![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessSo my brother and I just finished watching Salinger, the 2013 documentary about J.D. Salinger. As I watched, I felt a growing irritation.
Oh, not with Salinger. Sure, based on the limited information in this documentary and from other sources he appears to have been a complete jerk to friends and editors and had a serious taste for very, very much younger women whom he then proceeded to treat very very badly. So, yeah, not my favorite guy.
But no, my chief irritation was with the damn documentary, which, finding it had about 20, maybe 30 minutes of actual information, footage, and so on, decides to stretch this into 120 minutes. One hundred and twenty very very long minutes. My brother fell asleep.
:
When you have to stretch your material like that, you get:
1. A lengthy segment where a fan of Salinger's brags about going up to Salinger's New Hampshire home, leaving notes all over the the town and finally sticking notes into Salinger's tree, getting to talk to Salinger before this and becoming stunned, stunned, stunned that Salinger a) doesn't want to talk to him and b) doesn't want to give him life advice. Fan is then terribly terribly hurt and writes Salinger another damn note to stick into a tree which goes on and on about how Salinger really isn't a nice and friendly and generous person. Salinger reads the note and "looks upset." The fan, years later, is still shocked that this didn't go well.
2....followed pretty much immediately by various celebrities and writers assuring us that no, no, Salinger wasn't really a recluse who wanted his privacy, he just milked the whole "I'm a recluse!" because it fed into his fame and fortune, and a later segment where Philip Seymour Hoffman telling us, again, at length, that it's really strange to go from being a normal person to a celebrity.
3. Extended footage of World War II which for the most part doesn't include Salinger, including the film's most excited moment: a few filmed seconds of Salinger apparently talking to some French people. It's the only footage of Salinger in the film (the documentary does have some photos) so I can sorta see the excitement.
4. Another person telling us to cheer up: I mean, the Civil War brought us Mark Twain and Walt Whitman so apparently we had to have World War II to give us Salinger. THANK YOU DEAD PEOPLE.
5. A nice gossipy section about William Shaun, later supplemented by another but fortunately shorter segment where we learn that William Shaun cheated on his wife. Go, New Yorker, go!
6. Numerous writers telling us that THE NEW YORKER IS IT MAN AND SO MUCH BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE OUT THERE.
7. Not particularly veiled suggestions that The New Yorker's fiction editors in the 1950s had no clue what they were doing.
8. Numerous writers and actors, all men, assuring us that Salinger was like, awesome, dude; and a grand total of three women writers: one who gives us her opinion on Salinger's life, one who was the last to interview Salinger, and one who slept with him. That's nice.
9. A long segment blaming Catcher in the Rye for inspiring or helping to inspire three separate murderers -- Mark David Chapman (John Lennon), John Hinckley (Ronald Reagan) and Robert John Bardo (Rebecca Schaeffer). But wait! I hear you say. Didn't Ronald Reagan survive the assassination attempt, thus making that, by definition, not a murder? Why, yes. And wasn't Hinckley mostly focused on Jodie Foster, not J.D. Salinger? Why, again, yes. And wasn't Bardo by all accounts including his own obsessed with Rebecca Schaeffer, not J.D. Salinger, and was only carrying The Catcher in the Rye by pure coincidence? Why, again, yes. But, before you leap to the wrong conclusion let's get a writer on to assure us that if his writing inspired someone to murder not once but three times it would be VERY TROUBLING. As is attempting to suggest that Catcher in the Rye set off a murder spree, but let us go on.
10. Several DRAMATIC MOMENTS where we are meant to blame all of Salinger's issues on World War II, and I'd like to, really, I would. It's not that I doubt that Salinger's time in the U.S. Army was deeply traumatic: he arrived on D-Day and saw the liberation of concentration camps, covered in some detail in this film as if to say, "HEY, IF YOU THINK CATCHER IN THE RYE IS SHOCKING, LOOK AT THIS." He was hardly the only writer to have similar traumas -- Roald Dahl comes to mind, and since I'm rereading him at the moment, Lloyd Alexander, and we could continue with a lengthy list. I'm just saying that, as with Roald Dahl, I don't think World War II was the only issue. The film, not going for subtlety, instead just decides to keep showing us, over and over, the haunted HI I AM A WORLD WAR II SOLDIER IMAGE CONSTANTLY OVERSHADOWING EVERYTHING YOU WRITE images. Sigh.
All of this is to cover up, and not well, the film's essential problem: none of the people closest to Salinger, including his third wife and his son, agreed to be part of this film. His daughter appears only in archival footage from television interviews. This leaves us with exactly three people with any intimate knowledge of him: the woman who worked as his nanny and occasional housekeeper back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who mostly remembers his children and his wife; Joyce Maynard, who had an affair with him back in the 1970s; and a girl he met at the age of 14, who lost her virginity to him in Montreal a few years later and then never saw him again. Five other people in the film at least met Salinger, three just casually or for disastrous interviews.
The other 140 people interviewed for this film never met Salinger. Sure, a few of them have useful or interesting things to say about World War II and concentration camps and what sort of editor William Shaun is. But the others? We really needed to hear Martin Sheen's opinion on Salinger? John Cusack's?
Oh, yes, we did. Because, after all, the film had to fill 120 minutes.
Look, Salinger avoided publicity, no question. But much of his correspondence is part of the public record. His daughter wrote a lengthy memoir. We have his books. We have the public records of his divorce. Enough to fill a 120 minute film? Probably not. But 85 minutes? Why not?
Oh, not with Salinger. Sure, based on the limited information in this documentary and from other sources he appears to have been a complete jerk to friends and editors and had a serious taste for very, very much younger women whom he then proceeded to treat very very badly. So, yeah, not my favorite guy.
But no, my chief irritation was with the damn documentary, which, finding it had about 20, maybe 30 minutes of actual information, footage, and so on, decides to stretch this into 120 minutes. One hundred and twenty very very long minutes. My brother fell asleep.
:
When you have to stretch your material like that, you get:
1. A lengthy segment where a fan of Salinger's brags about going up to Salinger's New Hampshire home, leaving notes all over the the town and finally sticking notes into Salinger's tree, getting to talk to Salinger before this and becoming stunned, stunned, stunned that Salinger a) doesn't want to talk to him and b) doesn't want to give him life advice. Fan is then terribly terribly hurt and writes Salinger another damn note to stick into a tree which goes on and on about how Salinger really isn't a nice and friendly and generous person. Salinger reads the note and "looks upset." The fan, years later, is still shocked that this didn't go well.
2....followed pretty much immediately by various celebrities and writers assuring us that no, no, Salinger wasn't really a recluse who wanted his privacy, he just milked the whole "I'm a recluse!" because it fed into his fame and fortune, and a later segment where Philip Seymour Hoffman telling us, again, at length, that it's really strange to go from being a normal person to a celebrity.
3. Extended footage of World War II which for the most part doesn't include Salinger, including the film's most excited moment: a few filmed seconds of Salinger apparently talking to some French people. It's the only footage of Salinger in the film (the documentary does have some photos) so I can sorta see the excitement.
4. Another person telling us to cheer up: I mean, the Civil War brought us Mark Twain and Walt Whitman so apparently we had to have World War II to give us Salinger. THANK YOU DEAD PEOPLE.
5. A nice gossipy section about William Shaun, later supplemented by another but fortunately shorter segment where we learn that William Shaun cheated on his wife. Go, New Yorker, go!
6. Numerous writers telling us that THE NEW YORKER IS IT MAN AND SO MUCH BETTER THAN ANYTHING ELSE OUT THERE.
7. Not particularly veiled suggestions that The New Yorker's fiction editors in the 1950s had no clue what they were doing.
8. Numerous writers and actors, all men, assuring us that Salinger was like, awesome, dude; and a grand total of three women writers: one who gives us her opinion on Salinger's life, one who was the last to interview Salinger, and one who slept with him. That's nice.
9. A long segment blaming Catcher in the Rye for inspiring or helping to inspire three separate murderers -- Mark David Chapman (John Lennon), John Hinckley (Ronald Reagan) and Robert John Bardo (Rebecca Schaeffer). But wait! I hear you say. Didn't Ronald Reagan survive the assassination attempt, thus making that, by definition, not a murder? Why, yes. And wasn't Hinckley mostly focused on Jodie Foster, not J.D. Salinger? Why, again, yes. And wasn't Bardo by all accounts including his own obsessed with Rebecca Schaeffer, not J.D. Salinger, and was only carrying The Catcher in the Rye by pure coincidence? Why, again, yes. But, before you leap to the wrong conclusion let's get a writer on to assure us that if his writing inspired someone to murder not once but three times it would be VERY TROUBLING. As is attempting to suggest that Catcher in the Rye set off a murder spree, but let us go on.
10. Several DRAMATIC MOMENTS where we are meant to blame all of Salinger's issues on World War II, and I'd like to, really, I would. It's not that I doubt that Salinger's time in the U.S. Army was deeply traumatic: he arrived on D-Day and saw the liberation of concentration camps, covered in some detail in this film as if to say, "HEY, IF YOU THINK CATCHER IN THE RYE IS SHOCKING, LOOK AT THIS." He was hardly the only writer to have similar traumas -- Roald Dahl comes to mind, and since I'm rereading him at the moment, Lloyd Alexander, and we could continue with a lengthy list. I'm just saying that, as with Roald Dahl, I don't think World War II was the only issue. The film, not going for subtlety, instead just decides to keep showing us, over and over, the haunted HI I AM A WORLD WAR II SOLDIER IMAGE CONSTANTLY OVERSHADOWING EVERYTHING YOU WRITE images. Sigh.
All of this is to cover up, and not well, the film's essential problem: none of the people closest to Salinger, including his third wife and his son, agreed to be part of this film. His daughter appears only in archival footage from television interviews. This leaves us with exactly three people with any intimate knowledge of him: the woman who worked as his nanny and occasional housekeeper back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who mostly remembers his children and his wife; Joyce Maynard, who had an affair with him back in the 1970s; and a girl he met at the age of 14, who lost her virginity to him in Montreal a few years later and then never saw him again. Five other people in the film at least met Salinger, three just casually or for disastrous interviews.
The other 140 people interviewed for this film never met Salinger. Sure, a few of them have useful or interesting things to say about World War II and concentration camps and what sort of editor William Shaun is. But the others? We really needed to hear Martin Sheen's opinion on Salinger? John Cusack's?
Oh, yes, we did. Because, after all, the film had to fill 120 minutes.
Look, Salinger avoided publicity, no question. But much of his correspondence is part of the public record. His daughter wrote a lengthy memoir. We have his books. We have the public records of his divorce. Enough to fill a 120 minute film? Probably not. But 85 minutes? Why not?