In Rachel Cusk's Arlington Park, suburban living is the closest us humans can ever get to paradise. There, life can be lived at its most slickly comfortable. Rows of neat houses are filled with bright-eyed kids, dependable homemakers and luscious master suites. What's not to love?
Well, gender inequality, the sufferings of the underclass, and looming threats of child abuse are a few of the unlovely issues not yet banished from our new version of Eden. For the wives and mothers of Arlington Park, an upper-middle-class subdivision in contemporary England, tensions boil under the ostensible ease. Worries running the gamut from existential angst to everyday irritation fight for space in their minds and conversion like feral cats in a dumpster.
The narrative of Arlington Park drifts from household to household in a series of linked stories that works as half anthology, half novel.
We are led from intellectually frustrated teacher Juliet, to control freak Amanda, to coarse Christine. There is lonely Solly, and London transplant Maisie, who seems to be suffering from an undiagnosed personality disorder. The characters only share four traits in common: they are all women, mothers and Arlington Park residents, and they are all bitter as hell.
The most vibrant of the women is Christine. She tosses a bowl of potatoes into the microwave and her daughter into a bedroom with equal nonchalance. She leaves stuffy dinner parties early to drink bottles of liquor and dance with her friends. Christine's humanity manages to break through the shell of irony and bitterness that is crusted over the rest of Cusk's book.
Her other characters are bloodless when compared to Christine. Juliet, Amanda, Solly and even the edgy Maisie are too cerebral, too political. They feel like simplified illustrations of lifestyle choices. Amanda's story in particular reads like a feminist take on the medieval morality tale: what happens to a career woman who mistakenly becomes a homemaker? The take-home lesson is that some women shouldn't be tempted into motherhood. It's a disservice to the issue for something this painful to become so straightforward in 38 pages of large type.
The characters' situations become political problems to dissect, not emotional paradoxes to break the reader's heart. The melding of the narrator's ultra-aware, ultra-ironic voice, with the interior voices of her characters, undermine the very emotions that Cusk is attempting to produce in her readers. Though the situations she depicts are poignant, there is so much heavy-handed finger pointing, especially toward society at large, that the author eventually undermines her own characters and the specific situations she creates.
This is not to say that Cusk is fundamentally a graceless writer.
She has an amazing eye for detail, especially when she turns her attention to everyday places and objects. She writes of an early morning rain, for example: "It battered the plastic verandas where supermarket trolleys clung together in long, chattering rows." Her problem is that she can never trust those details to speak for themselves, making for ungainly lists of minutiae and clumsy characterization.
Cusk doesn't give the striking images she creates the space to breathe in the narrative. She doesn't give any individual detail, character or situation the respect it deserves, and that lack of respect is signaled by the irony and detachment that drips from her tone. She never seems to take her own characters seriously, nor does she seem to share any of their hope in the white-picket-fence dream. Cusk has written a book about the gradual disillusionment of young suburban mothers, but it sounds as though she's been over her own illusions of the subject for too long to relate to her characters.
Cusk writes with smooth confidence, and this book could have been great. The stories, characters, visuals and themes could each stand on their own. The problem is that she just keeps sprinkling on ironic awareness and extraneous detail until she ultimately bulldozes plot and characterization under a steamroller of stylistic flourish.
It's too bad that Cusk misses the painting for the frame, because her larger questions about the morality of suburban materialism are original and intriguing. She represents the darker side of suburban life not by showing us scenes of abuse or depravity, but of banal stupidity, and undeserving ease. She questions whether the material abundance and bone-deep boredom of such a lifestyle is moral or healthy.
The questions Cask asks and the joy of seeing through her artist's eye make the book worth reading. It's too bad that the soulfulness that must once have led her to create this story and its characters is choked by the stylistic and tonal affectation she's smeared all over it.
Though she sometimes obscures the message, Cusk's thesis is fascinating: a suburb might have been a paradise, but we humans are not innocent enough to enjoy it.
The Host encapsulates new genre of horror film
By MATT HANSEN
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter
It seems lately that the traditional knife-in-sternum horror flick has ceded its role in terrorizing suburban neighborhoods to its more sophisticated cousin: the public health emergency film.
Trading in the timid streets of AnySuburb for the commercial byways of AnyCity, these new films eschew big-chested, pigtailed babysitters who are slashed over the opening credits for a mass of panicked city dwellers on the run from Armageddon. This new development makes a lot of sense, actually. For one, it enables directors to pour just as much blood as any mass murder story onto the set as plagues, viruses and bacteria run rampant over a herd of urban victims, and it also fills a niche by situating shock value alongside a story that quickens the audience's collective pulse because they, too, could be the victims. But perhaps most important in this new move away from the serial killer and toward the killer epidemic is that, by and large, this new breed of horror films shares the same status as allegories that their less-evolved cousins do.
Whether serving as a reminder to avoid sleeping around, to avoid mixing booze with cars or not to trust that friendly face next to you on the airplane, horror movies -- even wrapped in straight-from-the-headlines drama -- are like the wagging-finger messages your mother used to tell you, except now they are acted out amidst arterial spray.
In this regard, The Host really is the archetypal new horror film, complete with quarantines, government-overseen panic and Orwellian oversight, not to mention a nod to the horror days of yesteryear with a massive, slithery iguana-lamprey fish that terrorizes downtown Seoul. As one of Korea's most popular films ever made, it seems content with staying that way -- even providing a seemingly convenient allegory involving duplicitous American generals and a hapless Korean family stuck in the middle. Slow-witted Gang-du Park (Kang-ho Song) lives with his elderly, morally upright father Hie-bong (Hie-bong Byeon) in a noodle stand by the Han River. When his daughter Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko) is seized by the rampaging lizard-monster that is terrorizing the waterfront, he joins his unemployed brother Nam-il (Hae-il Park) and his Olympic archer sister Nam-Joo (Du-na Bae) in a desperate quest to retrieve her. Song plays Gang-du as open-mouthed, bumbling, but also smoldering and indestructible. His nuanced performance sets the bar for the film, and his immediate family rises to the task, particularly Ko, whose Hyun-seo is caked in mud and wide-eyed for most of the film, but displays a cunning and quiet determination that Dakota Fanning would simply portray as "cute." Rounding out the family, Byeon plays the father atoning for his mistakes with the gleam of a former alcoholic, and Park and Bae, though given less to do, are equally compelling as the promising generation of a new Korea, fallen on hard times.
Despite the dependability of performance, something just isn't quite right with The Host, and it takes a moment to realize just what it is: it makes you laugh at the wrong times.
Moments that horror perfectionist Wes Craven would have aced become choppy or even --- dare we say -- awkward in -The Host. It takes a look at director Joon-ho Bong's work to realize that, unlike Craven, his pedigree hasn't been horror. Instead he's become Korea's premier director through his mastery of black comedy --- he criticized South Korea's dictatorial past through a satiric chase for a serial killer in Memories of Murder --- and it's clear that he's brings his offbeat bag of tricks to The Host. Washing the screen in mud and grime, Bong offers us slyly satirical lines -- angelic Hyun-seo looking up from her sewer prison and asking for a cold beer, wizened Hie-Bong explaining how he can tell his son's mood from his farts -- and a back story shaky at best, all hung on the skin of a CGI monster and watched over by a cabal of shadowy governments. Watching The Host is an exercise in confusion; but, unlike most of the public health horror flicks that leave you leery of coughs as you leave the theater, its tension knows when to let up and have a cold Hite beer.
