Jules Dassin - The Naked City (1955)

Now seems the best time to admit that, for the past three entries, this blog has been living a lie. Yes, it may seem like a music blog. It was, and it still is, but as it turns out my opinions on other things are so far-reaching and vital that they can’t be contained to one subject (seriously). With this in mind, I’ll be writing not only about music but also film, books, television and any delicious cakes that I may have eaten.

On this note, I’ll mention that I went into The Naked City expecting two things: a classic “New York” movie and a solid, if not exceptional, film noir. The film delivers on the first point but not so much on the latter.

When I place New York in quotes like this I’m referring to the kind of film that not only takes the city for it’s setting, but, like Mean Streets or Manhattan, exists entirely within an idea of it, with the story and the characters as almost secondary figures, byproducts of the mysterious essence the filmmaker is trying to capture. The Naked City is not only one of the first films to push this kind of idealized image, it takes the idea further than most.

This dedication to a full-scale representation of the city ends up creating a beautiful snapshot but also a dangerously splintered film. Really, there are two films here. One is a non-fiction documentary on New York - the outer shell which enfolds the second - a slightly undercooked noir that takes place within this defictionalized city.

Much attention is paid to the documentary aspect. The film begins with an extended explanation of the techniques used to capture the feel of actual city life – cameras placed behind one-way mirrors and in vans, unwitting extras, stolen shots – all of which serve to capture the city in the same context that a nature film might. This is a film that is groundbreaking for it’s time, it knows it and it wants us to know it, which may explain the overeager misstep of burying the film’s actual story so deeply that it becomes of auxiliary importance.

This story, which we finally get to after a gorgeous run-through of the city at night, is by the books pulp – a dead beauty, some faceless toughs and a few puzzled but confident cops. The narration (which is saddled with the awkward task of telling us a fake story inside of a real one) acknowledges the everyday nature of the crime to show us how it fits into the nightly routine we have just been shown. Basically, to accommodate the documentary aspect, we’re given as normal a story as possible, which is meant to further emphasize realism but gives a humdrum feeling from the start.

The same goes for the police officers, who are meant to be commendably average but instead come across flat and stereotypically sketched. Most prominently, there’s the Irish detective (grizzled, over-experienced, bubbling with old-world gentility) and the rookie cop (beautiful wife, cute kid, house in Queens). The film seems to want us to embrace these characters in the same way it wants us to embrace the anonymous lives it peeks in on every so often, but in their paved over normalcy they somehow come across less than the woman hanging her laundry or the kids playing in the street. Against this backdrop of real images of actual lives they stand out as pulp tropes and little more.

While I’m harping on the negative, it seems necessary to note that, despite its reputation as a classic of the genre, The Naked City isn’t really even a noir. First of all, it’s way too bright. The femme fatale is killed off before the movie even begins. The line between the good and bad guys is rigidly defined. It’s even cheerful. What it really is, then, is a sub-par police procedural with extraordinarily good outdoor footage.

Judging by the quality and demeanor of Dassin's other films (think of the brutal closing section of Rififi) it’s probably safe to blame these shortcomings on producer and narrator Mark Hellinger. Hellinger was a journalist who specialized in heart-tuggingly sentimental people pieces, and that shows here, in the way everyone but the scantily featured villains seems to operate around a shared kernel of inherent goodness. This seems anathema for a supposed noir, and any sense of grit is lost without the chance for our heroes to get their hands at least a little dirty.

On the other hand, Hellinger can be credited for the success of the realism the movie attempts to put across. It runs off a deep-rooted populism, presumably his doing, which makes the film memorable as a celebration of a city and the people who live in it. The fact that a murder exists at the center of the story doesn’t serve to cast doubt on the beauty of the place or to paint it in a darker light; it’s only a device that allows us to experience a few of “the 8 million stories in the Naked City.” This may be where the real problem lies. The film doesn’t seem too interested in the murder, only as far as its red herring status leads us to its true purpose of illuminating New York from the ground level. Yet without the murder at its core there’s no reason for the film to exist. This is a strange dilemma, and it leaves a fractured, although still entertaining film.

Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala (2007)

I’ve always been torn over Jens Lekman’s befuddled loser shtick – the awkwardness, the self-deprecating humor, the off-kilter lyrics draped in canned horns and strings. Beyond his albums, which have ranged between flashes of brilliance and musty excursions sagging with filler, I have real doubts about the persona itself, which can be either subtly infuriating or unwittingly charming. At his best, Lekman is fascinating. At his worst he’s drippy and frustrating, all puppy dog eyes and shuffling feet, a socially stunted twin brother to Sondre Lerche with a sampler and a strange unwillingness to leave his bedroom.

I won’t go as far as to say that Night Falls Over Kortedala has won me over, but it’s a start. Not that much has changed. The good-hearted but socially crippled loser motif remains consistent, but it really clicks here, mostly because the epic bluster of the music seems to be slyly mocking the triteness of the lyrics. With this in mind, the whole album plays out like a half-joke; Lekman sings from the heart and his music reflects it, but his words are so ridiculous (touching on asthma inhalers and Slingo) that his earnestness becomes laughable, and the backing even more so.

The clearest example is “Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig” (Swedish for ‘I Love You’), where backup soul crooners follow Lekman’s stumbling opening about a boy and his pet pig with a rhythm of oohs and ba ba bas. It’s strange and funny and succeeds in making him sound more awkward than any acoustic guitar ever could. The same singing voices appear briefly on “A Postcard to Nina,” where Lekman helps a lesbian friend by posing as her boyfriend during a family dinner, only to find himself pursued by an over-friendly father who he fights off with "out of office e-mail replies."

So Lekman not only has to deal with his own clumsiness and constant rejection from cute girls, but the fact that his own music is against him, a designation that elevates him to the most loveable kind of loser. At times there’s a Chaplinesque humor in the way he's forced to deal with this kind of trouble. This works best on “Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo,” when skipping along to a snappy piano tune, he starts to fall behind and has to sputter to catch up with the track, gaining so much speed that he loses the beat again on the other side.

Moments like this poke fun at the artificiality of the musical backing. It's basically all samples, which puts Lekman in the same line as Girl Talk or The Avalanches in terms of a drag and drop, scrap yard style of recording. But while these bands create palettes that are cold and exact, Lekman’s is more like a painted screen that’s falling down behind him as he tries to sing. His songs are patchwork quilts made from other people’s clothes, but he wears them well, a willing clown that, at least for now, pushes the act just far enough to not grate on our nerves.

Okkervil River - The Stage Names (2007)

There’s something different about The Stage Names, and on my first listen I mistook it for a weakness. Compared to earlier Okkervil albums, this one is small, even spindly; the songs never reach for the sweeping crescendos of Black Sheep Boy. Instead they remain tight and focused, hinging on simpler structures and reworked turns of phrase.

I have to say now that this creates an album that’s ultimately more satisfying, and on closer inspection The Stage Names is the band’s best work yet. Not only because of its subtlety – these songs don’t need to stretch out or graze the borders of melodrama to be effective – but because the complexity of Will Sheff’s lyrics is even more impressive when squeezed into a smaller context.

The emphasis on fiction is obvious, but the roots of the album’s themes run so deep and intertwine so well that it begs for some analysis. Ignoring the side ideas and distilling it down to one point, the album’s basic conceit seems to work off the twisted relationship between art and life. Art, of course, is influenced by life, but life is also invariably influenced by art, creating a loose circle that Sheff plays with very carefully.

The first two tracks establish the revolving convolution of this circle, the idea that life and fiction are separate realms but also that they tend to exist within one another. “Our Life Is Not A Movie, or Maybe” exposes the tendency towards enjoying the former as a mixed cocktail of fiction and reality but denies that impulse, while “Unless It’s Kicks” wonders “what gives this mess some grace unless it’s kicks, man / unless it’s fiction / unless it’s sweat or it’s songs.” The emphasis lies in the last line – the two are basically inseparable.

“A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene” contains first use of nesting on the album, where Sheff buries one layer within another to expose how easily they mix. “I’m the band in a show” he begins, establishing the reality of himself as something standing behind a fictional curtain. The whole thing gets even messier when you acknowledge that he’s talking about a reality show (I’m not even going to think about opening that can of worms). In this case, the first two verses refer to Okkervil River’s songs being featured in TV shows, Breaking Bonaduce for the first and Cold Case for the second.

The song continues with the mention of “a line” that the narrator “picks up right through the TV.” Art intrudes in life and gives rise to more of its kind. The repetition of a need for “a hand to take hold of the scene” calls up the idea of an outside influence that exists to steady life. Normally this role would be expected of God, but in Sheff's view of our media-saturated world, the steadying influence is instead the comfort of the cinematic imagery that he speaks of earlier in the song.

“Savannah Smiles” places this whole thing in a smaller context, with the story of a father and the disconnect between he and his daughter. The obstruction here exists between the reality of her life and his personal expectation of his her. He sees her as the child of eight, the girl in the picture, not what she actually is. What he reads in her diary upsets him because it challenges the fictional image of her with which he's struggling to keep hold. The song gains yet another layer as the story of Shannon Wilsey, the porn star Savannah, whose assumed name comes from a film about a neglected child who ends up being sheltered by two criminals (check Sheff’s Pitchfork interview for more information about this and some good insight into the album).

“Plus Ones” seems on the surface the most artificial song on the album, hinging on a lyrical gimmick (Sheff toying with the titles and lyrics of popular songs), but its genius is that it embraces its own inanity while exposing the love song as a cobbled mash of previously used ideas. The fun in interpreting the song is separating the references from the actual content (the use of "What’s New Pussycat" breaks the ‘plus one’ mold, so all bets are off). Where do Sheff’s borrowed words end and his own begin?

This kind of inspection is exhausting, so I’ll skip to the last song, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” which is probably the most complex. Here Sheff focuses on the suicide of poet John Berryman (born John Allyn Smith). Within he reminds us that stage names are in effect ways of fictionalizing ourselves, recasting our person as a specific image we’d like to portray. Berryman himself is quoted as saying that at a young age “he didn’t want to be like Yeats, he wanted to be Yeats.”

In the song Sheff blends two narrative perspectives – himself and Berryman – to show how much of a mess this all is; the poet is the reader is the songwriter is the listener. Sheff seems to be speaking of Berryman’s childhood with the idea of the imagined suicide attempt, but at the same time refers to his own age (31) and the figure of ‘John’ coming in with his mother and seeing his cold body.

So John, like all of us, is both creator and viewer. We’re all creators because whether or not we produce something directly, we all experience (be it from reality or from fiction) and that experience is channeled into our created version of ourselves, which is never the same as the one that existed before that experience. We are always changing based on what we experience, and the version of ourselves that we project (like the three poems that stand in for the body at the funeral) becomes the only reality of ourselves. Sheff wraps this all up by fulfilling his own prophecy (“by the second verse my head will burst”), although a little late, lapsing out of his own words into the slightly modified words of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.”

It seems telling that this song itself is a cover of a traditional Caribbean folk ballad. Not an original, but what really is?