muvies

American Splendor

Just saw American Splendor. Tempted, on my way out, to call it to myself a masterpiece. Mulling over what that word meant, why I would apply it to this movie and not a movie I just really, really liked. Or think of applying it. Maybe because it operated on many levels – didn’t just tell a story, but played with story-telling form, and did it in a way that was not obscurantist.

Leaving the theatre rushed to Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square to pick up the comic. The guy was just closing, but asked me if “I knew what I wanted” – if I did, I could go right in. I said yes, I know just what I want, and therefore was a bit rushed in my decision. There turned out only to be a new anthology out, with a disappointing cover promoting the movie, but I bought it anyway, muttering to the clerk “I guess the cover doesn’t matter, it’s what’s inside” (to which he made no reply). Went to Casablanca and read the first couple dozen pages at the bar.

The main actor who played Harvey Pekar was amazing, you didn’t want to believe such realism couldn’t be exactly what the man was like – he was a barking, shlubby neurotic who never seemed to step outside the persona of a working-class stiff. Yet I read in Robert Crumb’s intro to the anthology I bought that when Crumb met Pekar in Cleveland in 1962, he kind of idolized him as this wild beat-generation type guy with giant abstract paintings on his wall and the manic energy of Kerouac. That image didn’t really come through in the movie. He just seemed like perhaps how he wanted to be seen, as the one VA hospital file clerk in a million with the soul of an artist.

It was Crumb who inspired Pekar to do comics, despite Pekar’s total lack of drawing ability – they just happened to both be young hipsters in Cleveland at the same time (early 60’s) and got to know each other because they both collected jazz records and hit it off. This was the “American Greeting Card Company” period of Crumb’s life, which he has narrated in comic book form a LOT. He mentions Pekar tangentially in these accounts and Pekar mentions Crumb a lot in his early stuff, which is drawn by Crumb, so it winds up seeming kind of like some sort of classic time and place where you really wish you could have been there – like Hemenway hanging with Ford Madox Ford at the Deux Magots. Except it’s two poor kids from poor families finding inspiration in what was around them in Cleveland, OH in 1963 which is almost like the very definition of something that would be perceived as a cultural backwater.

And between Crumb and American Splendor it’s begun to be a nexus that is celebrated in film and brought to a larger audience – yet the personages do not come off as romantic. They are like freaks, but I identify with them so strongly – they have the guts to talk about what losers they are on a level that is, well, at least much riskier than the level Hemenway, Fitzgerald, etc. talk about what losers they are.