So Very

Caught chunks of two old favorite black comedies on TV last night; Hal Hartley’s “Trust” (1990) and Michael Lehmann’s “Heathers” (1989) (the former trailed by the cable company or whoever writes those haikulike “guide” synopses as “Pregnant teen meets moody genius with hand grenade”—not strictly inaccurate, but…). “Trust” was Hartley’s second feature (after [and really very similar to] “The Unbelievable Truth”) but the things I love about his films are already well established, in particular the deadpan/shellshocked delivery of the always mordantly funny dialogue. I can quite understand how this extremely self-conscious artificiality could be being fantastically irritating to many viewers, then and now, but somehow it still works for me. In fact, the more deliberately robotic the performances become, the more emotionally weighted they seem—at moments to an almost unbearable degree (and no, I wasn’t watching this on a ’plane). I still love “Henry Fool” (1997) the most though:

Henry Fool: We gotta talk. What the hell were you trying to do when you wrote this thing?
Simon: Nothing.
Henry Fool: Well, you know, you wrote it in a kind of iambic pentameter.
Simon: Iambic what?
Henry Fool: Verse. Look. In my opinion, this is pretty powerful stuff. Though your spelling is Neanderthal and your reasoning a little naive, your instincts are profound. But the whole thing needs to be given a more cohesive shape. It can be expanded, followed through, unified. Do you see what I’m getting at? Are you willing to commit yourself to this? To really work on it? To give it it’s due in the face of adversity and discouragement? To rise to the challenge you yourself have set? And don’t give me that wonderstruck “I’m only a humble garbage man” bullshit, either.
Simon: It hurts to breathe.
Henry Fool: Of course it does.



A subversion of an existing genre, “Heathers” is a very different ball game but just as effective in its own way, Lehmann’s strategic artificiality coming in the form of a calculated over-the-topness rather, as in Hartley, a studied withdrawal. The emotional content is lessened correspondingly, but the filmmaker’s motivation seems so different that one doesn’t really miss it until the film’s almost over. Apparently the cop-out ending was a studio imposition—I’d love to see a director’s version. A lot of this makes me cringe in a way that “Trust” undoubtedly does to others, but it’s a pleasurable cringing. And is there an ’80s/’90s line to be traced here? “Heathers” seems absolutely of the earlier decade, “Trust” already pretty deep into the later.

Veronica Sawyer: [writing in diary] Betty Finn was a true friend and I sold her out for a bunch of Swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads.

Love the way Veronica writes, physically, that diary too: fortissimo. Anyone blog that HARD?

Henry Fool: I don’t discriminate between different ways of knowing.