Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians

Submit a question for the next column.

January062006

Anthony Lane, you made me laugh!

Filed under: Pick of the Issue   Tagged: ,

By all means, we must encourage the funny lines. In his review of Caché (which the magazine insists on referring to as Hidden), Lane writes of the character played by Daniel Auteuil:


Georges is the host of a literary discussion program on French TV. Short of wearing a luminous T-shirt with the word 'Smug' picked out in rhinestones, there isn’t much more that he could do to advertise his character.

Funny! And true! Lane also has a moment of beauty here that is so modestly profound I think it, too, should be noted:

On the other hand, you might protest, why lay all this on Georges? He is no [Maurice] Papon, and were all of us to be harassed for our childhood misdemeanors mankind would stalk itself to death.

Incidentally, shame on the Voice's David Ng for this: "Indeed, everyone in Cach&eacute may have something to hide, including [Juliette] Binoche's frigid wife and their son, Pierrot." That's not just crashingly old-fashioned, it's a lazy misreading, too. Really, David, do you know what fucking year it is? Otherwise, his profile of director Michael Haneke is quite interesting. It ends:

Haneke's obsessions converge in Cach&eacute's final scene, a chilling long take that's the most enigmatic conclusion in recent movie memory. "Using a fixed shot means there's one less form of manipulation—the manipulation of time," Haneke says. "I've always wanted to create the freedom one has when reading a book, where one has all the possibilities because you create all the images in your head." Resolutely cryptic, he refuses to decode the scene's meaning: "About half the viewers see something and the other half don't, and it works both ways." He adds, invoking his protagonist's own mental journey, "We always fill the screen with our own experiences. Ultimately, what we see comes from inside us."

0 comments

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree
2009 New Yorker Desk Diaries
Inkleaf Studio illustration