Today in my playwriting workshop we again discussed unreliable narration, and twist-ending plotting — and then later I took my daughter to see a movie that turned out to exemplify the perils therein.

Unreliable narrators (or protagonists) have made for some of the best debates drawn from literature. Is the knight in the Canterbury Tales the most accomplished hero in medieval history, or is he a boaster with few actual accomplishments? It’s difficult to read Chaucer’s tone on this, and the evidence seems fifty-fifty. In “Turn of the Screw,” is the governess haunted by those ghost children, or is she insane? In Richard Nixon’s autobiography, does he actually believe his lies and justifications, or is he brain-damaged?

But a truly unreliable narration demands that the argument be split both ways so that we doubt. If we can decide early on one way or the other, the game’s over. The narration — or protagonist — can be unreliable, but our conclusion has become definitive. Once that happens, everything afterward starts to look like transparent writing tricks.

The same goes with twist endings. If you can sniff out the twist early on, everything else becomes drudgery. Today in my workshop one writer asked for advice — to pursue writing an unreliable character and a twist, or to expose the device early on and approach the material from a different angle.  Do these twists well and you wind up with “The Sixth Sense.” Do it badly and you wind up with “The Village.” (Or, someone else chimed in, any other M. Night Shyamalan movie.)

So there I was at 2:15 for the beginning of this week’s big new movie, and by the first scene I was sure I knew what was up. By the third scene, I had confirmation. The obvious problem with relying on gimmicks is that if they fail, you have nothing else to entertain people with. The leading man still looks like a rat-faced little boy to me, and his acting in this movie is stapled together from 50’s B-movies and James Cagney, circa the grapefruit-in-your-face era. Even the first scene looks utterly fake, and for reasons that mystify me:  It’s merely of people talking on a boat, and yet the background rolls past like a canvas in a stage melodrama. Is it so difficult to film people on a boat that you need to Photoshop every frame? If you know your lead character can’t be trusted, and that leads you to an immediate conclusion about the unsurprising twist awaiting you an endless two hours and ten minutes in the future, and your popcorn has already run out, what’s left to be enjoyed?

Whenever this happens to me in the movies (and it happens all too often), I wonder if others see things this way. The woman two seats to my left gasped and murmured throughout the movie like a lady with a hand up her skirt. At one point I actually looked over to see if she had been signed out for the day from a nearby facility. But no; she was just slack-jawed in absorption with a truly dumb  and patently phony bit of hooey made by supposedly the greatest living American director. Which left me remembering this exchange from “Annie Hall”:

Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character):  Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger:  Yeah.
Alvy Singer:  Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.

Mark Evanier applies common sense to defending Jay Leno. I’m one of those who don’t find Leno funny, but I don’t understand this backlash against him either. It’s not like he’s denying millions of people health insurance or something.

The new “Bad Lieutenant” movie by Werner Herzog — starring Nicolas Cage (of all people). I was already eager to see it, but this piece in the LA Times further tantalizes me. Some choice excerpts:

• “…Roger Ebert  [observed]: ‘Cage is as good as anyone since Klaus Kinski at portraying a man whose head is exploding.’ “
• “Almost impossible to classify, the film is a glorious mess: part ‘CSI’-style police procedural, part over-the-top B-movie and part surrealist character study in flamboyant dissolution.”
•  “Still, for all its sleazy, loony brilliance, doubts about the film’s ability to connect with a mainstream audience linger.”

Let’s see… Herzog, Kinski, messy, surreal, sleazy, loony, brilliant, and possibly uncommercial. I can’t imagine missing this.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

I wish I could boil incredibly complex issues down to simplistic and illogical outcomes while drawing absolutely ridiculous conclusions from completely unrelated events.

Because clearly, there’s fame and fortune in it.

And now I have to go to bed. I’m exhausted from performing hours of rhetorical reconstructive surgery.

I don’t have a lot of interest in pleasant music. Yes, I can hear that it’s soothing, but I can’t figure out why you’d want music to soothe you. I want music to snap me out of it, to communicate something new in an interesting, dynamic way that’s impossible to refute.

So, it’s easy to see why I like a lot of what I like:  Roxy Music, Talking Heads, David Bowie, the ubiquitously written-about (here, anyway) Pere Ubu, TV on the Radio, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Van Dyke Parks-era Beach Boys, King Crimson, and the like. What are the common elements? Intellectualism, contrapuntalism, dissonance, and surprise. What else do many of them have in common? Brian Eno.

It’s impossible to track the music I like without repeatedly stumbling across the name Brian Eno. The best Bowie albums? (Lodger, Low, “Heroes,” Outside.) They all featured Eno writing,  producing, providing “atmospherics,” or a combination of all three. Same with the three Talking Heads albums truly worth owning, including the astonishing Remain in Light. Eno has had the immense good taste or good fortune to work repeatedly with the likes of Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, John Cale, Philip Glass, David Byrne, and many others, and I’ve gotten this far without mentioning another act he’s produced by the name of U2 because their music does nothing for me. Along the way, he invented ambient music and made a lot of money doing so.

Eno can’t “really” play music, although his ability to twiddle knobs on early synthesizer systems and tapeloop machines he stapled together in the early 1970s enabled him to play live with Roxy Music. As someone with lots of ideas and very little skill, Eno is the prototypical modern artist. The abstract expressionists couldn’t paint, Martha Graham’s dances don’t look like dance, there is some doubt that most of the current academically hailed playwrights can write a play, and Brian Eno can’t play an instrument or read music. When asked by one interviewer if he would have been a music had he been born at an earlier time, the 61-year-old Eno said no, because his instrument would’t have been invented yet. What instrument is that? “The recording studio.” There is obvious enormous benefit to the presence of a naif. Why does Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still sound so fresh, and so wrong? Because it wasn’t  hampered by someone who knew how to do it “right.”

The past few years, Eno, who is also a painter, and is a painter in a similar way that he is a musician albeit with more training, has been doing installations of changeable art created by a random shifting interplay of abstract images, shown against a backdrop of ambient music. He’s now brought that show, “77 Million Paintings,”  to Long Beach, where I’ll be seeing it on Sunday with a friend similarly well-versed in all things Eno before, miracle of miracles, we’ll also catch a lecture by Eno at the Carpenter Center that evening. Yes, I got those tickets almost as soon as the event was announced; good thing, too, because the lecture sold out almost immediately. I’ve been following Eno and his work with great interest for 30 years, and this is the first time he’s made an appearance anywhere near me, so I wasn’t going to miss out. Expect more here after the event.

Here’s one of those Car Plays I’m always talking about here. This is the animated version of my friend Terence Anthony’s play, “Choke,” featuring three terrific actors I’ve been lucky to work with a little bit myself (Sara Wagner, Rodney Hobbs, and Bostin Christopher). If you’ve seen Terence’s other cartoon, “Orlando’s Joint,” you know what you’re about to get: really funny, really dark. (Which is why I love his work.) Enjoy!

Choke

Four baby pythons escaped the plastic foam box they were being transported in on a Qantas flight. Two subsequent flights were canceled and the plane searched repeatedly, but the snakes still haven’t been found. Maybe one slipped into an old lady’s handbag, and one into the pocket of someone’s trenchcoat, and so forth, and were carried off the plane. After their disappearance created havoc for Qantas.

So much for my friend Richard, who didn’t like the movie version of this story when we saw it together. He said it was “unrealistic.”  I said it was the best movie ever made.

It’s holy writ among playwrights that a bad production can screw up even a masterpiece. (Don’t believe it? Imagine William Shatner doing Shakespeare — or just singing “Rocket Man.”) But some plays hold up better than others under all circumstances, and after seeing a production of it this past Friday in a tenement theatre in San Francisco I’m thinking that Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” is one of them.

The basic premise is just so much fun:  An average college nerd given a chance with an unconventional and attractive young artiste is remade in the process and left wondering, in the end, who he is and what just happened. This particular production was the directing debut of a recent college grad, and the casting reminded me of many a production I have myself featured in somehow as director or producer or (worst) playwright:  This actor’s great, this one’s good, this one’ll do, and this one… we’ll make work somehow. One actor telegraphed the play’s finale — if you didn’t know the final twist, you could certainly guess it from every actorly indication starting with Moment One. (Note to young actors (or bad actors, or all actors):  Please don’t play the end, and please don’t play the intention; and please don’t play subtext; just be. Please.) Another was physically wrong in almost every way but brought such bonhommie to the role that I grew to appreciate him and his oddly accidental comic moments. The lead was a sensation. And despite whatever faults — including the introduction of an intermission that the playwright expressly doesn’t want — the production worked well, got laughs, and held the attention of the audience. LaBute’s play asks smart questions about the essence of identity and the nature of art and the authenticity of sexual attraction; its success stems from its ability to entertain while being provocative.

What undoubtedly added to the enjoyment for me was that my son was seeing it with me. We went to San Francisco very last minute for three days on some personal business and decided to see a play on Friday night. My heart is usually found in a smaller theatre, so that’s where we went. Thirty years in, it’s hard for me to look at these things without a critical eye (but boy, when I love it, it is a joy to behold); but for Lex, this sort of thing is still new and young. His enjoyment of the play, which he’d already read, rubbed off on me. Whatever relatively minor faults of the production, I left feeling that I wanted to see another play in another small theatre right away.

The next night, after a day full of errands and obligations all over San Francisco, we went to the movies. We both wanted to see “Taken,” but it wasn’t playing near our hotel, so we wound up seeing “Fast & Furious.” Throwing us, in one night, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Let me just say that if ever in my life I’m having the stuffing beaten out of me, if someone is to grab me, throw me against a hard wood table so hard that it breaks in half, pick me up and hit me eight times hard to the craniofacial area, I hope it’s Vin Diesel, because judging from the recovery of Paul Walker it must be like getting pummeled with soft pillows. Walker sits up, wipes an invisible dripping from his nose, and talks down Vin Diesel with soothing words:  It’s the classic misunderstanding, but it’s all for the good, and no hard feelings. You or I would be on life support, but Walker is made of movie stuff. Earlier in the picture, Diesel’s posse of roadway hoodlums south of the border power their muscle cars down twisting mountaintop expanses of secluded roadway at top speeds in reverse, dropping trailer hitches onto gasoline tankers so they can haul off the precious fuel. (I’m assuming this was conceived when oil was at $150 a barrel, not the $50 it’s hovering at now. In 2009 if you want to make off with that much money, you just get a federal bailout.) The fuel swipe goes awry and Vin Diesel and his car find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place:  hurtling toward one truck on a dead-end mountain pass while another tractor trailer endlessly flipping and bouncing from midair to hard ground is tumbling precisely their way. His solution:  Expertly timing when the tractor trailer is in midair and driving beneath it, getting out from under by the skin of his paint job. This trick is so neat that, of course, the movie repeats it again later. In big-budget action-adventure movies, if once is good, twice (or more) must be better.

For me, the movie dies 10 minutes in with Michelle Rodriguez’s character. No, I don’t know why I care about Michelle Rodriguez. I just know I can’t take my eyes off her. It isn’t purely heat; she’s got that indecipherable screen charisma that some people have and some people don’t. In a season of “Lost” that I don’t remember much about and didn’t care much about at the time, she was magnetic. (As was Michael Emerson.) Even surrounded by nitro-fueled steroid cars and whatever has been injected into Vin Diesel’s muscles and head, she stands out. But then she dies. In retrospect. We don’t even get to see it (except later). My son, who knew of my interest in seeing this movie because of Michelle Rodriguez, whispered “Uh oh” when we learned she wasn’t going to be reappearing in this movie. Not that her disappearance was a surprise, either:  Once your action-adventure hero somewhat unwillingly parts with his leading lady but leaves her a note (or, in this case, a big whopping bundle of cash; nothing says farewell my lovely so well as stacks of dead presidents), you know she’s doomed. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is a surprise in this movie, up to and including the identity of the mysterious drug lord everyone is hunting, and who turns out to be precisely who everyone (except our hero) thinks it is in the first place.

Finally — and I really can’t leave this subject without a word about this — let’s discuss Vin Diesel. I know that we shouldn’t discuss anyone with the name Vin Diesel, and I realize that each of us has only a limited time on Earth and I’m now spending some of mine on Vin Diesel,  and you’re spending some of  yours reading about Vin Diesel, but I can’t resist. Somehow I didn’t mind him in “The Chronicles of Riddick.” Maybe that’s because Judi Dench was in it. Maybe it’s because it was a science fiction movie with enough distractions, including Thandie Newton. (No Michelle Rodriguez, but she’ll do.) But “Fast & Furious” had me asking myself if Vin Diesel isn’t the flattest “actor” since Charles Bronson. An actor who was in a couple of my plays in the 1990’s did a movie with Charles Bronson in that period. I asked him what Charles Bronson was like. His reply:  “Like cement.” Just an inert slab that happened to be there for you to bounce lines off. I recently watched “Death Wish” again — and no, I don’t know why — and it’s true:  the “distraught” Charles Bronson upset over his wife’s murder and daughter’s rape is indistinguishable from the “workaday” Charles Bronson doing business out in the desert is indistinguishable from the vigilante Charles Bronson shooting would-be muggers in the park is indistinguishable from the murderous Charles Bronson evading police pursuing him from the subway station. Each has the emotional consistency of drywall. I couldn’t think when I’d seen that since in a major name film actor — but then seeing Vin Diesel in his latest solved that riddle for me. Say what you will about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who can’t deliver a comic line to save his schwarzenegger, but at least he can crack his face into a smile.

Oddly, though, for all its obvious problems, “Fast & Furious” is every bit as unwreckable as “The Shape of Things” — probably moreso. The latter is clever enough to withstand the uneven application of artistic ability. The former is so witless, so amped up on steroids and meth, that no amount of artistic ability is needed, or even germane. “What I learned from you is to have a code,” Paul Walker’s character tells Vin Diesel; from all evidence, that character’s code is to do whatever he wants whenever he wants wherever he wants, no matter the impact on anyone else. (We call that hedonism. No, Virginia, it is not a basis for heroism.) The movie’s code is similarly easy to grasp:  maximum impact, but no repercussions. Repeat. Faster. Repeat.

“I’m not a journalist,” says the weepy Fox News host Glenn Beck in this video. “I’m just a guy that loves his country.”

I agree he’s not a journalist. No self-respecting journalist would cry these cued-up crocodile tears.

In this clip, you’ll see Tina Brown call Beck someone who is “in the mode of the great charlatan evangelists.” I think that’s about right. Many of those folks were taken as prophets of God — just as many of these entertainers are misunderstood as journalists.

Before the last newspaper folds, will any of them be able to make a profitable transition to the web? Because as bad as print reporting has been the past decade, with an overbearing curiosity about Britneys and Lindsays and little interest in corporate and government malfeasance and illegal wars, I shudder to consider how much worse we will be relying on the sort of boosterish hucksterism seen below.

Please watch.