Caterina.net: All the Pretty Horses/Monster

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{ Saturday, January 17, 2004 }

All the Pretty Horses/Monster

Well I finished All The Pretty Horses and I suppose it wasn't as bad as I had thought it was going to be. Reading it was akin to seeing your cult band sell out, putting out Top 40 when previously they'd written only complex hieroglyphics whose meaning could be teased out only by those willing to climb the mountain and take the vows. Once the mainstream pours in (lucid prose, love story, a plotline that would make Syd Field salivate, the triumph of good over evil...) the true believers are flushed out. You could compare it to the more accessible works that many artists create late in their career. I'm thinking Late Picasso, ~~Late Beethoven~~ or Late de Kooning* -- critics fall all over themselves to celebrate this stuff that feel distinctly kneejerk and bled to me. The only thing that made me happy about All the Pretty Horses was that John Grady didn't get the girl. Well, on to The Crossing.

In other news, don't know much about the career of Charlize Theron, but she appears to have taken the reverse route, from mainstream to indie, in Monster, a film about Aileen Wuornos, the female serial killer from Florida. I'd always thought of Theron as a kind of latter day Michelle Pfeiffer, blonde and pretty and taking only Blonde and Pretty roles. But in Monster she was brash, tough, violent, ugly and mean. You can see the transformation for yourself. But the real transformation was in her facial expression, her body language, her walk. Quite amazing. The movie follows Wuornos' lesbian relationship with Selby, played by Christina Ricci, during which she kills a john who tries to rape her, and then six more. It gives a very complex portrayal of Wuornos, showing her bluster and woundedness without making her too sympathetic a character.

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* Coincidentally, Ron Silliman mentioned and defended late deKooning a few days ago:

Density is a nebulous quality in a poem, as it can be also in painting. Some visual works feel light, airy, ready to drift away while others feel weighted & worked. One of the reasons that de Kooning’s last works proved so controversial, painted as they were as he met the onslaught of Alzheimer’s, was because those canvases differed so materially from his “mature” style in just this way. Certainly the values in those works are different than from his dense, intense assaults on women in the 1950s & ‘60s, but my own sense is that these last works are marvelous in their own right. Indeed, I think they would have been greeted wholeheartedly as such had they been painted by an artist with any other name.

LINK | 1:43 AM | TB

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{ COMMENTS }

But sympathetic enough. Unusual for a movie about extraordinary events: the characters mostly appeared to be human.

Stewart | January 18, 2004 3:01 AM

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Late Beethoven?? What on earth are you talking about??

pete | January 18, 2004 12:14 PM

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Dammit, you're right, no flies on late Beethoven, I must have been typing while asleep again. But I can't think of who I meant. Which composer's work deteriorated over time into schmaltz and lameness?

It's easy to see with rock stars. They start out with all this passion and struggle, but once they have a house in Malibu and 42 inch TVs, they start penning pat ditties. I remember thinking this at a Patti Smith concert I saw a few years ago. I'd never seen her perform before, but I could not believe the "Power to the People" person up there was the same person who wrote Horses.

Caterina Fake | January 18, 2004 12:26 PM

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I tried to think of a classical composer to use there and couldn't--easier to think of ones (Sibelius, Rossini) who just stopped. But the short window of rock n roll greatness is inescapable. That said, if I'd painted Guernica or recorded Horses I'd expect everybody to put up with me forever!

ps did you know they found Crime and Punishment in Saddam's spider hole?

pete | January 19, 2004 11:11 AM

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Throw Liz Phair in the list of the Later Turned out to be accessible artists. I agree to your comment on Monster as well.
Thorton witnessed as a girl her mother shoot a man to death for self defense in a situation where brutally beaten up or something.

Chima | January 19, 2004 3:58 PM

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i remember the event Chima mentions to have been sort of ambiguous - Charlize Theron's mother did kill her father (or maybe stepfather) in South Africa when Charlize was a teenager, but i think it was uncertain whether it was self-defense or revenge. That's what i thought might be interesting about her performance as Aileen Wuornos: art imitating life, maybe.

Amy | January 20, 2004 5:56 AM

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Fear not- you'll like The Crossing. It's the (perhaps deliberate) undoing of all the shortcuts taken in All The Pretty Horses. I think it's the densest, most intensely searching of all his books.

Matt | January 21, 2004 4:08 PM

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I thought Monster was the best film of 2003.

Jacob Martin | January 22, 2004 5:04 AM

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Congrats--I couldn't finish "All the Pretty Horses."

aldahlia | January 25, 2004 3:06 AM

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If you didn't like All The Pretty Horses very much, try reading some of Cormac McCarthy's other grotesque works like "Child of God" and "Outer Dark". It's a very nice style and you feel like you've read a paragraph after reading one sentence. The book has it's flaws, but it's a good book to read during the wintertime (Or if you're a psycho path who enjoys bearing your brother's child and/or living in a fesces-ridden shack)

Mohamed | January 26, 2004 5:44 PM

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