Chapter Two: Faraway, So Close!
By Brett Beach
October 14, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Beginning this week, Chapter Two is dedicated to bringing its readers more sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll than all other BOP columns combined! Actually, it’ll just be rock n’ roll for now.
I sleep more now than I did when I was 12, but all things considered, not that much more. The key difference is that once upon a pre-teen time it was the radio, movies on videocassette, and books that held my shuteye at bay. These days it’s some combination of television, the Internet, DVDs, ripping CDs I have borrowed from the library, and (yes, still) books that keep me up past my bedtime. To bastardize Wordsworth: the child is the media junkie forbear of the insomniac man.
It was the summer and fall of 1988 that I began tracking the dueling Top 40 countdowns that aired on Sundays on two of the stations for which the antenna jutting out from my General Electric boom box/ghetto blaster was able to pull in a signal. One of them came out of Portland, 150 miles to the north and the reception, incredibly, was as clear as the more local signal in Bend, 36 miles to the west. For a total of eight hours each Sunday, my dial was set to capture the hit parades of Shadoe Stevens (whose soothing yet sardonic tones brought Billboard’s Top 40 to life) and Rick Dees (whose self-monikered show with its squeaky clean ribaldry and groaningly juvenile double entendres took its data from Radio and Records Magazine).
Despite the fact that these two shows shared 95% of the same songs for any given week - and a good proportion of these songs in the same position - I reliably tuned in for both. But the true kicker is that I painstakingly transcribed the results from Position 40 to Position 1, for both shows, week in and week out. On lined 8 ½-by-11 sheets of paper, in dazzling block-letter penmanship that put my chicken scrawl cursive in the classroom to shame, I laid out the song title, the artist, how many places the song had soared or crashed since the previous week, and the number of weeks at said position.
Since I was most often working on Sundays during the mornings and afternoons (cleaning the cabins at the resort my parents operated), this meant either carting said boom box around and making short notes that would be fleshed out later, or using blank tapes to record the parts of the countdown I would miss. Given that most of those cassettes ran 45 minutes to a side, this option would include paying attention to the clock radios in the individual cabins and rushing back to my room to flip the tape over at the appropriate time.
On weeknights during that summer and several that followed, particularly those evenings when I knew I didn’t have to get up early the next day, I would jack my headphones into the boom box, fire up either the Portland or Bend station, throw a pillow down on the shag carpeting of my room, and play chicken with the Sandman. I would see how many songs in a row I knew, the goal being to get to 28, one side of a sheet of lined paper, or about three hours worth. At that time of night, of course, there were no deejays, only the occasional random station identification, so I relied on my own personal honor system and a familiarity with song titles and artists finely honed from reading the Columbia House supplements and yearly complete directory.
If I was at least 75% sure I was right, I would tally it down. “Now is that Phil Collins solo or with Genesis? Oh wait! It’s a duet. Easy Lover. Oooooh, who does he sing that with? Bailey, Bailey, Bailey. Philip Bailey!” (For the record, it’s Philip Bailey featuring Phil Collins and was Bailey’s only solo top 40 hit.) I am not too proud to say that the best I ever did was 27/28, sometimes consecutively, sometimes in broken-up pairs of 12 & 15, et. al. More than once, I would give in to sweet, sweet sleep and simply throw in the towel.
Some nights, I would employ a similar stratagem with movies. Really long movies. My theory was that if I could start an epic-length movie at 11 or midnight and it kept me enthralled into the wee, wee hours, then it must be something special. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (172 mins, Philip Kaufman) passed the test. Until the End of the World (158 mins, Wim Wenders) was a draw. Fanny and Alexander (197 mins, Ingmar Bergman) saw me weaving in and out of sleep-deprived consciousness, but then I have never had the strongest affinity for Bergman.
I still have not caught up with the lion’s share of Wenders’ early filmography. I have seen some of his German language “road trip” movies from the 1970s (such as Alice in the Cities) and his Patricia Highsmith adaptation The American Friend but most of my viewing comes from his sprawling epics of the mid-1980s to mid-1990s: meditations on alienation in America and abroad, fears of technology overreaching the boundaries of privacy and overpowering the soul, a world where even angels feel the nagging doubt that something isn’t right and would throw over immortality for the tactile sensation of a warm cup of coffee and a chance to experience that crazy little thing called love.
Wenders sets many of these stories to the beat of some of the most idiosyncratic soundtracks of the last two decades. Until the End of the World may be a glorious mess in its shortened form (I have yet to experience the three-part 270 min. complete vision that Wenders screened infrequently in the early 90s) but the music, which Wenders commissioned by asking artists to consider what songs would sound like at the end of the 20th century, is a testament to cohesive unity. Talking Heads, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, and many others contribute career-highlight cuts for an album that stands on its own as well as in support of the film.
Until the global success of his 1998 concert film/documentary Buena Vista Social Club - which took Wenders’ skill with sound tracking his films to its logical conclusion - he was perhaps best known and most acclaimed for his 1987 romantic and philosophical fantasy Wings of Desire. (In a time before I had seen either film, I seem to recall it competing frequently with Raging Bull for the title of Best Film of the 1980s.) The original German title, which translates as The Sky Above Berlin, isn’t as swooningly (or ironically) sexy but it does locate the film specifically in that divided city.
Most of the film is shot in striking black and white - for that is the limited palette through which the angels view the lives of humans - by cinematographer Robby Mueller. This fact used to connote a sense of inherent heaviness in my mind, such that it was only a recent third viewing of the film that finally helped me see past the somber trappings of its outer layer to the deadpan comedy at its core, closer in spirit to early Jim Jarmusch than I might ever have considered. Wings of Desire contains what is sure to be the only delayed Meet Cute in the history of cinema that culminates at, indeed is made all the stronger for taking place there, a concert by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. It isn’t until the final half hour that the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) renounces his immortality and turns in his wings for a chance to meet the trapeze artist free spirit (the late Solveig Dommartin) who has preternaturally intrigued him. The film ends shortly after they meet face to solid face.
Wings of Desire is also the rare instance of a foreign film that was remade (as City of Angels) with a more tragic ending rather than a happier one. There’s a certain perverse charm in that, I think. Many purists were up in arms that Wenders’ vision, which admittedly contains more rumination on the nature of man’s struggle to achieve peace with one’s self than it does shots of streaming sunlight refracting off of Meg Ryan’s golden tresses, was “reduced” to a powerfully sentimental (even maudlin) tale of love found, then lost to an O. Henry plot twist. I reserve the right to enjoy both films. Wings of Desire moves my spirit and reminds me of Wenders’ assured nuttiness. City of Angels moves my tear ducts and keeps a fair damper on Nicolas Cage’s perennial nuttiness.
With its couple coming together nicely at the end, Wings of Desire wasn’t an obvious candidate for a sequel. But as Damiel fell, so did the Berlin Wall and Wenders uses 1993’s Faraway, So Close! as an excuse to revisit his characters in a world turned upside down with notions of glasnost and a black market that supports everything from guns to pornography for would-be gangsters looking to make a buck. Even the title captures this sense of uncertainty and hesitation (Faraway is drawn together while So Close is spaced out), albeit with an emphatically insistent (!) finish.
In a neat, though ultimately dispiriting inverse of the first film, Faraway attempts to be lighter, and certainly funnier, but sinks with portent by trying to cover too many plot bases. In true sequel fashion, the film repeats its predecessor’s core storyline (this time it is Damiel’s fellow angel Cassiel, played by Otto Sander, who takes the plunge to Earth, unintentionally, to save a little girl’s life) and brings back the most notable supporting character - Peter Falk playing himself as a former angel - in a larger part that ultimately plays out to diminished returns of enjoyment.
Clocking in at a bloated 146 mins (nearly 20 mins longer than Wings of Desire), Faraway finds room for: Lou Reed, Mikhail Gorbachev, sins of the Nazis revisited upon the current generation, Willem Dafoe in one of his vaguely menacing (as opposed to overtly so) turns as Emit Flesti, a chain of trapeze artists handling dynamite in midair, and much, much more, but never seems to have a handle on what it wants to really do with all these elements.
Viewing this for a third time, I remain admittedly confused about why Cassiel’s fall to Earth is more disastrous to the order of the Universe and Time Itself (wink, wink) than was Damiel’s. Cassiel becomes more easily corrupted by the greed and violence of the no longer divided Berlin but his quick descent into morose self-pity keeps him an emotional arms length from audience sympathy. This renders his apparent redemption during a protracted finale involving hostages on a tugboat, bungee jumping off a bridge, and actual wheels of time, both confusing and uninspiring. Cassiel gets advice directly from Reed at one point, but to no avail. Nick Cave is on the soundtrack once again, singing the title song, but perhaps another concert would have been just the thing.
Faraway, So Close! is also a Chapter Two for U2’s involvement with Wenders. Until the End of the World took its name from their 1991 track off of Achtung Baby, (and was also featured in the film). Wenders once again approached them about providing a song with lyrical and emotional connections to his current project and the result was Stay (Faraway, So Close!), a tune that I think ends up working better as a cinematic poem than the film itself. The mix in the film is heavier than the version on Zooropa but the potent imagery of the lyrics and Bono’s alternately compassionate and condemning intonations remain undiluted.
The closing verse I started the column with shows the obvious ties to the film, but the couplet “ You used to stay in to watch the adverts/You could lip synch to the talk shows” always gets me. It paints a clearer picture of Cassiel’s (and Berlin’s) dilemma than does the film. It also takes me back to the evenings of my childhood when I relied on voices in the night and images on a screen to help me keep time itself at bay.
Next time: “We are thirty seconds away from the worst medical disaster in Danish history!” And barring a miracle, that’s as close as any of us will ever get. A Halloween-themed Chapter Two that promises to be like “ER on acid.”