2

In this hybrid of confinement, tension and absurdist gore, The Hateful Eight very much resembles John Carpenter's The Thing.

1

It quickly became clear to me in thinking about Tarantino that in order to truly reckon with his late career, one would need to undertake a serious examination of exploitation cinema. That means a long, hard look at the dynamics of sexualized violence, at the meanings of gore, at the emancipatory possibilities of revenge. That means watching Ilsa She-Devil of the SS and I Spit on Your Grave. Another time maybe.

4

It bears mentioning that Mobray is not actually the hangman of Red Rock and is, rather, a member of the Domergue gang and a cold-blooded murderer. And that his name is not actually Oswaldo Mobray, it is English Pete Hicox.  Is it problematic to attribute narrative and political meaning to a quote about the nature of justice made by a murderer playing the part of an officer of the law? Yes it is. More on this below.

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I mean, Warren is an exceptionally complex character. This is a man who recognizes that all of the promises that America has made to black people have been broken, even the ones implied by granting him a blue uniform. He understands that his freedom as a black man has been made possible only through an act of tremendous, sustained violence--the Civil War. And so for him to escape a Confederate prison camp by setting it ablaze, killing dozens of men, many of them Union soldiers, in the process, or to torture and kill the southern soldier--who, by the way, had made the trek to Warren's Wyoming home in order to make good on a Confederate bounty against the Major's life--well these are no great stretch of the moral imagination. He is only obeying the logic of his own survival. In his heartbreaking lie about possessing a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln, Warren reveals his most important piece of wisdom. In a world as defiled as this one, any promise, any trust, is only as good as the guile and force that backs it up. It's to Tarantino's and Jackson's credit, I believe, that they so accurately identify the injustice and violence that shape Warren's world and yet refuse him the righteousness, the innocence, of victimhood. Or rather, he is a victim of politics and history but is still hateful.

Mighty MKP

Over the past few weeks, I've looked at a lot of photos of Molly Pryor. Some of them come from a life I recognize: Molly with Jessica and Sam, looking perfectly composed in the middle of a completely unchained New Year's Eve party; Molly talking with her hands; Molly giving me a headlock in front of a jukebox. Others are from a past I've only heard tell of: riding on her dad's shoulders on a hike; wearing long hair, a hollow body bass guitar and an adolescent scowl.  But one of them distills the Molly that I knew. She is 15 years old. Her face is in 3/4 profile; she is looking sideways at the camera and giving that enigmatic, close-mouthed Molly Pryor smile. That face in the picture is both impossibly young and preternaturally old. Her smile is generous and radiant but also wry and withholding, like she's thinking of something a little sad and a little funny, some small, telling irony that she's keeping to herself.

The Molly I met six years later wore that same wise/cherubic face and flashed that same smile. What smote me about her then were the exact things that everyone who knows her remarks upon. There was that easy laugh. There was her willingness to speak incredibly frankly about how much she cared about everything--music, movies, art and most especially the people that she loved. There was that romantic streak, her elaborate, rapturous plans, her readiness to spin stories of an arcadian south, a warmer, earthier place, a place worth escaping to. And she was so generous. Countless times, she brought me food and bought me drinks. She taught me to love Journey. She made me accompany her to the Dovshenko films at Lincoln Center. She talked the drummer of the Strokes out of his t-shirt and gave it to me.

There was also her obstinance and her quick, sharp tongue. I have yet to meet another person as given to grand judgements--and so regally heedless of the strong possibility that she would change her mind tomorrow--as Molly Pryor. Here is, for instance, a hopelessly incomplete list of things Molly has called bullshit on: bands with female singers; the Staten Island Yankees; the Decemberists (the band not the anarchists, though I'm sure she'd call bullshit on them too, if given the chance); Agnes Varda; the weather; eggs; Patti Smith (and she loved Patti Smith); France; brunch (!); so much more. And all of these delivered with an exaggerated Tennessee twang and a smirk. Her proclamations were often hilarious or absurd, but they conveyed a sense of real mastery and presence. They announced a forceful spirit. They said: I am willing to take up space, to alter the weather of reality.

Molly was mercurial: sometimes warm and ecstatic, sometimes sharp and short. She had a great capacity for pleasure and joy but could also be impatient and difficult to please. She was easygoing; she was demanding. She was open to every idea and experience; she was absurdly stubborn. Her nostalgia masked, I think, great pain.  Her veneer of confidence papered over her insecurity. Her romanticism was a symptom of a simmering dissatisfaction with the world as it was. Molly was, as she herself might have drawled, a whole lotta woman.

*     *     *

In those days we--she and Jeff and Heidi and I and many others--went to shows. We spent long weeknights in dark bars. We listened to records. We watched Tarkovsky films in her dorm room while she distractedly wrote art history papers ('A' papers, mind you--this woman had some serious intellect, though she was always cagey in revealing it). Among the many things that stops my heart and short-circuits my brain now is the impossible fact that what began this way, with such joy and promise and youthful pain could possibly have ended so catastrophically. How Molly and Jeff and I watching movies in that ridiculous East Harlem housing project could possibly have contorted itself into the awful phone conversations that Jeff and I had last week. How something so young could have become so old. How such a vibrant, forceful person could possibly be gone.

I don't know nearly enough about the last two years of Molly's life. I do know that they were dark, darker than I ever guessed possible. I didn't know how her worst qualities had hardened and metastasized and her best qualities had become so deeply buried. I didn't know how broken and worn her body had become.

In this ignorance, in the silence and distance that I allowed to exist between us, I was not the friend to her that I meant to be or that I should have been. I did not repay her for all that she added to my life. She did not make this easy for any of us, of course. She declined invitations, answered earnest questions with small talk or outright lies, responded to concern with silence. And, of course, no one knew how high the stakes were. We thought we had years to renew our relationships and to heal ourselves. The sudden realization of how desperate her life had become, of the finality of our estrangement, of how we all failed her and she failed us...it is just so bitter, I can barely swallow.

I didn't know but I should have known. I should have tried but I did not know I had to try. I should have tried anyway.

If I could speak with Molly today, I would tell her that I loved her and then I would beg her forgiveness.

*     *     *

I have been trying to conjure up some kind of defining memory of Molly. Instead I am deluged. There are specific moments that rise to the surface, of course, but they are like white caps on an ocean, welling up, cresting and sinking back into the great expanse of that life and those years.

We are all at a baseball game, or riding the cyclone. We are wasting whole Sundays at 'ino. We are performing acrobatics in an Austin hotel room. We at the Bulgarian disco, all of us arm-in-arm, absorbed into the heaving, sweaty mass. We are seeing a noise band in a parking lot, or lazing in the park with gigantic styrofoam beers or watching the night from a rooftop. We are screaming and dancing until the floor shakes, or careening down the Coney Island boardwalk like holy fools. We are tearing through Greenpoint on the 4th of July, running over the Pulaski bridge and through the alleys and warehouses, our hearts exploding out our faces. We are watching the sky crack open and rain light, like the city and the darkness and the humming night were celebrating us, were singing our praises and were awed by us, by our joy and our shrieks and our great love, the beautiful children that we were.

*     *     *

Here's one. It is the first winter of our friendship, back when 5th avenue felt like a distant land, Molly and I are stumbling through Park Slope. Anyone who has ever lived in New York knows the feeling. A party has gone on too long and you are a little too drunk. It has become impossibly late. You have walked for blocks to the subway and have waited too long for a train that arrives out of some sick dream. It is too cold or it is too hot. Your molecules have become heavy. Your face feels like a concrete mask.

We sit on the train for the long ride uptown. Without a word, Molly lies down and closes her eyes. She places her head on my thigh. She slips her first two fingers through one of my belt loops. We spend the entire ride this way, she curled up, head on my lap, tiny hand hooked on my waist. Neither of us move or speak. It is so quiet and so still.

Something melted away, something dissolved. It was like some great veil had been lifted and I saw her for the first time, unprotected by her layer of strength and knowingness. I glimpsed something very delicate and small, something that needed care. It broke my heart; it breaks my heart.

I was in love with her. Like so many artifacts of my early twenties, it was absurd and irrational and, I believed then, hopeless. But now I realize that it wasn't hopeless at all. In all of those moments, all of those tiny gestures, all of those gorgeous memories, in the supreme blessing of a friendship with this beautiful, generous, stubborn woman, this magnificent secret of a person; in all of those things, in the fullness of an entire life--that love was requited. I thought that those fingers on my belt loop and that head on my lap were a vision of an impossible happiness. But I was wrong; they were happiness itself. Thanks friend. I miss you terribly.

1

For the record, in my opinion, Vedder's voice is a gorgeous, once-in-a-generation instrument. Deep without being unapproachable, possessing just the right amount of grain. It can sound huge and strong when he's singing quietly, intimate when he's at full roar. All this was evident from the beginning but became more so when he ditched the histrionics.

5

These are Vs. (1993), Vitalogy (1994) and No Code (1996), all of which are pretty interesting and have moments of real greatness. If you ask me, Vitalogy is the best of these, not necessarily because it contains more good songs than the others but because in its noisy, cluttered production, in its stylistic ecumenicism, in its emotional ambivalence, it best reflects the band's conflicted relationship with themselves and their own success. Along with Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac, it is one of the last truly strange records made by a huge rock band, one of the last that actively interrogates the bizarre act of using commercial art to communicate with millions of people.