Falling for the First Time: Gremlins

So I'm a guest at the Mad Hatter's The Dark of the Matinee today for his recurring series "Falling for the First Time," in which he discusses '80s and '90s films with those of us who, by age or neglect, never saw them. Believe it or not, I'd never sat down with Joe Dante's Gremlins, so we chatted about Dante's first big hit.

Though not on the level of his masterpiece, Small Soldiers, Gremlins is a lot of fun, and I had a great time talking about it with Hatter. So head on over to his site and read our discussion of this wicked parody of the studio system and '80s culture.

A Life In Movies

Here's my contribution for Fandango Groovers' blogathon "A Life in Movies," in which bloggers choose their favorite films from each year since their birth. For the most part, I was surprised at how quickly I knew what my favorite film from each year was, but in some cases it was a struggle to decide. I also tried to limit directors to one film to avoid piling on too much life for any one person. For some of the more recent selections, you might see that I did not put the film that came no. 1 on my list for that year in the slot. This is not really because my mind changed but because of the aforementioned directorial limitation (also, as I note later, I've reevaluated my selection of year for movies like Certified Copy, which I probably should have considered a 2011 U.S. release despite managing to see it last year). Anyway, onto the picks:

1989 Batman

Not the greatest movie of 1989 by any stretch (Do the Right Thing and Sweetie are two of the best films I've ever seen), but this has the most resonance to my childhood. Born in the summer of Batman, it seems fated that I would have been such a Bat-freak as a child, and I must have worn scratches into our VHS. It had the camp of the mainstream Batman show but filtered it through Burton's then-fresh vision of Gothic pop-horror, making for a spooky, intricate Gotham where anything seemed possible. I have less love for Nicholson's performance now than I do for Keaton's understated but keen work, and Basinger and Wuhl are afterthoughts, but I can't help but love this thing.

1990 An Angel at My Table

Jane Campion followed up on her striking feature debut with a three-hour biopic of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Campion's intuitive, gently surreal direction proved perfect for the story of a schizophrenic young woman paralyzed by insecurity and anthrophobia, though she never lets her direction outshine the narrative. This set the standard for Campion's other biographical films (The Piano, Bright Star), but she's yet to equal this astonishing (and all-too-sadly underseen) masterpiece.

1991 The Double Life of Véronique

The preemptive fourth installment in Kiselowski's Three Colors trilogy, The Double Life of Veronique takes everything great about those three films and packs them into one bifurcated, curvilinear movie that constantly warps and bends until you'd swear you were watching the same five minutes over and over again. But those five minutes contain such density of thought, aesthetic and spirituality that you'll need the repetition to just begin parsing out everything. One of those movies that can truly change your life.

1992 Bitter Moon

Roman Polanski's dark farce digs into sexual roles, sedentary relationships and the power and terror of fantasy as if ripped from the "Circe" chapter of Ulysses. Polanski deconstructs his earlier sex thrillers into their purest and scariest components, crafting a stylistic exercise so immaculate sometimes I forgot to scream because I was too busy soaking in the mise-en-scène. I don't know that there's a "point" to this movie, but as an experience of cinema, a madcap journey into the heart of technique and the ability of film to grip the throat, I'll take it over the whole of Gaspar Noé's canon.

1993 Carlito's Way

I cannot wait to revisit this movie after filling all these gaps in my De Palma's filmography. This film affected me profoundly when I saw it, and the more of De Palma's films I see, the more I think it is his grand summation as a filmmaker. A romantic, elegiac take on his outlandishly satiric Scarface, Carlito's Way, despite its modest scale and narrower focus, seems the mournful, disgusted conclusion The Godfather Part III was meant to be, a piteous attempt to wrench a broken, hollow man from the life that has taken everything from him but his last breath. In true De Palma fashion, the director lets us know up front that this, too, shall be taken before it's all said and done.

1994 Chungking Express

In the Mood For Love is Wong's best film but I can't help but return to this far more frequently. I would likely attribute that to the fact that Wong's magnum opus conveys the more acute, more experienced and deeper pain of loss in adulthood, while Chungking deals in the adolescent howls of unfamiliar agony that speaks more to where I'm at as a soon-to-be 22-year-old. A diptych of confusion, sorrow and blindness to the potential of new love, Chungking Express can nevertheless also be joyful, effervescent and playful in a manner unlike the more excessively dour feel of Wong's other films. And if you don't smile with Faye Wong cleans the cop's apartment to her own cover of "Dreamlover," I pity you.

1995 Safe

Todd Haynes' creepy, psychological horror film could address the rise of new, incurable strands of terrible disease, but it also tears down the increasing soullessness of our society. His Safe is a cartography of sterile postmodernism; everything in the frame looks as if it were rubbed down in bleach and hand sanitizer. But the cleaner it gets, the sicker bored yuppie Carol becomes, until we're left with the uncomfortable suggestion that the "safer" we make everything around us, the more vulnerable we become.

1996 Dead Man

Though it premiered at the previous year's Cannes Film Festival, Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man didn't make its way back home until the following May. It's a wonder it got played at all: this is about as anti-America (or at least anti-American mythos) as a film can be. Whatever remained of the West after Peckinpah, Leone and Altman (with his McCabe & Mrs. Miller) got crushed under Jarmusch's boot heel here. This is a horrible fever vision of the Old West, a place where genocide and mass-scale environmental destruction were ways to relieve stress, where the theft of a horse can piss off a wealthy town dictator more than the death of his feckless son. As we follow our dying hero, named for the Romantic William Blake, we see the real Blake's flowery vision of the world undercut by brutality even as Jarmusch manages to find the spiritual strains cast aside in this hellish place. The greatest American film of the '90s.

1997 Chasing Amy

Kevin Smith's greatest film pulled back from the childish excess of Mallrats -- which, viewed from a certain angle, almost comes out a satire on Miramax's mercenary appropriation of independent and teenage values and perspectives -- and came out a beautifully realized portrait of the slacker in self-doubt. Smith never got nearly enough credit for actually digging into his characters instead of merely reveling in their Star Wars-quoting ennui (his Clerks II is one of the most underrated films of the '00s), and Chasing Amy remains his finest look into the anxieties and hangups that separate these people from others. Affleck and Adams will tear out your heart, and Jason Lee's acid tongue has never been so transparently a defense mechanism against his own fears. I cry every damn time.

1998 The Thin Red Line

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that The New World is Malick's finest achievement to date, but I've not revisited it in some time and I find myself drawn to The Thin Red Line with incredible frequency. It does the impossible: make a poetic war film that does not poeticize the horror of war. Its poetics instead turn to the natural world being ripped apart by bullet, mortar and fire, putting the sense of waste in suitably blunt and final terms (while also positioning it as a congruous part of nature) while seeking the spiritual thread that can overcome the violence around the characters. Malick may only make a movie once in a blue moon, but he makes one only when he has something to say. Maybe that's why each one is better than the last.

1999 Bringing Out the Dead

A stupendous year for cinema, yet I think my favorite movie from that year is one of its most underappreciated. Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead is the meeting of Taxi Driver's urgency and sense of helplessness and After Hours' stylistic farce, a humanistic dive into a master's technique that finds an unlikely harmony in its haphazard construction. Nicolas Cage has rarely been finer, and his insomniac visions of a New York in the death throes of its pre-Giuliani squalor say as much about the evolution, devolution and stagnation of elements of the city and its inhabitants as Gangs of New York.

2000 Yi Yi

Seems to capture the world in three hours. Starting with a wedding and ending at a funeral, Yi Yi follows the path of life through all its ups and downs, capturing humor and incomprehensible loss. I haven't seen the film for some time but I can't get some moments out of my head, chief of which being that stark reveal of an old lover to the father who's back faces the audience, making his face unreadable. It doesn't matter: you can see right through to the pain on the other side, and that transparency of human emotion characterizes the film's purity.

2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Jaws is the earliest non-kiddie movie I can recall seeing (I can recall it because it haunts me to this day), but I can no longer deny that Spielberg's two most misunderstood films (the other being Empire of the Sun) are his high-water marks. A.I. is big, bold and, many cases, unsubtle. But is also has a grace and humanism on a more intimate scale despite the bombast of its staging. For Spielberg, king of the mainstream, to make a film that essentially disproves the notion that humanity has any defining trait that separates us from the other animals (or our own creations) is unbelievable, and maybe that's why so few saw what he was doing. I see something new, something more downbeat, something more philosophically haunting with each viewing.

2002 25th Hour

Spike Lee is an all-or-nothing filmmaker, and when he connects, his brash and confrontational style reveals the sadness and care beneath his polemics. 25th Hour could have been a disaster of finger-pointing, its tale of a two-bit crook going away for a long time against the backdrop of Ground Zero ripe for cheap moralizing. Instead, Lee sets Monty on an evolutionary path that expunges the hate, anger and anguish of the city's (and nation's) pain to glory in all that is left, the melting pot still churning and the solidarity stronger than it ever was. Not four years later, Lee would film the impact of Hurricane Katrina with uncompromising political force. What a shame it was that events conspired to set him, and most Americans, on that arc.

2003 School of Rock

I have a feeling that Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder will one day take this slot, but for now I must give it up to Richard Linklater's stupendously grin-creating School of Rock. Starting with a simple premise -- a headbanging loser finding himself in charge of proper, stiff-collared rich kids in need of the loosening powers of rock -- Linklater maximizes every strength of his lead and delights in fighting the repressive yuppie culture that plans children's careers so completely that music is chosen specifically to enhance a child in the womb. But Linklater is not judgmental, and he mainly shows that rock still has the power to move even if it's long-since proven to be safe within a buttoned-down society. It's also that rare movie in which every child actor is interesting and engaging, and it relies as much on their presence as it does Jack Black's manic energy.

2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I had a number of choices for this year (this is no longer so clear-cut now that I've seen Claire Denis' The Intruder), but I've got to go with my heart, which remains with this broken couple so devastated by their relationship that they elect to erase it from memory. But Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman know that we need the bad to make sense of things, and Joel's fight to keep his painful memories to retain those fragments of delight and self-revelation prove desperately suspenseful for the implications of their loss. I would call it a literalization of the maxim that it's better to have loved and lost than never loved at all, but the film's beauty comes from being anything but literal.

2005 The World

Jia Zhang-ke's microcosmic view of China's continuous slip into megacapitalism lacks the more complete historical triumph of his 2000 feature Platform but makes up for it with its gorgeous staging and symbolic commentary on areas outside China. Vaguely reminiscent of Jacques Tati's Playtime, The World inverts Tati's commentary by showing how society moved to cover up its increasing conformity and modernity by cheaply appropriating old cultural landmarks instead of truly valuing their uniqueness. Jia presents a world so culturally and technologically confused that spoken conversations are terse and businesslike while a text message serves as the inspiration for fantastical reveries.

2006 Miami Vice

If directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Quentin Tarantino are eulogizing the death of proper, physical film and looking for a way forward, Michael Mann is already laying down the framework for the possibilities of digital cinema. His best work to date is Miami Vice, an existential cop movie that breaks down tropes until he's left with an impressionistic work that conveys only the emotion of the action, never the thrill or "coolness" of it. Unsurprisingly, the film is thus mournful, a collection of ephemeral moments aware of their fated deaths, like moths flying into flame. That shot of a blood-splattered camera turning into the light and obscuring in the reflecting liquid drops dotting the lens sticks with me even now.

2007 No Country for Old Men

Not simply a great adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's book but a better summation of the author's themes (which, frankly, are more elegantly expressed elsewhere). The Coens barely have to tweak their hip cynicism to encapsulate McCarthy's apocalyptic humanism, proving how adept the were with people despite the constant cries of their supposed hatred of their characters. It contains the usual Coen brothers anitclimax, but here the lens pulls back and captures the full scope of their blunt conclusions. Ennis' withering speech to Bell at the end says as much about tut-tutting over violence in the brothers' films as it does the "vanity" of believing one's own forming days to be idyllic and superior to the next generation's. Besides all that, it's also the formal achievement of American filmmaking in the previous decade and a stark but defining showcase for the power of editing over easier routes of audience manipulation (i.e. music cues).

2008 Shirin

I considered listing Synecdoche New York here, but I'm having doubts about listing Certified Copy as a 2010 film so let's just go with this equally wonderful Kiarostami film that deconstructs the nature of cinema with nothing more than reaction shots. But can they really be called reaction shots when we don't have the action shots for the characters to respond to? Shirin is so simple as to be avant-garde, but as is always the case with Kiarostami, the focus remains with character and humanity. He breaks down Persian art to its essence, then finds how it still connects to modern Iranians and, as can be seen with Juliette Binoche's cameo, those beyond its borders.

2009 Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino's love letter to cinema doubles as the smartest (and most satiric) deconstruction of the war film since Small Soldiers. Buried beneath the revenge fantasy of killing Hitler are uncomfortable parallels for the "fight terrorism with terrorism" mentality of America's operations in the Middle East and the bloodthirst of Israel's policies (Jews carving swastikas into Nazis a disturbing inversion of SS soldiers slicing Stars of David into rabbis). Tarantino literalizes the power of propaganda at the end by essentially killing Nazis with film, but the inferno of inflammable film stock also proves a Viking funeral for the old way of moviemaking that Tarantino cannot bear to see die. Probably the smartest piece of high-concept mainstream American filmmaking since A.I.

2010 The Social Network

Fincher's Social Network is not his masterpiece (paging Zodiac), but it best demonstrates his remarkable ability to make mainstream entertainment without sacrificing anything. Whatever hardships he endured cutting his teeth on the ill-fated Aliens sequel, Fincher has now proved his capacity for immaculate formalism in crowd-pleasing pictures. Fincher and Sorkin balance each other out, and together they find the core of their insecure protagonist, a middle-class kid who must prove himself against staid institutions and bloodlines but winds up so paranoid about it that he ultimately loses sight of himself in order to prove his worth to the one person who's ever truly be unimpressed by him. In the wake of the economic collapse, seeing the next wave of moguls behaving like the spoiled and arrogant children they are gives some clues as to how the previous generation's problems came about.

My Cinematic Alphabet

I've seen this même going around the blogs lately, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Unsurprisingly, picking a favorite for some letters was impossible because of the limited options (X2 was pretty much alone) or because I had so many choices (I actually wasted time stressing over whether to sub Playtime for Phantom of the Paradise, Repulsion or Rio Bravo for The Red Shoes, McCabe & Mrs. Miller for Miami Vice and The Straits of Love and Hate or Sansho the Bailiff for Sweetie). But I went with my gut and I've think I've got a decent range here. I've not repeated any directors, which was surprisingly difficult.


A is for A.I. Artificial Intelligence



B is for Bringing Out the Dead


C is for Chungking Express


D is for Déjà Vu


E is for Evil Dead II


F is for Fearless


G is for Grand Illusion


H is for Hoop Dreams


I is for I Was Born, But...



J is for Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles


K is for Kill Bill


L is for Lola Montès


M is for Miami Vice


N is for The Night of the Hunter


O is for Only Angels Have Wings


P is for Phantom of the Paradise


Q is for Quiz Show


R is for The Red Shoes


S is for Sweetie


T is for Two or Three Things I Know About Her


U is for An Unmarried Woman


V is for Videodrome


W is for Walkabout


X is for X2: X-Men United


Y is for Yi Yi


Z is for Zodiac

Upcoming Blog-a-thon: Iranian Cinema

Per The Sheila Variations:

In light of Jafar Panahi’s open letter to Isabella Rossellini, the Berlinale, and all of us and his plea for artistic freedom, I am going to host (very last-minute I know) a blog-a-thon during the week of Feburary 21 – 27 celebrating the contributions of Iran to the world of film-making. If you are interested in participating, just send me the links you have written during that week and I will post them here on my site. It can be about whatever you want, it doesn’t have to be about Jafar Panahi, specifically, although posts about his work would be fantastic. If you don’t have a blog and want to participate, feel free to write something and send it to me. I will post it here.

I'm extremely excited for this. I was about to watch Panahi's Crimson Gold anyway and will be contributing a piece on that film and, if time allows, at least one other post on another Iranian film I've never seen, Dariush Mehrjui's Leila (I also have yet to speak on Kiarostami's Koker trilogy, but I am getting way ahead of myself if I think I'll have time for all that). As Sheila said, no familiarity with Iranian film is necessary, and I hope to see some people joining in who have never seen a film from the country. Speaking from my own, extremely limited experience with Iranian cinema, I have found it beautiful almost to the point of pain, filled with commentary on humanity that transcends national borders -- a particularly impressive feat, given how ripe a sociopolitical structure like Iran's theocratic dictatorship lends itself to polemics.

Often, bloggers hold retrospectives and blog-a-thons simply out of a love for a particular director or genre, which is more than a valid reason. But it's nice to see a real impetus for engagement and learning here, a chance for many of us to get better acquainted with a fascinating but little-seen section of world cinema with copious treasures waiting to be discovered. If you don't want to participate, please help spread the word. A few Tweets go a long way. Hope to see a nice turnout for this.

(Contact information about the blog-a-thon can be found on Sheila's site via the link at the top of the post.)

Upcoming Series: Ulysses Reading Diary

*Update: I've placed links at the top of the post so readers don't have to scroll down to find them. Each post focuses on a chapter at a time.

Reading Log
Chapter One: Telemachus
Chapter Two: Nestor
Chapter Three: Proteus
Chapter Four: Calypso
Chapter Five: The Lotus Eaters
Chapter Six: Hades
Chapter Seven: Aeolus
Chapter Eight: Lestrygonians
Chapter Nine: Scylla and Charybdis
Chapter Ten: The Wandering Rocks
Chapter Eleven: Sirens
Chapter Twelve: Cyclops
Chapter Thirteen: Nausicaa
Chapter Fourteen: Oxen of the Sun
Chapter Fifteen: Circe
Chapter Sixteen: Eumaeus

Chapter Seventeen: Ithaca
Chapter Eighteen: Penelope

Hello, all,

I apologize for the severely slowed output as of late, but schoolwork has reared its ugly head (or heads, for, like the Hydra, every time I kill one assignment three more spring in its place) and I've been too busy to focus on reviewing. I should have two new posts by the end of the weekend, one on a film, another a continuation of my "Stuff I Like" series, where I spotlight an artist from any medium who has had an impact on me. For now, however, I still have some work to do.

Though I have not had time to sit down and digest a film in one go, I have been spackling the narrow cracks in my schedule with reading, and I've been both returning to old favorites and finally tackling classics that previously daunted me. The greatest blind spot in my literary awareness must be Ulysses by James Joyce, almost universally considered the crowning literary achievement of the 20th century. Joyce himself was foreign to me, considering I'd only ever read brief excerpts of his work with minimal explication.

I just completed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, however, and the wonderful time I had with it made the fears I had over tackling Joyce's titanic novel all the more transparently unnecessary. However, when my copy of a reprinting of the original 1922 text of the novel arrived in the mail, I turned to the back to check the annotations and found nearly 300 pages of notes explaining Joyce's esoteric, highly advanced and multilingual wordplay, in addition to notes delving into the novel's connection with Homer's Odyssey. So, some apprehension remains.

Therefore, I've decided to handle the book differently than my usual style, which is to just read like the wind because I can never stop myself. Instead, I will keep a running log here of my trek through Dublin, a post for each of the novel's 18 chapters. I should say that this will almost certainly not be a book review, insofar as analysis may be scant in favor of simply spilling out how I've processed the text and the notes. I hope it shall amount to more than a running list of characters, motifs and happenings like some second-rate SparkNotes, but we shall see how it goes. I do at least hope, in deference to Professor Nabokov, to put forward some idea of who the man in the brown mackintosh is. A catalog of the posts will be collected here for easier access once I'm finished.

See you at the top of the Martello tower in Sandycove, everyone.

Dalí: The Late Work

Though my younger sister has always been given to drawing, painting, scrapbooking and various other forms of artistic endeavors, I have never known her to be all that obsessed with art. Imagine my surprise (and joy), then, when it was she, not myself, who approached my mom about heading to Atlanta's High Museum of Art to see an exhibition of Salvador Dalí's late period before the works returned to Florida. I assumed I would have to make up some excuse about seeing friends downtown before the week's end so I might peek around the place myself, but the unexpected interest of other members of my family made my exposure to the wild Spaniard's post-Surrealist work all the more pleasurable.

To say the least, the relegation of the entire second half of Dalí's life the nebulously defined realm of kitsch made the revelation of his work's potency all the more overwhelming, and the question of how it could be so handily dismissed all the more baffling. Having begun his artistic career at the age of six with impressionist landscapes, Dalí moved into Cubism as it gained ground in the 20s and fell in with the Surrealist group in Paris at the end of the decade. But his "official" involvement with surrealism ended another 10 years later, leaving the last 49 years of his life to essentially be defined by a single decade.

One look through the gallery assembled for the High Museum, however, will silence anyone who would dismiss the artist's second half as conventional. "The only difference between me and the other surrealists is that I am a surrealist," Dalí once said, and if the movement was all about capturing the subconscious, Dalí certainly never stopped painting surreal works.

Compared to the more out-there work of his accepted Surrealist period, Dalí's later work displays a clearer influence of classicism, with outright nods to Velázquez, Raphael, Vermeer and others. Subjects look more photo-realistic, and Dalí incorporates Renaissance aesthetics all the way down to religious imagery, brought about by the re-embrace of the Catholicism he rejected in the '30s. The critic Robert Hughes charged Dalí's late work with being repetitious, and he does return to themes and symbols throughout his later paintings and sketches. The Virgin Mary, inevitably modeled by his wife and muse, Gala, features in numerous paintings, as do Christian symbols of ostrich eggs (once associated with virgin births) and some of Dalí's own pet motifs such as rhinoceros horns.


But there is also a seemingly contradictory usage of scientific imagery. The detonation of the Hiroshima bomb changed something inside Dalí: whatever he thought about the morality of the bomb -- and those thoughts, as far as I could see as I scanned over the assembled text for the exhibit, were curiously unaddressed -- he recognized that the Atomic Age had begun and art had to adapt to stay contemporary. Gorging on science magazines and studies, Dalí picked up remarkably on the nature of nuclear physics, and he mixed it into his religious imagery, crafting what he called a "nuclear mysticism," a way for him to justify his belief in God but lack of faith. Somehow, he found a way to trace Catholic dogma into the realm of advanced physics, finding proof of God in such a way that he honored his childhood teachings but circumvented dogma in all but an aesthetic sense.

The mash-up of contemporary and classical is at times astonishing. Dalí breaks up that image of his wife as the Virgin Mary to show the Christ-child growing inside of her, bodies elongated into particles to suggest atomic energy as the force that impregnated her. One of the artists best and most well-regarded paintings, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, is painted from an extreme, high angle, looking down on Jesus as he hangs overlooking a smaller landscape of the artist's childhood home. But I did not notice that Jesus was floating over Port Lligat when I stared up at the large canvas; to me it seemed as if he were in space orbiting around Earth, Christ as Major Tom, occupying two figurative heavens at once. Furthermore, Dalí left out the crown of thorns and stakes, removing the torturous element of Christ's execution, turning a moment of guilt-inducing need for atonement and forgiveness into a gentler embodiment of the painter's alternately classic and futuristic view of Jesus.


Unquestionably the highlight of the exhibit, and possibly Dalí's career, is the immense canvas of Santiago El Grande, finally taken from its permanent residence in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in New Brunswick, Canada. The placard next to the painting advises the viewer to crouch down and look up at 13.5 ft long, 10 ft wide painting for maximum effect. It is an unnecessary instruction for a masterpiece so awe-inspiring that the reverence it engenders will bring one down on a knee anyway.

Depicting St. James, the patron saint of Spain, on horseback, Santiago El Grande represents the apotheosis of Dalí's nuclear mysticism: despite the considerable size of the canvas, St. James and his horse are perfectly proportioned, and the combination of photo-realism and artistic license is incredibly subtle, especially for this artist. The horse's head looked so real I had a difficult time looking at anything else, while the rest of it had a soft blur, making it one with the sea it stands upon. In James' upraised hand is the Crucifix, born aloft as if brandishing a sword, a moment of religious epiphany as impressive as anything in the Sistine Chapel. Surrounding this dominant image are symbols of both religious and atomic significance. Angels appear at the top of the painting, and a highlight of one seamlessly melds into the horse's chest and neck. At the beast's feet, a mushroom cloud swirls, yet Dalí tempers the potentially fearsome sight by placing a jasmine flower in the middle of it, a sign of purity inside the symbol of mass destruction. And that shade of blue! That glowing, heaven-lit iridescence that seems to fluctuate even among the areas of color that remain constant. It's as if Dalí used a normal tint but God decided to always shine a light on it in approval and appreciation. Add one Gala-modeled woman looking on from the shore, and you've got a painting that more than earns its rarely used subtitle: "In Search of a Cosmic Unity."


Other highlights included the sketches and etches Dalí did, either as drafts for paintings or self-contained work he quickly dashed out to support himself -- Dalí once said that he loved nothing more than to finish his breakfast and spend the rest of the morning earning $20,000. But even these illustrations have a beauty, depth and inventiveness to them that belies their classification as minor works. While illustrating some plates for use in an illustrated version of Don Quixote, Dalí used such bizarre techniques as shooting paint squibs out of a musket to splatter the plates, or painting with rhinoceros horns. The plates have a psychedelic quality reminiscent of Ralph Steadman, who vomited acid visions of caricatured horror onto the best work of Hunter S. Thompson.

Obsessed with Vermeer's The Lacemaker, Dalí made his own copy of it, an almost note-perfect recreation with a warmer color tone, though that may be from the centuries of age between original and duplicate. Then expelled the obsession fully by deconstructing the image as he did Raphael's Madonna, finding his beloved rhino horn buried into Vermeer's composition. This second version is as striking for its originality as the proper copy is for its immaculate recreation. In preserving the Old Masters in a contemporary setting, he has dissembled and reassembled them with the modern. Dalí's Lacemaker may look like something out of an issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, it has the same respect for classicism with a dash of personal innovation that also dots that comic series.


Many point to Dalí's public persona as a significant reason for the decline of his art in the discussion of the artist; critics charged him with being a fraud and an attention hound, and supporters increasingly agreed. But Dalí's showmanship was just another way to flaunt his weirdness, to let nothing hold back the id he regularly slung onto canvas. There were numerous great 20th century artists who enjoyed attention, of course, but Dalí is the one who got to be an A-lister in the age of Hollywood and rock 'n' roll. Andy Warhol idolized the Spaniard's ability to court press as much as he did the man's art, and for Dalí to remain one of the more recognizable names in art even to laypeople could not simply have come from his talent, not with material so alienating and weird. Sure, he could be kitschy -- one room in the gallery featured his experiments with stereoscopic painting complete with 3-D glasses for maximum effect -- but Salvador Dalí was a mad genius, and the world is less interesting without him. I'm glad I got the the chance to see just how brilliant and daring he was long after so many wrote him off.



P.S. Though this is an example of Dalí's fame-baiting, this clip of the artist's appearance on What's My Line? ran through my head several times as I walked through the High Museum's exhibition. As you can plainly see, Dalí may have loved to be on television and in print, but he never courted the mainstream by dulling himself down. If he became an icon through the media, it's only because he remained so damn strange even within the confines of a frothy game show that one couldn't help but love him.