What Do Steely Dan and Terrence Malick have in Common?: Part 2

Read part 1 over at Bright Lights After Dark

• I do not mean this flippantly: both Fagan/Becker and Malick are avid readers, embracing modern and 19th century fiction and philosophy not only at an aesthetic level (as is so often done by artists who enjoy the idea of grand thoughts but lack the mental acuity to think them) but in a tightly cerebral fashion. The idea of fate as is matched with ennui and sexual vacancy are not easy concepts to render in either film or music, but somehow the relationships of Kit/Holly and Bill/Abby manage it, as well as the protagonists of "Gaucho," "Josie," "Everything You Did," and "Razor Boy". Bill could be singing "Razor Boy" TO Abby in a moment of hopeless desperation, dredging up a fictional, Ariel-like monster to dispatch the Farmer's genitals. "Cousin Dupree" also features an oddly concrete incestuous fantasy not unlike the awkward ageplay that keeps Bill and Abby reasonably aroused enough not to betray one another, for a time.
  

• Both Malick's and the Dan's obvious penchant for the novel are clear in the floating narratives they pen, and that is perhaps the most challenging of attributes to limn in regards to both artists. To parse it inarticulately, they write/produce songs, they write/shoot/edit/produce films, that feel nothing like songs or films are *supposed to* feel, although that phrase can get us into trouble. With Malick the ordinary rhythm of cinematic scenes, with exposition and confrontations building to an eventual climax, is eschewed almost completely -- the characters float in on anonymous, nondescript clouds, and some scenes exist only to develop and sustain a powerfully specific mood, as with the chapters in lengthier novels (the Brontes and Dickens come to mind). Many writers focus on Malick's images, but forget that his narratives are firmly planted within them -- I do not accept the criticism that, for example, Days of Heaven is merely a "pretty film," or primarily a visual one, as the images are not isolated nor particularly painterly: I "read" them as I do descriptions of landscape in Steinbeck. Steely Dan, meanwhile, often structures their songs apart from the typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-solo-chorus pop syntax, fixing lengthy orchestral interludes at the centre ("Aja") or interrupting each verse with an odd relative minor chop-solo ("My Old School"). And once again, the notion that either of the aforementioned songs are merely exercises in jazz-pop ear candy is ludicrous. The changes in "Aja" spell out an elusive story (probably about a woman, definitely about a city), just as the saxophones in "My Old School" allow us to actually hear California tumblin' into the sea. There is a poetic collapse between form and content in Malick/Steely Dan that makes one feel as though most other films/albums are lacking some crucial emblem of sophistication.

• This bullet point is both a commonality and a divide of sorts, because while both artists think in terms of the novelist's language and imagery, Malick is rooted in the rural (even going so far back to imagine an America of endless ruralism) while the Dan are obsessed with the urban (I have a theory that they and Tom Waits invented pop-noir in music). Malick's clearest precursor is Faulkner (not only that of The Sound and the Fury but also the symbol-heavy, endless sentence Faulkner of "A Rose For Emily," etc) while the Dan's is (of course) WS Burroughs, although that might be too reductive an alignment. We also sense several voices floating in and out of the Dan's stream, whereas Malick tends to let only a choice few do the talking. Both artists, however, have a tendency to fixate upon individuals who are less intelligent and more perverse, but somehow more cleverly archetypal, than they themselves are (which is a fitting definition of literary irony). Either way, both find plenty to laud/revile simultaneously -- the locusts of Days of Heaven and the dead dog of Badlands, the suicides of "Black Friday" and the parasitic relationship of "Through With Buzz". It's also worth nothing that stringed vignettes of the grotesque and arabesque meet up, of course, in the suburban nightmares of Sherwood Anderson (especially Winesburg, Ohio).

• Both artists, aside from being the source of myths themselves (not only related to their working methods but explanations of the lengthy breaks in between their masterpieces) are more concerned with mythology than fact, and often confuse the two deliberately. Badlands is a fiction based on a true story that seems, by way of stylistic deadening, even more real than the existing plain accounts of Starkweather's mishaps. Imagining Pocahontas and John Smith as lovers with Rolfe between them is simply more fun, and a convenient opportunity to explore the identity of the post-modern savage with genuinely feminine chattel. "Charlie Freak" and "Parker's Band" are the mythic dichotomy of Bird told in song, as it should be, just as "Pretzel Logic" imagines a world where Hitler reigns. "The Caves of Altamira" mingles discovery with inaccuracy and wonder, like a child mis-interpreting a book on primitive art. "Kid Charlemagne," whether about Owsley or a composite figure, is a mad portrait of the death of the 1960's. Both Malick and Fagan/Becker manage to pull these shenanigans off with a mixture of 1st person narration and sardonic aplomb -- they're not concerned with being taken too seriously as history, but folklore is always crucially grave. Is John Smith dreaming? Is Rikki? Is there gas in the car?

• And not to put too fine a point on it, but both Terrence Malick and Steely Dan kick serious ass.