of the drama. His face concentrates motives and events so suggestively that it becomes its own landscape of a window opening, opening onto an America defined not by hope but by fear, not by reason but by paranoia and not by mastery but by sin, crime and error. At its root it's a Puritan drama played out in God's country, a country the face says, that God long ago left to its own devices a judgment the face doesn't question and doesn't doubt. Richard Avedon once caught that face in his show Portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2002. Over familiar work made Avedon's over familiar white backgrounds and every pore focus oppressive. But in a room featuring pictures from his collection, his 1985 collection in the American west, there was a breach. Some of Avedon's shots of highway bums are so lurid they're unforgettable, in the worst freak show manner. But Clarence LEPARD DRIFTER Interstate 80 Sparks, Nevada August 29, 1983 that picture was different. Instead of the lantern, jaws and thieves postures of the other men on the walls, Lippert held himself in reserve. The countless big dark freckles or skin cancers that covered his face and hands spoke for a life lived out of doors. But the dark blazer and the bleached white shirt made it seem as if he were a gentleman farmer out for a stroll. He was fine looking in an east coast old moneyed way, with a full head of sandy hair, a full head of sandy hair and a full head of sandy hair. And he appeared in two photos, one showing him from the waist up, as if shot from below softened his features, weakened his chin and turned his nose bulbous. But Avedon's second shot, shot head on and cropped at mid chest was Lepard gazing straight out at you. His chin was strong, his nose was hard, and in the way he carried himself. He offered no quarrel with God, but he dared you to judge him. His face suggested Gregory Peck or Robert Ryan, and the disease on his skin deepened his face until you could see Lincoln behind the movie stars and behind all the other faces. You could see Bill Pullman. You saw a version of Bill Pullman. Dave always had Bill in mind. Barry Gifford says. Barry Gifford, who co wrote Lost Highway David likes to have a kind of neutral character. It was hard to read Bill Pullman's face. It's the sign of a great actor, lynch says, to inhabit the character so that the character changes him. He can play Fred Madison, Gifford says. He can go out and play President Madison, or for that matter, President Thomas J. Whitmore in Independence Day in 1996, which amounts to the same thing. Most often, Bill Pullman has disappeared into his face, into a mask of bland, sexless handsomeness. He's the sheepish grin in While you Were Sleeping. He's the straight man, sleepless in Seattle. He's the rogue CIA agent in Spy Games. He's in a score of different movies where he's mistaken for Bill Paxton or maybe it's Jeff Daniels. Nobody can really tell who he is. His vagueness is so complete in these movies that it becomes its own kind of nihilism. Pullman's earnest, bumbling, nice guy circling Sandra Bullock and While youe Were Sleeping is only a few steps removed, though, from his role as the humiliated doctor in the Last Seduction. The chump who peddles scripts and runs drug deals to keep his wife happy, who wanders their apartment looking in mirrors, marveling at her nerve after she takes off with the $700,000 he's gotten from selling pharmaceutical cocaine. Though the fighter pilot president in Independence Day, always clear thinking and resolute in the face of an attack on the planet by aliens from outer space, he's a combination of The World War II pilot George Bush and Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton for whom? At the White House. The White House that's blown up in the movie. Pullman screened the film. This character, the heroic president, is a character mathematically reversed. In Lost highway and Igbe Goes down, the Persona of an actor develops. The Persona an actor develops is itself a landscape. And the roles where Pullman gets lost in the scenery are a backdrop for the real action, a foundation for the house that's going to be pulled. That may be what lynch saw in Pullman's eyes, the rage, the insanity in the guy Next Door. Next door may be where Pullman usually finds himself. But there was another country to be discovered, to be felt out in the course of a roll. A nation sick of its burden of better, purer, truer, but lacking any other bluff to run, even on itself. Pullman calls that bluff on his everyman. His everyman in Malice, in the Last Seduction, the end of Violence, the guilty Rick Igbe goes down Lost highway playing a college dean, a physician, a Hollywood producer, a lawyer, a businessman in his 50s, whose only job is to flatter his 30 year old boss, a middle aged man institutionalized after a breakdown. A all these men are cuckolds, but they appear less surprised by the betrayals of their wives than amused, stunned, even thrilled to find out how intertwined their lives are with evil. With his cards face up and worthless in each role, Pullman traces the footsteps of a previous character and the effect is a feeling of suspension. And as Pullman, his face seems to contemplate itself more than the world or his enemies. As he tries to read his own mind and a thin curling smile pulls against the twitch of murder or suicide in his eyes. There's the feeling of a will toward a finale as the character tries to reach its fate. It's there in the Guilty, when Pullman's attorney, Callum Crame, having parlayed the COVID up of the murder of a woman he raped into a federal judgeship, makes his smugness inseparable for his self loathing. His self contempt is nothing against his contempt for a world so corrupt it could grease the rails for a man like him. It's there in Rick where Pullman humiliates himself in front of his boss and then with the two of them in a bar, humiliates a waitress. He sneers at her. Fuck you, she says. Fuck you, he says. And as the scene breaks, you can see Pullman bring all the roles of his past to bear on this one. All the anger, fear, mastery, even defeat in his college dean, as movie producer, as doctor, as jazz musician is emptied out. And what's left is someone without will or or desire. Someone who will do exactly what he's told if only he can maintain a presentation of power. And the double behind the eyes of the guy next door is no longer a killer, but a zombie. And what's left is the embodiment of what D.H. lawrence, coming off the Moby Dick chapter in his book Studies in classic American Literature called Postmortem Effects. When the Pequod went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas. And the Pequod sinks with all her souls. Their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramps, steamers and ocean crossing liners. And what we mean, Lawrence said, is that people may go on, keep on and rush on without souls. The drama of the character, feeling for its last role, is there most finally in Igbi Goes down, where in scenes scattered through the film, Pullman takes his character from the office to the asylum. His Jason Slocum is the Swede without any measure of self control, he just did everything that was expected of him. And in his 40s, he flipped out. In Jason Slocum's office there is an absolutely clean desk made of blond wood. And inside the long shallow drawers are hundreds of and hundreds of cigarettes, individually placed in beautiful rows, as if the drawers had been designed precisely for them and nothing else. It's an image of the only desire left to a man who's blown his brains out merely by emptying himself of every other desire. An infinitely repeating image of the condemned man's last cigarette, his son Igbi, who, it turns out, is not his son at all, who grows up with a father who walks heartily, smiles cryptically, and after a time never bathes at the dinner table. His wife asks whether he's taken a shower, he gets up as if offended, and then he returns to the table naked and delivers a homily about the importance of personal hygiene. There's a squint, but there's nothing in it but an attempt to get the world to come into focus. And at the end, in the asylum, there's not even that. Just a puffy faced man sitting in a chair, staring at nothing, Though somehow you see a naive but deadened intelligence, a memory of questioning that's like the phantom pain of a missing limb. So that's a dive into an attempt to see a country and how it works in one man's face. If you have any questions about this or anything else or any arguments or disputes, I'd love to try and respond, raise your hand.

Is that a hand? Can you talk a little bit about how the work of Sac Band Berkovich, who has influenced you?

Sack van Berkovich, for those who don't know, Sack Van Berkovich is an American historian. He's originally from Canada. He was named for Sacco and Vanzetti, thus Sackvan. And he wrote a book that was. That lies behind this one called American Jeremiad. And I think the thing that I found most striking about that book, it's about the idea that all through American history figures appear to condemn the country for violating its own premises, for betraying its own promises. That figures who, like Jeremiah in the Old Testament, come before the children of Israel and say, you made a covenant with God, but you have violated this covenant and God is going to reign ruin upon you unless. Unless. Unless you turn around and keep these promises. And he is saying, this is at the root of American identity. And my book, which is called the Shape of Things, to prophecy and the American Voice follows a really similar argument. But what was so powerful to me in Sac Van Berkovich's book is his notion that this idea of a country, a country based on a covenant, as I see it, the country is based on a covenant that it makes its people make with themselves. With the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, America creates itself as a country that makes a covenant with its own citizens and with its future, that it's based on promises of liberty, equality and justice for all people. And the whole history of the country is going to be the struggle to keep those promises and the struggle against their betrayal. And their betrayal is inevitable because the promises are so grand and vast. To an American, this can seem to make perfect sense. Why else found a country without an ambition that grand? And Sackvan Berkovich writes in American Jeremiah, how weird this is is how strange and impossible and unlikely and destructive. He says, we don't do things like this in Canada. We just go about our business. And so he. There's a couple of pages where he just goes through one person after another and says, can you believe this? People are really saying these things. And I like the idea. It was very helpful to me, me to have somebody dramatize America as strange, foreign, unlikely, so that you stop taking things for granted and begin to ask why they're really here. Yeah.

I kind of take the sort of biblical prophets as feeling like there's some identity left that, that's worth complaining about. Just in the same way that early 19th century Americans thought there was some identity that's still worth complaining about. But if I, I've read American Pastoral and it's almost as if he's saying that that identity is completely dead, that there is no identity left at all. What do you think?

Well, I don't think. I think that that's where American Pastoral leaves you, but I think that in the books that follow in I Married a Communist and the Human Stain and the Plot Against America, the question is never settled. It's not remotely settled. You get to the very edge of the void and you stare into it and maybe you turn around and walk away, maybe you back off and take a running leap over it, maybe you get past it if you're Matt Damon in one of the Bourne movies, and maybe you don't, but the question of what American identity is, given that this is a made up country, this is a construct, this is a fairy tale that we're all condemned to live in, American identity is never going to be fixed. It's never going to be settled. What it is. And you're always going to be faced with the question that because the country is made up, American identity doesn't even exist, and we all belong nowhere and we belong to nothing. And to make that question real, Roth has to push you to the point of dissolution and complete emptiness. For myself, you know, I don't know the answer to the. The question. I didn't think about this very much. You know, when I was growing up, I had different kinds of identities, and I knew that I was a Californian. That was really important to me, and I knew that I was Jewish, and that was kind of confusing. But I also knew that especially I was from San Francisco people, and that was really a big deal. That made me very proud. But I didn't think about the question of being an American, really, until I got to college and I began to read the Puritans, began to read the Founding Fathers, read Abraham Lincoln and Herman Melville, and I saw all these people saying, this is something special. This is something different. There's never been anything like this in the history of the world. No one has ever embarked on the adventure that we're caught up in. And that was thrilling to me, and I began to think about it differently. You know, my parents had no problems identifying themselves as Americans because they lived through the Second World War, where in a lot of ways, the country was refounded, was recreated, and they. They grew up. They didn't grow up, but as adults, the face of America for them was Franklin Roosevelt. I remember somebody asking Bob Dylan in the. In the 60s if he ever wanted to grow up to be president. He said, hey, when I was growing up Harry Truman was president, who wanted to grow up to be Harry Truman. And the same was true for me. You know, I mean, you can think of a lot of people, I suppose, wanted to grow up to be John F. Kennedy. By the time he was elected president, I was already too far along. But God knows I didn't want to grow up to be Dwight David Eisenhower. So these questions became real to me after this. That and whether there is such a thing as American identity, whether we've reached a point in our history where the last thing that matters, the last thing that would be interesting would be that question. I don't know. Hope not.

Yeah.

In that case, following on to what you've said, it's almost like you seem to be saying, or. And I think maybe Philip Roth was saying that kind of the American dream is built within the construct. In other words, we all get together and sort of say we're all going to agree that this is the dream, to have this great country and everything like that. And it's almost. Are you saying that we're kind of like suddenly waking up and realizing we're in second life and it's all make believe?

Yeah. That regardless of how we see the country, and particularly if we see it as a place of boundless opportunity, of beauty and openness, where anyone, just as the country was made up, anyone can make himself or herself up, can escape the expectations of their past, of their parents, of the people around them, become someone that no one could have ever expected them to become. And that not only is this your freedom in America, this is your obligation in a lot of ways that just as the Founding Fathers created the country, we as citizens have the obligation to create ourselves and never live within the bounds of expectations. You have this field of opportunity, but opportunity defined in the most philosophically profound manner ever imagined. And in his book. In his books, he shows how that sense of America can vanish in an instant, can be turned into its opposite in an instant where, yes, it's as if you're waking. The American dream is a dream and you wake up from it and you're in another world entirely. And this, you know, this drama is played out in American Pastoral. It's played out in I Married a Communist and the Human Sting, where people are moving forward and then the ground is pulled out from beneath their feet and everything they believed is reversed. This happens in those books, in terms of character, in terms of person. Yes. They're books based in American Pastoral, in the. In the upheavals of the 1960s. I married a communist in the McCarthyism in the 1950s, the human stain in the late 1990s. And it is a parable, really, of Bill Clinton's impeachment taking place in a small college in Massachusetts. All this plays out, though, in terms of this person and that person. You become involved with these people and you care about the people. You don't necessarily have to think about the national drama they're acting out. In the plot Against America, this all becomes more programmatic and it's like a thriller instead of a Jane Austen novel. And in some ways, it's much more effective because it's a thriller. What happens? What happens? Charles Lindbergh, the anti Semite, the Nazi sympathizer, runs for president in 1940 and defeats FDR. He becomes president. He makes an entente with Nazi Germany and with Japan. There is no Second World War that the United States is in. The United States is tacitly supporting Germany as it conquers all of Europe and moves into Russia. And the government of Charles Lindbergh becomes something very close to a dictatorship. The constitution begins to fade away. Jewish people are marginalized, their families are broken up, their neighborhoods are broken up. And it's a prelude to the suppression and ultimately the extermination of all minority populations in the country. And this has all played out within Philip Roth's family. When he was writing that book, I met him and I asked him, is this going to be a Roth book? Which is what he's always called books where there are characters named after himself or members of his family, even if they're not nonfiction at all. He said, oh, this is a Roth book. And I said, well, who are you in it? He said, well, I'm me. And I said, well, you know, how did you respond when Charles Lindbergh was president? And he said, I haven't figured that out yet. And so it works. It works wonderfully. You have a tiny little family that is under attack by the United States government. And his test is very simple. Can he make you believe not that Charles Lindbergh gets elected president in 1940? Can he make you believe the country that you would then be living in? Can he put you in it? And he can do it. He can do it. Imagine. Imagine that you're 12 years old and you go to school on Tuesday, just like you did on Monday. And you get to the school and you're told that you're no longer enrolled there and you cannot attend this school anymore. And you say, why? You say, well, it's because you're black, or it's because you're Jewish, or it's because you're female, or it's because the government has determined that your family has only been in this country, country for two generations for whatever reason it might be. You say, well, that's ridiculous, that's not fair, that's not right. And you're told, well, that's the way it is. And that's simply the first step toward living in a different country. And that's, I think, the drama that is taking place in all of these novels. I guess you get the idea that if you ask me a question, you get a long winded answer. There might be simple questions that I could just say yes or no to. Any more. Yep.

So I was wondering what you're working on now.

What I'm working on now. What I'm working on now, with absolute desperation, is a class that I'm going to start teaching on September 4th. And I am trying to create a syllabus and a reading list and lectures that I might actually give at the New School in New York. It's a class called the Old Weird America, named after one of my books. It's about old folk languages from the 19th century. How a whole body of song came together out of fragments that nobody could claim they wrote, but that everybody could claim belonged to them. And it focuses on Bob Dylan, who once said that when he discovered folk music when he was a teenager, he realized there was a whole country of songs. A country that existed in songs that belonged to nobody, belonged to everybody. And that meant that you could take pieces from one song and put them in another song and create something completely different. You could take a song that had been sung thousands and thousands of times by hundreds and hundreds of people and you could change a word here and you could change a word there until it became a song that had never been sung before, a song like John Henry. So that's what I'm working on, that class. Yeah.

Okay, so I'm. I suppose I'm exposing my ignorance here, but I'm not sure I understand what the term prophecy means in, you know, within your subtitle and how that relates to what else you've told us about this book.

Well, you know, when people think of prophecy, they think of predicting the future. But all through American history, people are named prophets, and often in a very casual and undefined way. And, you know, maybe this first struck a chord for me reading an essay by Edmund Wilson about Abraham Lincoln. And at the very end of this essay, where he's trying to get at the absolute heart of Lincoln's character, he says, this prophet finally showed his good faith with all the people he had sent to their deaths in the Civil War by laying down his body with theirs. Very gorgeous, eloquent language. God knows if it means anything, but it just said, you know, this prophet. And I remember. Prophet? What are you talking about? Why is he a prophet? He's a prophet because he forced the people of his community to come to terms with who they were, who they are. He said, you have to make choices. You have to decide what kind of country, what kind of society you want to live in, and what sort of a role you're going to. To play in it. And by acting out the most extreme possibilities of American life, he created a whole idea of what the country could be in terms of decency, in terms of murder, in terms of suffering, in terms of eloquence and understanding. So that's one aspect of a prophet, whether it's Martin Luther King, whether it's David lynch, whether it's Bill Pullman, whether it's Cheryl Lee in Fire Walks With Me. It's someone who forces you to confront both yourself and your country. But in another sense, as the person who asked the first question was, maybe leading up to, a prophet is like an Old Testament prophet, someone who comes before the community and says, you made a covenant, and your whole identity, your whole reason for being on this earth is in that covenant. And you've violated it, you've ignored it, you've turned your back on it, you've shown contempt for it. And because you have violated this covenant, everything you love will fall to ruin. You will be punished. And that, that voice, that message is found all through American history and all through American art in the 19th century. Time after time, people stood up and said exactly that. And nobody said it more eloquently than Lincoln in his second inaugural address in 1865. This is that shocking moment when he says that the Civil War is God's punishment on America for violating its own promises to itself. He says, slavery is a sin that is a contradiction in this nation, that can only be paid back in blood. He's saying exactly what John Brown had said just before he was executed in 1859 when he said, the sins of this guilty land can only be cleansed away with blood. And six years later, Lincoln is saying the same thing. And then he says something that John Brown didn't say. He says, if every drop of blood, blood taken by the lash, has to be repaid by a drop of blood taken by the sword, the sword of battle, then so be it. The Civil War will have to continue until blood washes blood, until that balance is made. Now, this is a biblical prophet. This is somebody saying, you have committed a betrayal, you committed a crime. How are you going to pay for this crime? The world will never be put right again. This is part of common coin in American political language. Through most of the 19th century and through most of the 20th century, it disappears. And you find the same drama, the same accusation in art and not in politics. So this book has a kind of political rhetorical frame, but the heart of it is seeing how this drama continues, how people continue to wrestle with it in movies, in novels, in music, in poetry. So I hope that's a little clearer.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming. Thanks a lot.