The Disappointment Artist Read Online Free

manipulated my versions of the characters and crises that had overpowered me, trying to decant
The
Searchers
, unmake it, consume it. I watched the film and thought about it and talked about it too much, and when I eventually became a bore,
The Searchers
shot me in the back and walked away.
    I diminished the film, I think. By overestimating it, then claiming myself as its defender, I’d invented another, more pretentious way of underestimating it. My wish to control its reception was a wish to control my own guilt and regret, not anything the film needed from me, or from anyone. If the case for
The Searchers
could be made airtight then my dropping out of Bennington was justified. My cruelty to D. excused. My own isolating intensity pined for some tidy story of struggle and triumph. But there might not actually be anything to struggle with, no triumph to claim, nobody to rescue. Wasn’t it possible that John Wayne should have left Natalie Wood in the tepee—that she was happier there? Weren’t he and I a couple of asses?
    For years I’d chastised the crowd at Tishman in my fantasies, my words ever-more blistering, my argument ever-more seamless. Now I concocted a balm for the burning ears of my imaginary schoolmates:
I
can forgive your resistance to this film.
The Searchers
is a thing I seem
doomed to spend a lifetime trying to fathom, and how often do you have a
lifetime to spend?
Then I’d add,
Can you forgive me my absurd responsiveness?
    Oh, I’ve perfected my defense of the film. It’s hinged on the notion that in certain Hollywood films a major star can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms, a “problematic site,” and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter. James Stewart in
Vertigo
, say, or Humphrey Bogart in
In a Lonely Place
. Refuse the notion and
The Searchers
becomes unwatchable, an explosion in the void. Grant it and the rest falls into place. The weird stuff, the racist stuff, the hysterical stuff: it all serves to split Wayne from fellow characters and from the viewer’s sympathies, to foreground his lonely rage. It’s very, ah,
Brechtian
. If you liked, I could chart how even the most distractingly unfunny pratfall contributes to my thesis. Imagine a DVD with my commentary, my filibuster of articulations, covering every frame.
    Snore. Who’d listen? Detractors of
The Searchers
are casual snipers, not dedicated enemies—like D., or the audience at Tishman, they take a potshot and wander off, interest evaporated. Those who care like I do cherish their own interpretations, and don’t need mine. I know this because as a minor consolation I’ve collected these people. The rock critic who screens a 16 mm print of
The Searchers
in his living room. The biographer who scoured Monument Valley to find the charred remains of the burned cabin, chunks of which he hoards at his home in L.A. Others . . . among fellow cultists the title’s enough, passed like a talisman.
    A new friend remarks he’s surprised to learn I rate
The Searchers
as an influence.
    “Have you seen it?” I ask, falsely casual.
    “Long time ago. I just remember how racist it was.”
    “
The Searchers
is racist the way
Huckleberry Finn
is racist,” I say, of course. But it’s cant, and stale in my mouth. He’ll watch again and understand, or not.
The Searchers
is my private club, and if you don’t join you’ll never know you’ve been rejected. I’m like the Cal professor—caring has worn me out.
The Searchers
is too gristly to be digested in my novel, too willful to be bounded in my theories. I watch or don’t, doesn’t matter:
The Searchers
strides on, maddened, through broken landscapes incapable of containing it—Ford’s oeuvre, and Wayne’s, the “Studio-Era Film,” and my own defeated imagination—everywhere shrugging off categories, refusing the petitions of embarrassment and taste, defying explanation or defense as only great