Books and Arts

There’s always been a market for nostalgia. Keats, the huckster of Greek glories, put it best: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” But the peculiar achievement of Lester Bangs, the cantankerous rock critic played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the film Almost Famous (2000), is to sell us some self-confessedly unsweet music. True rock and roll, the Bangs character tells us, is “gloriously and righteously dumb” and could suffer no worse fate than to become an “industry of cool.” Of course, by his lights, the golden age has passed; all that remains is “the death rattle, the last gasp, the last grope.” If nostalgia is a drug, he has mainlined the stuff. What are you on, man, and where can I get some?

With a new show at the Whitney, Edward Hopper’s New York; a new documentary film from director Phil Grabsky, Hopper: An American Love Story; and a recent exhibition organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the work of one of the most popular yet seemingly inscrutable American artists of the twentieth century is receiving a great deal of renewed attention. In his paintings, Hopper’s hard-edged realism, impressionistic plays of light and passages of intensely saturated color compete for attention. What has always captured the public imagination is the relative isolation of the figures that appear in his work. Search for articles about Edward Hopper online, and many will describe his art as an exploration of loneliness.

It’s a dazzlingly staged event that evokes the ancient theater, Italian operas, elaborately choreographed Busby Berkeley films and an open-air spectacle on par with WrestleMania at Caesar’s Palace. I’ve watched it knowing that as a small boy, I tugged on my mother’s blue jeans and asked a question informed purely by cinema: “Is Cleopatra the most beautifulest woman in history?” “No,” replied mother, with a cigarette stuck between her clenched teeth. “Elizabeth Taylor is.” I was, of course, picturing Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. The event I’m referring to isn’t mere cinematic overindulgence; it is a monumental moment — six decades after moviegoers first saw it — which transforms a movie star into a deity.

I'm watching Girls. Hannah (Lena Dunham) is tweeting in her bedroom: “My life has been a lie, my ex-boyfriend dates a guy.” She deletes this and types: “All adventurous women do.” She stands up, shakes her hair, swings her tattooed arms and dances to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” I was this person once, I think to myself, as another girl (Marnie) walks into the room and laughs maniacally as the two discuss the shocking reveal that Hannah’s boyfriend, Elijah, is gay (“he seemed gay”). They dance together like white girls on Ellen. I tweet the video: “White girls with tote bags.” I realize that what felt relatable in 2012 now comes off like a camp-cringe spectacle that’s oblivious and dumb. It’s shocking. It’s perversely millennial.

Falling for Christmas has a ridiculous logline: “Newly engaged, spoiled hotel heiress gets into a skiing accident, suffers from total amnesia and finds herself in the care of a handsome, blue-collar lodge owner and his precocious daughter in the days leading up to Christmas.” The Netflix romp is notable only as it marks Lindsay Lohan’s return to a genre that made her famous. “It’s such a refreshing, heartwarming romantic comedy and I miss doing those kinds of movies,” Lohan told Netflix, in earnest, while describing her character as, “Extravagant. Temperamental. Glamorous.” You could build a campy slasher flick or porno off such plot scaffolding; none would be great cinema. And yet Falling for Christmas is more complicated than that. Why?

On Sunday, November 10, 1991, the band Tin Machine played a gig at Brixton Academy in south London. Brixton then was far from the gentrified area it has become; it remained a hotbed of simmering social and racial unrest. The notorious riots of a decade before were still a recent memory, and those who ventured to the Academy did so in the knowledge that fights and aggravation were highly likely, especially after alcohol had been consumed. But if on-street scuffles were a price that gig-goers had to pay to see their musical idols, the world of Tin Machine was a much less happy one. At the beginning of the Nineties, David Bowie had to consider, for the first time since the success of the single “Space Oddity” in 1969, that he might be a spent force.