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Steven S. Drachman remembers Ryuichi Sakamoto

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Many, many people will write astute and intelligent appreciations of Ryuichi Sakamoto, the eclectic and influential songwriter, composer, performer and actor who died recently at the age of 71. For example, Kevin Nguyen argues in MSN.com that “there are very few forms of modern music that don’t reflect the influence of Sakamoto’s expansive, ever-changing four-decade career,” in an article headlined, Music Sounds the Way It Does Because of Ryuichi Sakamoto, and he makes a pretty good case for his expansive thesis.

I can’t write anything halfway smart about this great musician. I loved the music too, but I didn’t understand everything that made it great. Still, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music was a soundtrack of my life.

On my very first date with the woman who would become my wife, in late August 1983, I took her to see Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which starred David Bowie, and took place in a particularly sadistic Japanese prison camp in World War 2. I was a big David Bowie fan, and it seemed to me that I’d probably impress her and win her over by forcing her to like the things I like.

A bit of advice. On your first date with anyone, don’t go to a movie by rogue Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima. The movie was brutal, and within five minutes, I found myself apologizing in her ear. But the musical score by Sakamoto (who also co-starred) was overwhelming, a haunting mashup of electronic and orchestral music, of East and West, so appropriate to the theme of the film, and so unlike anything I’d heard before. It was weird and unique, but also immediately accessible.

Sakamoto became a reliable presence on our playlist. Our first apartment sported a wallsize poster of the Japanese release of Mr. Lawrence. We saw him in concert twice. His Beauty album was the first record we bought on CD, before we even owned a CD player. This past winter, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden near our home put on a light show; the Lawrence theme accompanied a vast multi-acre sea of synchronized waves of light.

As a young man, I thought someday I would write a novel that would be made into a movie that Ryuichi Sakamoto would score. I wouldn’t have dreamed of John Williams composing the score, which would be mainstream, well-known and Western. But also not as good. Sakamoto scored The Sheltering Sky, The Last Emperor (for which he won an Oscar), The Revenant and around forty others. He was our greatest film composer, and his music made movies monumental.

In the 1980s, our pet guinea pig purred with abandon, out of control, whenever we played “Paradise Lost,” a song from his 1984 album, Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia, another weird but irresistible composition, a tropical tune with steel drums, filtered through a Japanese sensibility. It was the only song that made our guinea pig purr.

It was his favorite song. And I don’t blame him.

^^^

This appreciation was written by Steven S. Drachman. Steven is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.

Image: Detail from Illustrated Musical Encyclopedia cover artwork

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How Did Chinese Politics Play Out in the Oscars 2023?

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Despite what some may argue, the US award show, the Oscars, is always political. This year, the 95th Annual Academy Awards has been entangled with Chinese politics for two reasons: First, Michelle Yeoh was the first Asian woman awarded Best Actress for her role in the movie “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Chinese social media used the Chinese-Malaysian actresses’ win as evidence of China’s rise in global cinema. Yet, ironically, the seven-award-winning movie was not released in mainland Chinese cinemas as it depicted material deemed subversive. Second, pro-Beijing Hong Kong actor Donnie Yen who supported Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s protests in 2019, was invited as an award presenter. The decision triggered an online petition.

Political cartoonist Badiucao’s Tweet summed up the irony of the two controversies:

 

Yeoh is a Malaysian-born Hokkienese Chinese woman who moved to the UK with her family when she was 15. She began her acting career in Hong Kong and became a famous action star in Asia. Another of her films, “The Lady” (2011), a biographical film about Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma’s democracy movement, was also banned in China as leaders were concerned a pro-democracy film could undermine the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Michelle Yeoh plays Aung San Suu Kyi in the film, and she did not refrain from showing her support for Myanmar protesters after the 2021 coup.

Michelle Yeoh and the racial narrative of the Chinese ethnicity

“In Conversation with Michelle Yeoh, Singapore International Film Festival 2015” by David Seow, dywseow is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

“Everything Everywhere All At Once“ won seven awards in the 2023 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director. The film is an absurdist comedy featuring a Chinese American immigrant, played by Yeoh, who travels across a multiverse, taking on different forms and identities and, eventually, choosing to continue her life as a stressed mother of a rebellious lesbian daughter. The film was not shown in China as the depiction of a sexually diverse multiverse is distasteful to the Chinese censor as it contradicts the mainland Chinese project of reviving a “socialist spiritual civilization of the new era.”

While Yeoh’s most prominent films could not be shown in mainland Chinese cinema, Chinese online patriots have been eager to point out Yeoh’s Chinese ethnic origin to celebrate the rise of China and Asia. Hu Xijin, the top commentator from state-funded Global Times, led the “Chinese angle” of the Oscars Best Actress Award on Weibo:

“Congratulations to Michelle Yeoh. So happy for her. China is rising, and Asia is rising. People of Chinese and Asia descent will definitely receive more attention, gaze and respect all over the world. More people of Chinese descent will fly, and with their efforts and struggles, they will stand at the top of all sectors. The time has come. Keep up! People from all over the world who carry the blood and genes of the Chinese, regardless of where you are and your ancestors’ nationality.”

Hu won some applause on Chinese social media, and many crowned Michelle Yeoh as a “beacon of Chinese people” (華人之光). However, outside China, others resented the claim. Under Hu Xijin’s post, many Twitter users asked why Yeoh’s films are not available in China, and some mocked Hu’s message. One user explained the political message behind Hu’s claim:

“What Hu really wanted to say is: Michelle Yeoh, don’t forget to thank the Chinese Communist Party. Even though your movie can’t be released in China, you owe our great communist party.  No matter where you were born, Chinese are forever in debt to the Chinese communist party.”

Donnie Yen’s controversial presence at the Oscars

Another controversy lies in the Acadmey’s decision to invite Donnie Yen as an award presenter at the Oscars. Yen is considered China’s top action star and has acted in many patriotic Kungfu movies, which feature a hero beating down stereotypical Japanese and western bullies, exemplified by the “Ip Man” series.

His image in the movies fits well with the official ideology of the Chinese government. In 2017, Yen was standing beside Chinese President Xi Jinping on the 20th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong to China, as shown in Anna Kwok’s tweet:

 

 

During the 2019 anti-extradition protests, like many in the Chinese entertainment sector, Donnie Yen echoed Beijing’s official narratives by labeling the protests as riots. Rachel Cheung, a journalist from Vice News, highlighted his political position:

 

 

He also criticized western media outlets, in particular, BBC, for being biased against China in their reports. Early this year, he was appointed to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference as a representative.

Some called the Oscars committee hypocritical in inviting Donnie Yen, as they had previously rejected former comedic actor and current President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s request to appear in the ceremony via Telecast for two consecutive years.

In reaction, a group of overseas Hong Kong political dissents launched an online petition against the Oscar’s decision to invite Yen as an award presenter.

 

 

As many as 100,000 people signed the petition. But the Oscars schedule went on according to plan on March 13 and attracted some petitioners to protest outside the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles ahead of the ceremony:

 

 

Now the award ceremony is over, but the tension prevails. On the one hand, Beijing influencers continue to cement the country’s soft power by celebrating the achievement of “Chinese genes,” on the other hand, exiled activists from Hong Kong and China are warily watching the politics of Hollywood.

Following Donnie Yen’s Oscar appearance, outraged activists began criticizing the new president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Janet Yang, who established her foothold in the cinema industry by obtaining exclusive representation rights in North America for all films produced in mainland China through a small film distributor based in San Francisco in the early 1980s and then helped big American studios sell their movies to China. Jeffrey Ngo, a Hong Kong diaspora member, dug into Janet Yang’s Chinese politics in a Twitter thread:

 

 

It is an open secret that Chinese politics have shaped the Hollywood movie industry, given its huge 1.4 billion people market. But public mobilization against the hypocrisy of the “American dream” is rarely seen. While the scale of protests outside the Oscars venue is small, new political dramas may emerge. Stay tuned.

^^^

Oiwan Lam is a media activist, researcher, and educator currently based in Hong Kong.

This article originally appeared in Global Voices, an online community of writers, translators, and human rights activists from various countries and with different language abilities and expertise.

Feature image of Michelle Yeoh on stage at the 2023 Oscar stage taken from a screen capture from ABC7  Youtube Channel.

Anna May Wong Oscar final image

Steven S. Drachman on Anna May Wong’s Academy Award

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A couple of thoughts on the Oscars and the sweep of the sci-fi Chinese family drama-comedy, Everything Everywhere All at Once, which (if you’ve been hiding under a talking rock for the last year) stars Michelle Yeoh as a late middle-aged laundry owner grappling with daughter problems, husband problems, and tax problems, all while battling an evil force determined to destroy the multi-verse.

Hong Kong Film’s 1980s Heyday

I spent my college years in the mid-1980s watching Hong Kong movies at New York’s Music Palace on Bowery Street in Chinatown, and that other one, the theater that had subway tracks on its roof, which I think was on Mott Street. Both are gone now.

I watched action films directed by John Woo, Ching Siu-Tung’s Chinese Ghost Story movies, Stephen Chow comedies, and on and on.

When I saw Michelle Yeoh’s explosive appearance in Supercop, at the Music Palace, I thought that she should have won a special Academy Award for riding a motorcycle off an embankment and landing on a moving train, with a smile on her face.

At the time, I really lamented the fact that no one in the mainstream media wrote about these movies, and none of them managed a proper mainstream release. Hollywood studios thought the American audience wasn’t ready for Chinese movie stars, and America’s taste-makers definitely wasn’t ready. When Jackie Chan’s Police Story made it into the New York Film Festival in 1987, it did more to damage the festival than to elevate Jackie Chan.

Hollywood’s Blind Eye Was My Gain

But the lack of media awareness of these movies had a silver lining for me. When Hong Kong film festivals finally began to dot the horizon in the early 1990s, almost no film critics (with the occasional exception, such as Dave Kerr) knew enough to write intelligently about these movies, and I stepped into the gap. I eventually interviewed Jackie Chan for Entertainment Weekly, because no one at the magazine had more than a vague idea of who he was.

It was the start of my such-as-it-is writing career. It led to other things. If not for the American obscurity of Hong Kong films in the 1980s, and my propitious knowledge of this industry when one was momentarily needed, I’d have no writing career at all.

Hollywood’s treatment of Asian film was echoed in its cold shoulder to Asian-Americans. For years and years and years, Hollywood infamously rejected any film that would star an actor of Asian national origin. Barry Hughart’s rousing fantasy/action novel, Bridge of Birds, had all the elements of a great movie franchise, and Hughart even found himself in discussions with a studio executive, who, according to Hughart explained bluntly (in what one might call “colorful” language) that the all-Chinese cast meant that the movie would never be made.

Everything Everywhere Deserved Its Oscar Sweep

Some view Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Oscar sweep as something like reparations or affirmative action, an award for all the Asian-themed movies and Asian actors the Academy has overlooked, all the movies Hollywood didn’t make, all the actors it never cast.

This seems to suggest that the movie wouldn’t have won these awards if there weren’t wrongs to be righted. And this is unfair. While not typical Oscar bait, Everything Everywhere could certainly under any circumstances have benefited from what I will call “the Sideways effect.” Generally speaking, the Sideways effect refers to the way a single nasty line in a popular movie depressed the sales of merlot wine. But I use it a different way, to describe an offbeat film that rides just the right wave at just the right time. There can be one, and only one, “Sideways effect movie” in any given year. This is one rule of the Sideways effect.

Everything Everywhere was the Sideways effect movie this year, for reasons that included cultural ones, but it could have been the Sideways effect movie even in the best of all possible worlds.

The actors and filmmakers seemed to acknowledge that they were winning awards for all those who should have won before them; it was not a coincidence that an editorial about the great Anna May Wong appeared in the New York Times the week before the Oscar ceremony.

In accepting her award for Best Actress, Michelle Yeoh called out to “all the little boys and girls who look like me,” in accepting his award for Best Supporting Actor, Ke Huy Quan stated that “I spent a year in a refugee camp and somehow I ended up here on Hollywood’s biggest stage…. This, this, is the American Dream,” and in accepting the award for Best Picture, co-director Daniel Kwan said, “We are all products of our context. We are all descendants of something and someone, and I want to acknowledge my context.”

Recognizing What Came Before, and What Could Have Been

So it was kind of OK, in a way, that Michelle Yeoh’s award recognizes not only the best performance of 2022, and the great performances that she has given for forty years, but also the Oscar that Anita Mui didn’t win for her heartbreaking performance in Rouge and the Oscar that Maggie Cheung didn’t win for her tough and daring turn in Full Moon in New York and her haunting role in Farewell China; that Ke Huy Quan’s award also acknowledges the Oscar that Michael Hui didn’t win for Always on My Mind, that Jackie Chan didn’t win for Little Big Soldier, that Tony Leung didn’t win for Farewell China, and that Leslie Cheung didn’t win for Happy Together. And while we’re at it, maybe Stephanie Hsu’s nomination as Best Supporting Actress can somehow, in some redefinition of karma, recompense Hayley Man, a young actress whom the Academy failed to recognize for Farewell China in 1990.

And maybe it’s also a recognition of the Oscar that Brandon Lee won for his role as Number Ten Ox in Bridge of Birds in some other part of the multi-verse, a hypothetical world in which, in 1988, Hollywood had the foresight to make an action/fantasy film starring a Chinese lead actor.

And, of course, it’s also above all a recognition of the Oscar that Anna May Wong didn’t win for The Good Earth in 1937, because the studios cast Luise Raine in yellow face in the lead role. Image the performance Wong would have given, if she’d only had the chance! Imagine the acceptance speech. And imagine the Hollywood that such a thing would have created and cultivated. Imagine the movies that would have been made, but that weren’t made. It’s a requiem for a world of movies that never existed.

One day, an Oscar will just be an Oscar, and not redress for a hundred years of injustice. But not quite yet.

A Final Thought

I’ve mentioned Farewell China multiple times in this article. It’s a great movie about Chinese immigrants in New York City, directed by the great Clara Law, and you should watch it. I reviewed it for The Boston Phoenix when it played in Boston in the 1990s, and I interviewed Clara Law at the time. It used to be rentable on DVD.com, but now it’s not; you should add it to your list and keep an eye out.

After The Joy Luck Club, Crazy Rich Asians and, now, Everything Everywhere’s Oscar triumph, I’ve had the same thought — maybe Hollywood will suddenly be so excited by the idea of movies about Chinese women that they’ll reach out to Clara Law and offer her a deal.

Farewell China won a slew of awards, including Taiwan equivalent of the Oscar (and the Hong Kong Oscar nomination) that Hayley Man received for Best Actress, before vanishing utterly into obscurity, apparently.

Clara Law is still alive and well, living and working in Australia.

And One Last Thought

Blake Edward’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a great movie rendered almost unwatchable by Mickey Rooney in yellow face as an old Japanese landlord. It’s not the yellow face per se that is so objectionable, but the horribleness of his acting, the worst performance Rooney ever gave. With today’s special effects technology, Rooney could be surgically excised from the film and replaced with George Takei or Ken Watanabe. Edwards’ widow, Julie Andrews, is still alive and would presumably approve. She is a nice lady, reputation would have it. Wherever he is, I know it’s what Mickey Rooney would want.

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.

Image: What if Anna May Wong Won an Oscar?

vintage brown crt tv on parquet wood flooring

Steven S. Drachman: On TV

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Some stuff I’ve been watching, and some thoughts I’ve been having.

Rich Guy Traveling to Fancy Places that Cater to Rich People

Last night, I watched the first episode of Eugene Levy’s The Reluctant Traveler. Rich man gets out of his “comfort zone” when he travels to a luxury hotel in Finland; mistakenly believes he is roughing it. Locals forced to laugh uproariously at his stupid ad-libs; rich man mistakenly believes he is being funny. Maybe Hollywood is out of touch!

This is a genre that might have begun with Michael Palin, but Palin himself caught on that his privilege was showing, and later episodes crashed through the myopia. His visit to North Korea was a particularly spectacular example of breaking out of the genre to show us something genuinely new. It’s unlikely that The Reluctant Traveler will reach those heights. It is really nicely filmed, though.

A Groundbreaking Kids’ Sci-Fi Show

When I was a kid, I watched Land of the Lost, and my dad watched it with me. This was a show about a father and his two kids (later an uncle) who wind up in a weird primitive alternate two-mooned world populated by dinosaurs and two types of humanoids, the reptilian Sleestak and the lovable chimplike Pakuni. The show ran from 1974 to 1977, and it was shot on cheap-looking videotape and blue-screened backgrounds, but the stories were great. It was later rebooted for television in 1991, and as a movie in 2009. The new TV version was more lavishly shot on film and starred a famous movie actor, Timothy Bottoms. The movie was funny (at least, I thought so), and starred Will Ferrell.

But it was that first series that I loved, and still love.

Watching it back then, as a kid, I was used to TV and movie aliens speaking gibberish and assumed this was the case with the Pakuni, Chaka and his two dads, Ta and Sa. After a couple of episodes, though, my father said he thought the TV Pakuni were speaking an “actual” (though made-up) sort-of language. So he paid close attention, and pretty soon he could speak passable Pakuni. He had a knack for languages, and he liked to fool around with them. He learned Esperanto, which is pretty useless, and also Hawaiian, but Pakuni was probably the most useless language he ever mastered. Still, he enjoyed calling his kids to dinner in Pakuni. He didn’t have the benefit of a Pakuni-to-English dictionary, but one exists now.

I’ve told this story from time to time, but I have recently learned that Pakuni was the first “conlang” (consistent though madeup language) ever to appear in a film or TV show, developed by a linguist at UCLA, which made the show a trailblazer in at least one way. It was also the first show that featured two dads, even if they were chimplike aliens.

Klingons did appear in Star Trek in the ‘sixties, but back then they spoke only gibberish.

Style over Substance

I’ve been watching Hello Tomorrow, and the criticisms are all true: it’s a show about not very interesting people living in a wildly visually fascinating world. The visuals are what is known as “retro-futurism,” and it’s a popular style of art that looks at the future through the lens of the past, using a Jetsons hue. I believe that Hello Tomorrow is the first TV show or movie designed 100% in a retro-futurism style, and it is spectacular. The story, about a salesman and the son who never knew him, and an uninteresting fraud-mystery that plays out in painfully slow hints, is less-so. Is there an argument that this alone makes it worth watching? I will report back.

Mark Maron: From Bleak to Dark

Mark Maron looks just like Kurt Vonnegut these days. Or rather, he looks the way Kurt Vonnegut looked back when he was still alive.

Maron’s new show is breathtaking. His first standup special since the death of his partner Lynn Shelton (“the genius,” he says), it is both sad and hilarious; apart from some gratuitous and jarringly crude bits of unfunniness near the beginning, it’s the sustained masterpiece that those of us who have followed his career always knew he would one day achieve.

If only he didn’t look so much like Kurt Vonnegut. It’s distracting.

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book. Image by Pexels.

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Your Sunday Funnies: The Death of Preiss (Part 1)

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This is the first episode of a new graphic novel by the cranky novelist and columnist Alon Preiss, and it is somewhat fictionalized in one important respect.

“I am alive and well,” Preiss tells us, “though it will not be ever thus. So while this story is currently fiction, someday, perhaps soon, it will cease to be so.”

CHAPTER ONE: IN WHICH PREISS DIES

TO BE CONTINUED….

^^^
Alon Preiss is the author of A Flash of Blue Sky (2015) and In Love With Alice (2017), which are both available from Chickadee Prince Books.

World ending

Things to Do in VR: Watch the Sky, and Wait for the End of the World

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AltspaceVR, that amazing world that contains amazing worlds, is really truly going away on March 10. So the best thing to do between now and then is to spend as much as possible in ASVR, before it’s gone for good.

Enjoy one last weekly Pagodascope event, that great party set in a cotton candy-corn, mixed metaphor Peewee’s Playhouse of a party room, with terrific music and infectious enthusiasm, on Saturday, February 18, from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM. It’s the 44th, if you are keeping count. There are three more Thursday “Bratwurst” parties, on February 23, March 2 and March 9. All Bratwurst parties take place from 3:30 PM to 6:30 PM Eastern time. (An explanation: the organizer wanted to lure more Germans into VR, and thought bratwurst was the way to go.) And for a great evening in a realistic, European nightclub, visit the very last MOMA rave event (before it moves to VrChat) on Friday, March 3, at 5:45 PM. See one more “3D Hologram” acoustic musical performance by the VR trailblazing musician Katelyn Christine on February 22 at 9 PM. And drop by the skinny sandbar that houses Henry and Matt’s Late Night Barbecue, this Friday at 9 pm.

Finally, on the very last day of Altspace’s life, watch the world end. “The end of our beautiful community life in AltspaceVR,” writes Shu Shu, the organizer of THE COUNT DOWN: THE LAST MOMENTS OF ALTSPACEVR. “Join us – we will film this tragic moment when the shutdown happens.” This apocalyptic happening will be on Friday, March 10, from 10:00 AM to 12:59 PM, or whenever it shuts down. It’ll be like Last Night, This is the End or Melancholia. Although, admittedly, not really as bad. Because we’ll be sad once it’s over, but we’ll still be alive.

^^^

Model for the End of the World: Kalyee Srithnam

Etude illustration

Steven S. Drachman, on that Columbo Episode that Natasha Lyonne Loves So Much

In Sunday’s New York Times, Natasha Lyonne, the star of the new streaming mystery series, Poker Face, and Rian Johnson, the show’s creator, picked their favorite episodes of their favorite old mystery shows. Lyonne cited a Columbo episode that guest-starred John Cassavetes, but then barely said anything about it. (“Ah, that one has two boyfriends: John and Peter. So it’s nice to see them reunited. It warms my heart.” That’s it. Then she talks about herself and her friends.)

The episode, Etude in Black, is from the second season (either episode one, if you’re reading the Times, or episode 2, if you’re streaming it), and it’s really something.

Of course, the show’s star, Peter Falk, who plays the rumpled, eponymous detective, did his other most iconic work in Cassavetes’ art films, like Husbands, so this episode is something different.

Etude in Black features Cassavetes as Alex Benedict, a murderous symphony conductor — that’s not a spoiler, every Columbo episode tells the viewer whodunit at the beginning — and much of the ninety minutes features Falk and Cassavetes talking, just like a Cassavetes movie, Falk circling his prey, feigning idiocy, and Cassavetes underestimating him till it’s too late.

The episode has a tremendous pedigree at which the Times article doesn’t even hint! It was written by Steven Bochco, who would go on to create Hill Street Blues  and NYPD Blues (and the — let’s say — underrated Cop Rock), and it co-stars luminaries like Myrna Loy, Pat Morita and an adorably young Blythe Danner, as Benedict’s wife, Janice, who at one point is voyeuristically filmed in a tennis outfit that you must see to believe. (Ah, 1970s TV!)

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ADVERTISEMENT Listen to the season finale of the popular Weird-Western, historical-fantasy/science fiction podcast, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh, starring Sal Rendino!

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But most astonishingly, it was co-directed by Cassavetes, so it ranks as a sort-of undiscovered Cassavetes classic, something never mentioned in his oeuvre, the auteur going quasi-commercial for the only time in the many years between A Child is Waiting and his death in 1989. (The other co-director, who received credit, was Nicholas Colasanto, who viewers of a certain age will remember as “Coach” in early seasons of Cheers. Falk himself contributed as well.)

Cassavetes and Falk deliver edgy, lose, indie/verité-style performances, especially in the lengthy and difficult scenes that feature Columbo and Benedict just talking, ramblingly, and the script focuses on various of Cassavetes’ obsessions, all of which give the production a distinctly different vibe from the usual 1970s detective program. The movie is depressing, emotionally relentless, difficult and tragic.

Benedict finds himself unable to extricate himself from a dalliance with his symphony’s pianist, Jenifer Welles. She, both jokingly and flirtingly (but certainly unseriously) threatens to make a scandal unless he leaves his wife. He seems to joke back. With a wry grin, he remarks, “It’s a marvelous choice you’ve given me.” Smiling, she replies: “You know I’m right.”

But is there even a hint of seriousness beneath Jenifer’s coy threats?

If so, he’d lose his Janice, but to Jenifer, he objects only that his symphony would lose the benevolence of his wealthy mother-in-law. Is that his real motive, money?

Still, he seems to relent, and Jenifer plays Chopin for him, happy and in love, at least till he kills her with a paperweight to the head. A moment earlier, he had loved her.

“Love is a stream,” Gena Rowlands once insisted, in Cassavetes’ great film, Love Streams. “It’s continuous. It doesn’t stop.” To which her psychiatrist replied, wearily, “No. It does stop.”

In Etude in Black, Cassavetes shows that love stops on a dime. And the man who loved you in the morning will, by evening, drag your body to the kitchen, position it just so, turn on the gas, then put a forged suicide note in your typewriter.

Like any Columbo episode, whodunit is not the question; instead, the central mystery of the drama is one that drives many Cassavetes movies. What motivates a man? Here, is it love or money? Does he kill to keep largesse flowing to his symphony, or to keep the love of his wife? And, as always with Cassavetes, how the generally unhinged obsessions of the women in his life drive him to tragedy.

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ADVERTISEMENT Listen to the season finale of the popular Weird-Western, historical-fantasy/science fiction podcast, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh, starring Sal Rendino!

Available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts

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Early in the episode, Columbo examines the initial police report, which deems Jenifer’s death a suicide, which sends him off on a lengthy Cassavetes-esque rant, weird, quiet, heartbreaking.

“Did you read this?” he asks a colleague sadly, in a low whisper. “This is what they gave me. This is the dossier that they gave me. ‘Female Caucasian piano player, born Kenosha, Wisconsin.’ This is what they gave me. Now look what I find in the scrapbook. Miss Wells London, Miss Wells Paris. Miss Welles, Miss Welles, Miss Welles. Genius at birth, talented, magnificent, feel and taste, fabulous. Look what the department gives me. ‘Female Caucasian piano player, born Kenosha, Wisconsin.’ Look what I find in the scrapbook. Look at these pictures. Girl has a wonderful shape, don’t you think? Look at those eyes. Bedroom eyes. Look what the department gives me. ‘Female Caucasian piano player, born Kenosha, Wisconsin.’ No bleach there, regular hair. No fear there. No heavy makeup. Got a girl with a body, money and a career. Got some column items to show the crowd she went with. Best people. Dukes, earls, politicians, big people. So add that. What’s missing? Her man. The man. Her person. Somebody. Woman like that’s gotta have somebody. Eyes like that. But that’s me. I’m paranoic, every time I see a dead body, I think it’s been murdered. Can’t imagine anyone murdering themselves. Especially a young girl like that. Beautiful eyes. But that’s me. I like to see everyone die of old age.”

The “fun” of Columbo usually involves watching a comically rumpled and faux-buffoonish detective run circles around a comically pompous, hateful murderer. Etude in Black throws away the formula. There are no laughs here, no fun. It is a great movie.

^^^

Steven S. Drachman is the author of a science fiction trilogy, The Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O’Hugh the Third, which is available in paperback from your local bookstore, Amazon and Barnes & Noble; it is also available as a Kindle e-book.

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