Mark, You Ignorant Slut

Most people, when looking through my DVDs, see things like Pearl Harbor and Keeping the Faith and immediately think “guilty pleasure”. These people are at least partially wrong; I lost any sense of guilt over loving bad movies way back in the back-when (and anyway Pearl Harbor is pretty great if you can get past how shitty it is). But I don’t want to come off like I’m immune from guilty-pleasure movies; it’s just that my guilt is a little different from most people. Most people, for instance, would hold up a movie like Stone Reader as an example of their erudition, but I can’t watch it without feeling like I’ve accidentally eaten a hamburger somebody found near a dumpster.

I watch Stone Reader an awful lot. I don’t, however, think that should count for much; I’ll watch any movie ever made about reading and/or writing for the same reasons I’ll watch any movie set largely in a record store. People like movies about the things they do. And, to be fair, Stone Reader is an excellent movie about reading and writing; it features incredibly insightful remarks and absorbing anecdotes in equal share, and it invites you to test your knowledge on a very casual, open-armed level. In no way do I want to give the impression that I don’t like this movie, because I enjoy it every time I watch it. Fortunately, however, I can walk and chew gum, because in practice I hate Stone Reader very nearly as much as I enjoy it.

Or, to be a little more specific, I hate hate hate hate hate Mark Moskowitz, the director and star of the film. It’s not that he’s everywhere in the film that makes me hate him; I have no implicit beef with star-making machinery, and the way the film’s set up (low-budget indie documentary about a guy trying to track down an author who wrote a potent yet long-forgotten book called The Stones of Summer and then disappeared), it’s probably the only way to organize the movie coherently. Rather, it’s the transformative effect that Moskowitz’ presence has on the film which turns me eight shades of red, as he turns a perfectly respectable movie into the literary equivalent of Spinal Tap. Moskowitz, in other words, has accidentally made the most ridiculous movie ever.

I’d love to think that there’s no stigma attached to the act of recreational reading, but that and fifty cents etc. Reading is pretty much the most self-involved thing a person can do, and it would be useless to pretend that anything offering that much myopic pleasure isn’t bound to attract insufferable assholes (see also “indie rock”). And everybody’s encountered these assholes – the ones who talk shit about you if you haven’t read Hemingway, or the ones whose Impassioned Arguments basically come down to page numbers in other peoples’ books, or the ones who digest one book and then run around screeching about it like it’s some lost Biblical text. The nature of reading, as even Stone Reader points out, is that when you read, you’re the one giving life to the text; dealing with people who want credit for this, I guess, is just one of those things we have to deal with as a civilized society.

Moskowitz, however, is the absolute king of these people. Even setting aside the comical degree of self-justification required to motivate someone to make a movie about tracking down the author of a book you AND ONLY YOU loved, the guy just plain sucks: he shows off his commitment to reading like a precocious seven-year-old, he can’t have a conversation that doesn’t devolve into Dueling Pontifications, and he explains the stupidest, most basic shit to his audience (actual line: “I liked stories with subplots and twists to them”). It’s like watching James Lipton interview Ira Glass summed up in one man’s charisma.

The problem, of course, is that the movie only works if you give yourself over to accepting Moskowitz’ approach. The whole movie is pitched in terms of his experience as a devoted reader, both in general and in the particular case of The Stones of Summer; if the movie is to make any sense to the audience, it is because the audience presumably has experienced the joy of reading in a very profound manner and can see what Moskowitz is trying to accomplish. It’s just that Moskowitz’ manner of behavior is so insipid and self-righteous that it makes me ashamed even to identify with him, both as a person and as an artist. Even setting aside my profound distaste for the tote-bag-and-whale-songs-CD milieu he epitomizes so adroitly, the man’s just fucking dishonest; the film is full of instances where the narration tries to pass off staged shots as “happening right now in the story”, like showing his friends “finding” the book in their mailbox or setting up items ahead of time in order to run across them “in the process” of doing other stuff and making “off-the-cuff” glib remarks (taking a copy of The Stones of Summer out of an [opened] mailer and, with a note of surprise in the voice, referring to it as “a box of stones” = VOMIT).

I think that movies like this do the same type of disservice to the field of documentary filmmaking that the Darkness do to the genre of heavy metal. People take movies seriously because they like the whole process of movies – choosing the movie, watching it, talking about it, seeing how it does, etc. – but it didn’t take people too long to realize that on a certain level, you can’t watch a movie without it fucking with you. Consequently, we got the documentary genre, the sine qua non of which is the assurance that you can believe that what you’re seeing is legit. This isn’t to say that the genre of documentary necessarily equates to “no manipulation”, but just that the manipulation is pitched at an everyday level. You can take Randall Adams seriously in The Thin Blue Line, for instance, because Errol Morris put a lot of effort into editing his interviews to efface his own presence and make it seem less like Adams was addressing someone present; you’re watching Adams talk just like you’re watching anyone talk from across a table.

Stone Reader doesn’t work like that; instead, it trades legitimacy for continuity. It’s impossible for a normal human being to experience the events of Stone Reader as Moskowitz puts them forth; even Moskowitz himself didn’t experience the action of sending the books to his friends the way he shows it in the film. You get to see everything, but there’s no support for any of it; you just have to take it on faith that this happened and then this and then this and then this guy said this and hey we’re out of time. Which is fine, I guess – but how are you supposed to take it seriously when it’s trying to puff you up to the level of omnipotence? Is it worth watching the metal-detector scene if we’ve watched Derek Smalls shove the foil-wrapped cucumber down his pants beforehand?

I have to admit that I’m less inclined to give Moskowitz any credit simply because the man seems like the type to take supreme pleasure in the smell of his own farts; inhabiting an insufferable person’s universe isn’t all that tempting an alternative to reality. I think it’s very telling that most of the truths I find in Stone Reader come from the interview portions, as it seems entirely within the realm of possibility that I might have nothing to learn from these people if I wasn’t so exasperated with Moskowitz. But it also seems possible that I find truth there because unlike the rest of the film, I actively have to look for truths in the interviews rather than simply be informed of them. Omnipotence vanishes when the credits start rolling.

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