THE LOS ANGELESATION OF RAYMOND CARVER by Charles Deemer Short Cuts, Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt's ambitious synthesis of nine short stories and one poem by Raymond Carver, is a screenplay that I admire for its ingenious structure but question for its bold reinterpretation of the Carver landscape. Like Nashville, Short Cuts weaves together simultaneously developing story-lines into a complex fabric that is stronger than the binding of its threads. Also as in Nashville, Altman creates such a strong sense of place that "landscape" - in Short Cuts, the landscape of Southern California - becomes a central character in the film. But this is Altman's landscape, not Raymond Carver's. I will argue here that the gaudy, kinky and histrionic darkness in Short Cuts the movie is less horrific than the quieter and more subtle dark vision in Short Cuts the fiction, the collection of Carver's short stories that serves as the basis for Altman's film. Nine stories and one poem create the fabric for Short Cuts, the film: (1) "Neighbors," in which Bill and Arlene Miller discover that housekeeping can lead to revealing their fantasy selves. (2) "They're Not Your Husband," in which Earl, an unemployed salesman, overhears male customers talking about his waitress-wife, Doreen, and discovers that it matters to him what they say. (3) "Vitamins," in which the male narrator's affair is confronted in a bar by an angry Vietnam vet. (4) "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," in which Ralph Wyman forces his wife Marian to reveal the truth about a past indiscretion. (5) "So Much Water So Close To Home," in which Claire, the narrator, is upset when her husband, Stuart, discovers a dead woman on a fishing trip and delays reporting it. (6) "A Small, Good Thing," in which Ann and Howard Weiss lose their son after he is hit by a car on his birthday and later confront the baker who made the boy's unclaimed birthday cake. (7) "Jerry and Molly and Sam," in which Al, a factory worker, gets rid of the family dog but is unable to woo it back again. (8) "Collectors," a strange tale about a vacuum cleaner salesman's demonstration to a man who may or may not be the man of the house. (9) "Tell the Women We're Going," about two good buddies, Bill Jamison and Jerry Roberts, who ditch their wives to pick up two teenagers but end up killing one of them. (10) "Lemonade," a poem about cause, effect, and loss. Altman and Barhydt's ability to intertwine these story-lines into a cohesive whole is impressive. "The two," writes Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, in an introduction to the published screenplay, "would perform variations like jazz musicians on the Carver stories . . ." (p9). Most of the story-lines are introduced on the night that opens the film, and a close look at how this is done will reveal Altman's method. The opening image of the film will prove important to defining Altman's landscape: EXT. - SCENIC VIEW - NIGHT A view of the city lights. The sound of helicopters can be heard. The CAMERA PANS RIGHT to reveal a sign illuminated by the helicopter lights: REMEMBER MEDFLY QUARANTINE. The sign vibrates wildly. Looking up, we see the helicopters coming in low and spraying Malathion, an insecticide. The sign like everything else gets coated. In bed are Howard and Ann Finnigan, the same couple from "A Small, Good Thing" above (but with new last names, as all Carver characters will receive new last names), who are watching Howard's editorial about the spraying on TV. Howard is now a television anchorman, a job not seen in the Carter landscape of blue collar workers in the Pacific Northwest. In vignette fashion, different scenes under the sprayed Southern California landscape rapidly introduce the movie's major players: Attending a concert together are Claire and Stuart from "So Much Water So Close To Home" and Ralph and Marian from "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" Covering his "Jerry's Cool Pool Service" truck from the spraying is Jerry Kaiser, the Jerry Roberts from "Tell the Women We're Going." In the house, his wife Lois is talking dirty to a man on the phone, her at-home job. Earl from "They're Not Your Husband" visits his wife Doreen at the 24-hour cafe where she works, driving up in the limo he drives for a living. Visiting a jazz club together are Bill and Honey, who replace Bill and Arlene from "Neighbors," and Jim and Harriet, whose apartment they will housesit. Al from "Jerry and Molly and Sam" is now Gene, a policeman, who kicks the family dog out of the house, despite the spraying. In this way, in rapid fire fashion, seven of the nine short stories are quickly set down as the foundation for the film's developing action. As Altman's synthesis moves forward, surprising links are made between the stories as the various characters move in and out of one another's lives. For example, the next day Jerry from "Tell the Women We're Going," now a swimming pool cleaner, is serving the pool belonging to Howard and Ann from "A Small, Good Thing." Stuart and his buddies, the fishermen who will discover the body of a naked woman in "So Much Water So Close To Home," begin their out-of-town trip with breakfast at the cafe where Doreen ("They're Not Your Husband") works, and it is their banter that gets overheard by Earl, which leads him to ask his wife to go on a diet. When Ann orders the birthday cake for her son, Casey, also in the bakery are the man from "Collectors," who will be at his ex-wife's house when the vacuum cleaner arrives, and Claire from "So Much Water So Close To Home," who now works as a clown, with birthdays on her list of gigs. Driving home after work, it is Doreen who hits Casey, the birthday son of Howard and Ann. After Howard and Ann take Casey to the hospital, their doctor is Ralph from "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" And so it goes, with characters and story-lines rapidly coming in and out of focus in a way that is seamless and satisfactory on the screen, although complex, perhaps even tedious, to explain. What this vignette-like development creates is an overwhelming sense of Southern California and its people, who are busily juggling career and social life, racing through fast-paced lives that can leave them frustrated and disconnected, constantly in motion as if fleeing from their own frustration and loneliness. Short Cuts is a satisfying film on all counts but one - its connection to Raymond Carver. Carver's people are not TV anchormen and clowns, makeup students and doctors, artists and big city policemen. In Carver's short story "Jerry and Molly and Sam," Al gets out of the house to have his affair by telling his wife that "I might drive over to Carl's, shoot a few games of pool, have a couple of beers" (p126). Pure Carver. In the film take on the character, who is now the policeman Gene, the excuse for camouflaging an affair is very different: "No, I don't want to talk about where I was last night. Not in front of the kids, I don't. I don't want to talk about the ain-pay and isery-may I saw last night. If you would like to hear about kids on C-R-A-C-K you can come in the other room" (p34). Pure Altman. Carver's story "Collectors," about the mysterious visit of a vacuum cleaner salesman, works at the level of menace, at the level of subtext and what is implied. In Altman's translation, when the vacuum cleaner salesman arrives at the house, an ex-husband is taking a chain saw to the furniture, reducing the interior to a pile of kindling. It's a very funny movie scene, but it's also hard to imagine Raymond Carver writing anything like it. Carver's vision reveals quieter horrors. Altman's exaggerations fit perfectly into the Los Angeles landscape, of course - indeed, kinky and extreme behavior is what the culture has come to expect from Southern California. But Carver's home territory is the Pacific Northwest, where the good buddies growing up in "Tell the Women We're Going" can spend summers "swamping peaches, picking cherries, stringing hops," activity unknown to Altman's characters. Does this make a difference? Absolutely, as comparing Altman's version of "Neighbors" with Carver's original will show. Both story-lines about the housesitting couple reveal how moving into the space of a stranger's apartment can bring fantasy forward into action. In Carver's story, Bill, alone in the apartment, begins snooping around: "He rummaged through the top drawers until he found a pair of panties and a brassiere. He stepped into the panties and fastened the brassier, then looked through the closet for an outfit. He put on a black and white checkered skirt and tried to zip it up. He put on a burgundy blouse that buttoned up the front. He considered her shoes, but understood they would not fit. For a long time he looked out the living-room window from behind the curtain. Then he returned to the bedroom and put everything away." (p17-8) When his wife finds some pornographic pictures, Bill wants to go back and see: "The key," he said. "Give it to me." "What?" she said. She gazed at the door. "The key," he said. "You have the key." "My God," she said. "I left the key inside." He tried the knob. It was locked. Then she tried the knob. It would not turn. Her lips were parted, and her breathing was hard, expectant. He opened his arms and she moved into them. "Don't worry," he said into her ear. "For God's sake, don't worry." They stayed there. They held each other. They leaned into the door as if against a wind, and braced themselves. (p19) This is the end of the story. Carver's characteristic understatement, his ability to create private horror from subtext and nuance, the quiet tension in his work - all are evident in this passage. This approach is a far cry from Altman's treatment of the same story-line: INT - STONE APARTMENT - NIGHT We see the aquarium then Honey. She's the picture of a battered woman, swollen and bloodied. She turns away and we see Bill, who looks sullen and brutish. We hear what sounds like a slap and Honey sprawls on the bed. BILL: I'm sorry I had to do that but you just got outta line. HONEY: Come on, Bill. BILL: I know I'm just the gardener-- HONEY: (laughs) I'm getting tired of this. Bill on his knees straddles Honey. He raises his fist like he's going to punch her. BILL: Oh, no, let me fix this for you. He picks up a brush and begins to touch up the blood around her mouth. She starts to squirm. BILL: Don't. HONEY: Bill, this is takin' fucking hours. BILL: Yeah, well, you know. Stop it. Stop it don't move. HONEY: I gotta go to the bathroom. Don't lean on me like that. I'm takin' this thing out too. Honey takes the lump out of her mouth. BILL: No, just keep it in for the picture. HONEY: Hold it. Just a second. BILL: Support your husband. Bill takes the camera and begins focusing on her. BILL: Now look like someone really hurt you ... (p113-4) The basic actions are the same: the housesitting couple slip into fantasy. But here the two worlds - Carver's and Altman's - perfectly reveal their differences: one quiet, understated; the other extreme, histrionic. In his introduction to the Carver collection, Altman defends his changing of landscape: "One of the reasons we transported the settings from the Pacific Northwest to Southern California was that we wanted to place the action in a vast suburban setting so that it would be fortuitous for the characters to meet, but we wanted the linkages to be accidental" (p9). I don't understand why these conditions also couldn't be met in Spokane or Portland, where the blue collar feel of Carver's landscape would be left intact. Southern California, in fact, is not the Pacific Northwest: the two landscapes have very different cultural mythologies. There is little shocking about the role-playing of Bill, the makeup artist in the film scene above, because the landscape in which Bill exists is noted for eccentricity bordering on weirdness. What is shocking, however, is Carver's Bill, from the same blue collar stock that mythologically treasures the Fourth of July and traditional family values, slipping into women's clothing. Little is shocking any more in Southern California. But when Carver's blue collar couple lock themselves out of their neighbor's apartment, where they dared to let drop, if only momentarily, the mask that hides secret desire, and then are left holding on to one another, bracing themselves as if against a wind, their terror is as deeply felt as any Southern California earthquake. Altman, then, succeeds as Altman but not as Carver. But this is not to say that Carver's quiet vision cannot be translated to film because it can - and it has been. In John Huston's Fat City there is more of the feel of Carver than anything in Short Cuts. And when at the end of that film Huston manages to create the longest effective screen silence I've ever seen - two men sitting at a cafe counter - he creates something remarkably close to the quiet terror of Carver's couple embracing against the wind.
Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt. Short Cuts: the Screenplay. Capra Press, 1995.
Raymond Carver. Short Cuts: Selected Stories. Vintage Books, 1993.
8/97