The New Age (1994)
Director: Michael Tolkin

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JUMP DOWN:        Irony not Satire        Too Cool/Uncool
Fated to Fall        Peter Weller: Opaque        Judy Davis: Peerless        The Verge of Allegory
Good Faith        Modern v. Traditional        Irreducibly Individual        Harrowing Back Stories
High-End Decadence        "The Writer’s Movie of his Dreams"        Cosmic Irony       

Peter and Katherine Witner (Peter Weller and Judy Davis) are platinum-grade service industry professionals in L.A. He’s the kind of hip, spiffily dressed talent agent who wins clients because they want to belong to his set, and she’s a graphic designer with her own firm. Poised in a big house above Sunset Boulevard, which boasts a panoramic pool deck and a contemporary art collection, they seem to live in a tower for people with "it," yet the tower has no foundation. As they discover when they’re caught out by the early ’90s downsizing of the ’80s boom economy, which leaves them uncertain not only of what to do next but even of what they ideally would want to do next. Their instinct when their lives enter crisis mode is to do what they do best, go shopping and give a party. But instincts can play you false; it all depends on what informs them.

One of the major attributes of Peter and Katherine’s Hollywood lifestyle is a personalized amalgam of self-help formulae and new-age spirituality. In their circle, personal growth is the lingua franca. For instance, the head of Peter’s agency tells him at a staff meeting that he’s coasting on his reputation, bringing in only what they pay him. He’s not being fired, merely steered, in what his boss calls an "intervention." And Peter, his pride piqued, responds within the twelve-step vocabulary that staying at the agency would be "co-dependency," and so quits. The same day, as it happens, that Katherine folds her business.

Peter and Katherine’s set speaks in spiritual terms not only about life and death, but also about work and play. Keeping up with the latest trends requires the services of mediums who do everything from easing the terminally ill over the border of death to helping with business decisions. At their what-next? party Jean Levy (Patrick Bauchau), a Belgian psychic with the aging lounge-lizard gloss of George Hamilton or Robert Evans and an unreadable smile (is it pure beatitude, or beatitude because the fish are biting?), informs Peter that Katherine, put off by Peter’s remoteness and infidelity, has left with another man and that Peter must embrace the thing that hurts him. When Peter asks what that means, Jean replies, "Live with the question."

After their party, the Witners further consult Jean, who asks them, "If the two of you could do anything right now, go anywhere, where would you go, what would you do?" When Katherine blurts out, "Shopping," wit turns into fate. Jean says, "There’s your answer," further "explaining," that "in Chinese the word for crisis is the same as the word for opportunity." Peter finally interprets Katherine’s answer to mean they should open an expensive clothing boutique called Hipocracy, i.e., clothes for the hip aristocracy, though of course the pun on "hypocrisy" also shows how Peter and Katherine outsmart themselves, taking witty self-consciousness as adequate protection against the tricks of fate.

Dialogue like Jean’s with Peter is bound to activate an expectation of satire, but Michael Tolkin, the writer-director, purposely suspends our responses to all this spiritualizing. He’s more truly speculative about this search for significance, which is a worldly activity at the same time that it’s metaphysical. We can see that Peter and Katherine have "everything" but selves, and that as L.A. conspicuous consumptives they’d like to fill some unnerving inner silence with mantras. But the movie’s approach is very different from the topical satire of spiritual fads in Semi-Tough or from Woody Allen’s attitude toward L. A. in Annie Hall. Tolkin’s outlook isn’t so easily adopted.

Jean’s single most practical piece of advice, offered too late, is to observe the foot traffic on a street before opening a shop. What Peter and Katherine did instead was to have Jean and his assistant visit the already rented space and help them lay out the counters and mirrors and dressing rooms in alignment with spectral energy. It’s easy to laugh at how crazy some people are now, and yet the similarity of the scene to one in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist 1   (first produced in 1610) indicates the reason for preferring poker-faced irony to topical satire. Focusing on a contemporary fad is to miss the larger phenomenon of human folly, which is open to satire but not to the hope of alteration as a result. Tolkin’s irony makes topical satire seem complacent and shortsighted.

The various shamans we see are not as flat or as passively perceived as in satire. When a priestess is bonging some metal bowls at an assisted suicide, Peter starts a debate with her, and her response shows she’s less invested in the particulars of what she’s doing than we expect: "I think Peter just wants some comfort. That’s what rituals are for." Her answer indicates that even the people selling the rituals understand that religion can be effective without being taken literally. The New Age features the most intriguingly rendered passel of spiritualists outside A Dance to the Music of Time, where, likewise, Anthony Powell sees that the greater irony resides not in exposing mediums as fakes but in accepting that this isn’t definitively possible. 2  

By not enjoining the easy attitude, Tolkin takes us into obscure territory, but it’s dramatically obscure--we watch Peter and Katherine try to respond to guidance, and we see their uncertainty as to whether they’ve chosen an effectual path settle like dust on their hopes. Their search for answers to the big questions appears to have begun largely as a lifestyle accessory de rigueur for people in their elevated circumstances. But now that they really need consolation and co-piloting, they’re pushed beyond their complacency as "enlightened" trendsetters in a superculture in which you shop for religious truth. They end up facing the fundamental religious problem of expecting material circumstances to reflect spiritual status. When their foot slips in the material realm, their spiritual footing can’t help but give way.

Peter and Katherine’s angle with the store is to cater to rich people too busy to shop, who can rely on the Witners’ taste. However, selling their taste violates the kind of allure Peter and Katherine have: a salesman can be too cool for his own good, as we see when Peter throws their first two customers out because they treat him like someone who works in a shop. Still, Katherine’s mistake may be even worse, which is to chase after sales among her friends. The most fascinatingly grisly part of the movie starts at the opening cocktail party for the store when we see Katherine hustle her friend Anna into buying a $400 belt and Peter hushes the crowd to exult, "First dollar!" Later Katherine spots Anna passing in front of the store without coming in and runs out to chat. Peter and Katherine have been embarrassed by the need to have a sale, but Katherine can’t help using Anna’s story about a transcendent vacation to Bali as a pitch for the sinking store: "You should have come in before you left; we had some wonderful kind of sarcastic resort dresses ... Well, you know, why don’t you come in now? Take advantage of the sale before the prices go back up." (’90s comedies have been rich in "Don’t do it!" moments--the phone messages in Swingers, the water hazard scene in Tin Cup.) In this exchange, Katherine discovers that Anna is having a party to which she and Peter have not been invited, and Anna is forced to be honest with her and tell her that she’s put off by other people’s problems. Startlingly, Anna doesn’t resent Katherine for the pressure tactics. She doesn’t like the feel of what’s behind it--the grasp of the drowning woman. And most horribly, in Katherine’s terms, you can see that she’s lost what was supposed to make a go of the boutique: she’s become uncool.

The rise-and-fall of the shop has the recognizable shape of an endeavor bound for failure, as if the characters were meant to be tried by what they feared most, which, as Katherine says, is to have "regular jobs, by the hour, no expense account," and which prompts Peter to say he’d kill himself. This is also Griffin Mill’s nightmare in Tolkin’s 1988 novel The Player, that he’ll lose his job as a studio executive and end up selling cars to younger men with his old job: "Why not kill himself now? The fantasy ended with his funeral, and a crowd of pitying friends." 3   As with Hurstwood’s decline in Sister Carrie we feel fate pulling Peter and Katherine’s arrow from the peak of its arc till it thunks into the turf. The story of Hipocracy sweats the usual middle-class American dread; to the unusually sophisticated Peter and Katherine, however, middle-class feelings in themselves are something to dread.

Tolkin nurses that dread far better than Arthur Miller, who strips the common man of a preconceived false consciousness and presents this ideological pathos as tragedy. Even Tolkin’s economic theory is more intriguing, both when Katherine explains the interlinked economic overextension that created and then annihilated her graphic design company, and when Peter explains at full voice to Katherine while making a last, futile sale, "We were all born because the economy was expanding. See, now it’s collapsing. The world doesn’t need us. In the old days, the laws of nature kept everything in balance, when people were in harmony with nature. And now, nature is dead, and there’s no more harmony, and we’re all pointless." Tolkin is clearly working something out, in part, it would seem, anger over having grown up as the son of TV writer Mel Tolkin on the "unfashionable" side of Santa Monica Boulevard while going to high school with the children of movie and TV stars. 4   In this sense he’s fantasizing himself as a winner like Peter and then punishing the idealized fantasy self.

There’s an additional distance caused by Peter Weller’s opacity as a performer, which is in one way appropriate since his character is meant to have so much aplomb that nobody can tell what he’s thinking. This both entices and scares people, an effect Weller achieves out of his limitation as an actor. Generally speaking, he’s too reserved for an actor who can’t otherwise suggest the precise nature of his withheld conflicts (as Humphrey Bogart could, and Nick Nolte can). Peter isn’t flat or dull but with a less fully articulated script Weller might have been. Still, he does create a not unsympathetic picture of a man who has exteriors mastered. Peter can tell his father (Adam West) why a $900 red jacket looks bad on him and then put it on himself and make it look good enough to buy. His father always seems slightly overmatched by his son’s sharpness, for instance, by his "tactful" jibe that Dad’s new girlfriend is beautiful in a "weekend in Acapulco" kind of way. But Dad has no surprises inside him, and we feel he’ll always be there in his showplace of a house. Peter makes an intense impression, and yet suicide isn’t as much of an extinction as it would be for someone stolid like his dad. What works for the story is that when Peter becomes uncertain you cannot imagine what he could replace his smashed confidence with. He had no other visible assets.

If Tolkin is working a grudge off on his male protagonist, that may be why he’s given Katherine more life than Peter. Or maybe it’s just Judy Davis’s peerless performance. Davis has taken Diane Keaton’s comically neurotic fluster into a new dimension; you can see exactly why the older Woody Allen would have been drawn to her. She doesn’t have Keaton’s gawkiness or freshness; she’s been sitting on her lees longer and is at times glamorously perverse. Not in any ordinary slut-in-a-tight-black-dress way (though she wears one to advantage--ours--in this movie), but in a way that serves almost as existential commentary. She knows life too well, feels depleted because nothing can surprise her. Her smirk shows that even when Peter’s old sexual tricks--talking her through a fantasy of public sex--work they’re not really working anymore. She remains on the outside watching them work. The only time they really work is when they are having sex in public, but his spiel is still necessary, which is a form of dissociation Katherine doesn’t appear to be aware of.

Davis is even more amazing to watch here than she was in Husbands and Wives (1992) or The Ref (1994). With dark lipstick and burgundy-tinged corkscrew curls fringing her face she’s an erotic vision dispossessed of the soul you might hope to gain access to by sex. She’s often at a vigorously fidgety loss--with her pale, pale skin, she’s as agitated as an Ophelia resuscitated by more adrenaline than her system can metabolize. Or else she languorously changes poses, shifts her glance, as if she had to work against weights on her limbs and eyes. She’s incredibly knowing and conveys it with technical skills, such as simultaneous variations in both her delivery and her timing, that make you experience an aesthetic version of free-fall. When she turns it on a man at a party it’s a rapt performance, in which even her insecurity coils around him.

Davis’s delivery has some of the gestural deliberateness of Bette Davis’s, and she likewise has a way of reorienting the negative energy in a room around herself that proves her a mistress of emotional static. The Christmas Eve dinner in The Ref is her equivalent of the cocktail party in All About Eve, and like Bette Davis she keeps the static humming in reserve even in low-key scenes. One of the advantages of technical panache is that you don’t have to display it all the time to achieve your effects.

In addition, Judy Davis is regularly funny in a way Bette Davis was only at her most extraordinary, in All About Eve. Judy Davis’s low-key manner has that combination of airiness and saturation that marked Constance Bennett’s comic style in Bed of Roses and Topper. And like Bennett, Davis’s comic ability is inseparable from her glamour, which likewise feels fully attained rather than patrician, inborn. She has the high style of ’30s comediennes but in a late, mannered phase. And at the same time she’s more in character: she’s a full-spectrum actress as well, and the darkest, most worldly comedienne our movies have ever had. (Even more so than Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, because that character wasn’t a challenge, just a campy occasion.)

In Davis’s contemporary American roles she has low expectations, but she can’t stop searching for something that will bring her release, which is what powers her comic style. There’s no excess of high spirits, God knows, because she feeds all that energy back into the character’s confusions, which seem to come in concentric ring upon ring, like Dante’s hell. Davis’s range comprises both male gallantry (especially in Impromptu [1991]) and neurasthenic femininity, which combine comically when she flutters her eyelids at her own deliveries. She knows what she’s saying is no more than prospective because she can’t decide which aspect of persona will get her what she wants, make her happy, and what she can’t hide she turns into style, which doesn’t help. In The New Age gallantry is finally her only spiritual achievement. Peter gets her to admit her suicidal tendencies by saying, "I bet you know what you’d wear," and he’s right. When she wears it--a full-length cream-colored concoction of satin and tulle and flowers, with elbow-length gloves--and we watch her walk away from the camera, the path of her precision wamble seems to incise the outline of irony on our corneas. She may be on the brink of suicide but the swing of her hips and shoulders is unkillable, and so we believe her capable of stage managing a way out for herself and Peter, if only to preserve them for the hell they have not been able to stave off.

Tolkin hasn’t exactly created characters; Peter and Katherine are situations that have accrued to people fitting a certain contemporary profile. Which is another way of saying that The New Age borders on allegory. What we feel most intensely about Peter is that to round out Tolkin’s vision he must end up as a telemarketer, the kind of intrusive drone he has repeatedly hung up on in disgust throughout the early part of the movie after demanding, "Are you proud of yourself? Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?" and then swearing, "Goddamn telephone salesmen! Who are these people?" It’s Tolkin’s vision of perdition for an existence in which there’s no afterlife--you get your punishment up front, and sooner than you ever expected.

However, Tolkin’s control of the movie isn’t impersonally schematic, he’s not just the puppetmaster. His irony is exquisitely rendered--the look achieved by the colors, fabrics, skin texture, lighting, is everything Peter and Katherine could wish it--but he’s not remote from these people. Tolkin took a telemarketing job like Peter’s in the early ’80s with the rationale, "I’m researching life right now, let’s see how degraded I can make myself," 5   which is another way he’s both inside and outside Peter’s experience. Tolkin has the knack of considering possibilities in character at the same time that he benefits from an overview that shows him there’s no way out of the maze. He knows where the story is going but you don’t feel he’s set on it a priori.

That’s how Tolkin is different from a satirist: he’ll listen to gnomic pronouncements and make a good faith effort to imagine what it could mean to live with the question, how that could help you. While researching new age spirituality for the movie, he was "surprised to find that his initial cynicism [gave] way to a respect for faith in all its incarnations." He added, "I’m always happy at being humiliated by my own recognition of my contempt." 6   With a full imaginative, even visionary, engagement in his subject, he’s not so dead sure of himself as to dismiss everything that sounds like horsecrap, though he is sure that disaster is visited thickly on everyone and that no spiritual life now practiced can cope with it. Finally, he reasons that if all we can see are spiritual problems but no clinching spiritual solutions, then spirituality is a real force even though there’s no cultural consensus about how to gain access to it. (And in a rich country of individualists like ours, in which material failure is not taken stoically as irrelevant to truly important concerns, but rather resented as unnecessarily cruel and dire punishment, people look to spirituality for ways to evade the biggest picture--creation and destruction always adding up to nothing.) It’s the lack of consensus that makes people look foolish in drumming circles, for instance, not the rituals themselves.

Tolkin is thus a religious writer for secular souls. You can see it in his novels: The Player in which the protagonist gets away with murder, and Among the Dead (1993) in which the protagonist doesn’t even get away with apologizing for adultery. In Tolkin’s work atheists too get caught in traps of conscience--in fact, matters of soul are worse without structured belief. Louis Menand has cogently defined modernity in just these terms. He has said that in traditional societies the meaning of an individual’s life is to perpetuate the culture as received. In the modern era the end of this cyclical idea of life and history and culture, and the beginning of a progressive view of all three, does not rob life, but rather death, of its meaning. This becomes a problem because there’s no point at which you can die in contented certainty that you have played your part appropriately. Seeing existence as a forward march toward the always open possibility of giving meaning to your life (an activity which can never be confirmed as successful within your lifetime, and is always a subjective call, anyway) means that the defining action might still be in the future, no matter how old you are or how much you’ve accomplished. The standard of "objective" measure is gone and so we trudge onward. 7

Tolkin dramatizes this view of existence at its most dispiriting. He doesn’t proceed from an orthodox desire to scold, he’s no Jeremiah. He just won’t turn away from what anyone can observe. Peter and Katherine’s fall can be endless because in The New Age there’s no distinction between forms of observance: starting a business can be spiritual, or going to an orgy, or committing suicide. And when spiritual exploraton is custom-tailored, i.e., irreducibly individual, there’s no one to lay any part of the burden on. As Tolkin has said,

[Y]ou get a little bit of information or an insight or two that actually have some profundity, but it all gets lost in the soup of the desperation of your daily life, you haven’t invested enough of yourself in that system to give yourself a new view on what you’re doing. ... The New Age philosophy means that whatever comes to you is what was supposed to come to you at that time. Potentially it’s the most despairing of religions: Since everything is your fault, you have no recourse. There’s nothing to pray to. 8  

Tolkin is scrupulous and yet insidious, with an instinct for our vulnerability. He has the cruel genius to realize that if you hold a magnifying glass over an ant you may burn it in the sun’s concentrated rays but you can also observe it more closely in its extremity. He doesn’t actually kill his characters, but rather, by showing them as not philosophically whole in a way that would either allay their torment or steer them clear of it in the first place, he applies to them the maximum discomfort that they can live with. They end up wishing they couldn’t.

Tolkin isn’t just torturing the hapless, however. In one way he fully identifies with Peter, who has a novelist’s ability to whip every situation into a storyline. For example, when his father tries on that red jacket, Peter dissuades him by saying, "You look too much like a Del Taco-franchise owner who lives in Palm Springs, goes to the mall, walks into one of those stores for guys who cruise the disco in the Holiday Inn, and got talked into buying something a little too slick. . . ." Later when he and Katherine are trying to decide what kind of store to open, she suggests a copymat, and he objects: "Oh, God. I mean, Xerox machines, five cents a page, endless streams of displaced midlevel insurance executives coming by with a resume." This identification of the author with his observant but confused hero in the act of creating back stories for random groups of people is key to Tolkin’s work.

In Among the Dead it’s a pastime the protagonist now misses sharing with his dead wife, 9   and it leads to arguably the most harrowing passage in The Player, when Griffin Mill "places" the women at the bar in the Polo Lounge, and then we read, "He wanted to leave his booth and join the women at the bar, buy them drinks, and then compel them to the suicides they owed the world." 10   (It’s like Dostoevsky’s Underground man telling Liza what her miserable future as a whore will be like.) In The New Age it’s finally the skill that makes Peter successful at telemarketing (as we see in the imaginative way his first sale is shot to reflect his getting a handle on the woman at the other end of the line), the skill that seals his fate.

What Tolkin writes of Griffin Mill in this scene above--"He wanted to stay in this mode forever, always at a short distance from himself, where he could admire the craftsmanship of his being, every gesture, every word, each shift of energy a calculation" 11   --is equally true of Peter, and of Tolkin himself. And he associates this ability to suss people’s stories with death. To Tolkin it seems there’s something about the universal imagination of a novelist that enables him to see too much, and he as much as anybody feels the lack of spiritual answers to redirect all these stories trending downward, either materially or spiritually, if not both. Peter is living out the terrible fate that Tolkin can imagine--that’s their bond. The problems aren’t all spiritual. We can also glimpse the truth of Jean Levy’s attention-grabbing opener to Peter, "Nobody taught you to be a man," manhood, like religion, being another concept educated people think of ironically yet haven’t figured out how to replace. Peter suffers for Tolkin, who keeps on writing, keeps on imagining fates like Peter’s.

Tolkin is at the same time the least moralistic of moral observers. In fact, he’s openly curious about high-end decadence. In The Player Griffin Mill takes the girlfriend of the man he’s killed to Mexico rather than somewhere "degrading" like Palm Springs, and Tolkin in part sees the validity of his justification: "Kahane’s ghost, if he was watching them, could justify to God the need to return in his body and haunt them if he saw them screwing where the sin was so inelegant, so predictable." 12   That is, there’s no virtue in inelegant sin itself, so why not have the best? There’s the detachment and absorption, the exact measuring of urban decadence in the opening scenes of his fascinating directorial debut feature The Rapture (1991) and all of The New Age. He has the eye and the reserve to reproduce the chic without seeming jealous or prurient (as in a Michael Douglas movie in which the punishment has to be exaggerated to compensate for how mouth-wateringly the sin has been depicted). And Tolkin can attach the decadence to existential themes without seeming pretentious. He’s a man who in all situations keeps his head.

This is reflected in another way in the fact that he’s able to pull off some ambitious structuring, for instance, intercutting Peter with his new girlfriend and Katherine with her new boyfriend--all four end up getting massages on adjacent tables, and discussing their relationships. He also more elaborately intercuts Katherine at a drumming circle, where she fails to feel what she thinks she’s supposed to feel, with Peter at a bisexual S/M orgy mansion where he’s tempted by three sirens in a pool, one zaftig punk Vampira, one tattooed and pierced blond sybil, and a cooing porno Hercules. What a fish pond! And those tempters actually seem like individuals, especially the girls. Malaise may be even more elegant in L’Avventura but not sexier. (Tolkin’s orgy house also seems far more compellingly instinctual than Kubrick’s in Eyes Wide Shut, where the solemn debauch played like the ceremonial scenes of The Magic Flute as staged by Hugh Hefner in the Playboy Mansion.)

In The Player Tolkin describes "the difference between the writer’s movie of his dreams, which would be the really immortal movie, that tour through the brilliant connections of his freely associating but always focused mind, and the studio’s version of that dream, toward the production of which the writer conceded the banal necessity to tell a story." 13   By directing his own picture, Tolkin gets the writer’s dream on film as nearly as a writer can, in large part I would guess precisely because he isn’t leery of impulses that arise below the shoulders. The combination of free association and an always focused mind produces a storyline that surprises while holding a shape that feels inevitable. And the editing establishes the perfect variable pulse for the novelist’s anecdotal flow. (An impressive feat after having cut the picture down from an original version forty-five minutes longer. 14) The picture has a speculative rhythm just right for people trying to figure out what it means to live with the question.

It’s at the opposite end of the structure spectrum from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a sympathetic view of Southern Californian therapeutic fads, which Paul Mazursky and co-writer Larry Tucker organized as a series of revue sketches that are beautifully thought-through but still responsive to the performers’ rhythms. However, unlike Mazursky, Tolkin could not pass for a sunny guy. This is, after all, a painfully comic inversion of a romance. In the medieval Quest of the Holy Grail the knights undergo baffling mystical experiences and then turn to hermits who explain them, showing how Christian meaning is immanent in all experience. In The New Age the gurus’ explanations are as cryptic as the experiences they purport to shed light on. Tolkin knows this but doesn’t make the gurus melodramatic bad guys (unlike Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley bilking a bereaved tycoon with a phony apparition). They aren’t any better off than their devotees--the existential question mark hovers over them all. But Peter and Katherine are the questers who increasingly lose their bearings, their place in the world, their feel for existence, each other. (The gurus at least have going businesses to attend to.)

Which raises a question for this book: is The New Age a comedy at all? Not in the usual sense, though it is amusing. But it blasts past the easy response of satire to reach a higher ironic overview. Everyone in the picture is shut out and no one’s at fault. (It understands that culture is an unconscious group product, not the imposition of a scheme to one group’s advantage.) Tolkin shows a world in need of a divine comic superstructure, of a spiritual tradition that will fit the new, ecumenical mix-and-match lifestyle but still have authority to guide everyone in all situations. He has a broad enough sensibility to show the simultaneous desirability and impossibility of such a cosmic configuration, as befits a man for whom irony rather than pathos is the dominant mode of the human comedy.

You may get a clearer sense of what Tolkin is avoiding than of what he’s after. He flirts with and then evades a black-comic ending but gives us a certainly bleak final shot of Peter who has now become the trainer of the phone salesmen, Faust forced to sell his soul at a discount and then trained to take over one of Mephistopheles’s franchises. Tolkin doesn’t betray his characters, but he sees their crises more clearly than their opportunities. He is in a way snagged on an aspect of his topic. In The Player he attributes to the Writer, who is stalking Griffin Mill in revenge for his contempt for writers, the fear "that soon there would be no sincere style," 15   which is an ironic idea to be expressed by an ironist. But Tolkin is sincere about the implications of irony, which can lock you out from all larger answers. He uses irony to show the trap of irony ("some wonderful kind of sarcastic resort dresses") without thinking that he hasn’t, we all haven’t, landed in it along with Katherine and Peter.

Novelists like Flaubert and Nabokov were so worldly that they could let irony spin as a purely literary idea. Tolkin brings it home to the content of his works, which is not the same as deploying it as a satirist against a character or his milieu. In a very American way, Tolkin wants to talk about what irony leaves you able to believe in, to do, even if the answer always boils down to, Not much. He’s earnest in a way that enhances rather than undermines the irony. C.S. Lewis  would call Tolkin a "symbolist" or "sacramentalist": a poet who sees humans as "the ’frigid personifications’; the heavens above us [as] the ’shadowy abstractions’; the world which we mistake for reality [as] the flat outline of that which elsewhere veritably is in all the round of its unimaginable dimensions." 16   Tolkin is fully engaged in such a quest for meaning, he simply has the ironist’s refusal of easy answers, that great prophylactic against sentimentality.

1. As Drugger says to Subtle, the wonder-faking con-man:
   

   "I am a young beginner, and am building
   Of a new shop ...
   And I would know by art, sir, of your worship,
   Which way I should make my door, by necromancy,
   And where my shelves; and which should be for boxes,
   And which for pots. I would be glad to thrive, sir;
   And I was wished to your worship by a gentleman,
   One Captain Face, that says you know men’s planets.
   And their good angels, and their bad" (Jonson 190).
   

   (return to text)
2. Though it requires purposeful restraint on Powell’s part, obvious from his caustic observations about Aleister Crowley in his memoirs. (He identifies Crowley as "magician" in the Index to the second volume; Powell 80-5, 204.). (return to text)
3. Why not kill himself now: Tolkin, Player 9 (return to text)
4. unfashionable: "Hollywood Complex" 34-5. (return to text)
5. I’m researching life right now: Tolkin interview 56. (return to text)
6. surprised to find: "Hollywood Complex" 36. (return to text)
7. Louis Menand: I heard him work out this theory at a one-day John Dewey conference given by the Princeton University Program in American Studies on 29 April 1999. (return to text)
8. [Y]ou get a little bit: Tolkin interview 56. (return to text)
9. Among the Dead: 165. (return to text)
10. He wanted to leave his booth: Tolkin, Player 72. (return to text)
11. He wanted to stay in this mode forever: Tolkin, Player 71. (return to text)
12. Kahane’s ghost: Tolkin, Player 147. (return to text)
13. the difference between the writer’s movie of his dreams: Tolkin, Player 14. (return to text)
14. forty-five minutes longer: Tolkin interview 58. (return to text)
15. no sincere style: Tolkin, Player 93. (return to text)
16. C.S. Lewis: 45. (return to text)