Jason Sperb
This has been a very good month so far. I wanted to provide a quick update on the current status of my Payne project--I promised I would touch base when I had complete rough drafts of the first two chapters, and I'm happy to report that I finished the second this afternoon. This is great news in particular as it was only back in June that I was just hoping to have these done by the end of the month, so I'm a couple weeks ahead of schedule.
The catch is that I started with the two chapters I knew would be the easiest for me to work through as I begin to develop my analysis of his films, with the hope that the momentum from that accomplishment--plus the opportunity to narrow down what ideas would go in the other chapters--would really get the project moving. So, the chapters I have completed so far won't be the ones at the start of the final version (I don't think) but they will probably be the center (literally and figuratively) of the project.
I'm not ready to reveal the proposed table of contents at the moment--mainly because there are a couple of chapters that I haven't decided on names for yet, and also because I don't want to take the time yet to talk through the organizational logic of the larger project.
I will say that the first chapter I completed is largely about representations of tourism and travel in Payne's films (being a little familiar with the geography of Nebraska definitely helped me get started here). This includes both the emphasis on road trips and journeys in his films, as well as the depiction of established tourist destinations (my day in Lincoln actually proved useful here, by the way).
One of the movies I've actually gotten the biggest mileage out of so far is one that most people don't even think, or even know, about:
If you aren't familiar with this little 7-minute gem of a film, it's a short that Payne made fifteen years ago for the anthology movie, Paris, Je T'Aime (2006). I won't say too much about my takes on it here, but it's as important a movie to the project as any of them, and the next chapter I'm going to start working on next week takes its tentative title from one of the last lines of dialogue here.
The second chapter I finished discussed how characters deal (and do not) deal with historical questions that exist on the margins of these narratives--history here refers not only to frontier and colonial histories but also more personal truths that characters often navigate through different forms of nostalgia. As with the other, I won't say much more for now, but I will add that it was surprisingly influenced in the end more by my day in Omaha than I would have guessed when I started out.
A big chunk of the chapter can be traced back to my earliest impressions of The Descendants (2011):
I was always fascinated by the scene in particular late in the movie when King (George Clooney) walked around his family clubhouse and looked at photos of his Hawaiian ancestors (see above), where he is both immersed in and detached from the histories they present, and much of the chapter was inspired by so many questions about not only colonial politics and legacies but also different notions of representation and interpretation which get raised there.
A final note about that--the idea for a project like this began in 2011 and 2012 when I first saw The Descendants. Obviously, that might not sound surprising given that I also had an idea at that time to write a whole book about Hawai'i at some point. But what is interesting to note is that Payne was my favorite contemporary filmmaker when I was younger (maybe he still is, I don't think in those terms as much any more). Back then, I loved Citizen Ruth (1996), I loved Election (1999), I loved About Schmidt (2002) and I loved Sideways (2004). I saw all but the first one in theatres on their initial release. Yet, outside of discussing Election and Schmidt briefly in the context of a broader project back in graduate school about the general use of voice-over in the cinema, I never had any interest in writing about them.
It was only with The Descendants--the first film of his I didn't particularly like at the time (both for its dubious handling of cultural politics but also for the heavy-handed melodrama which seemed to lack the more delicate touch of his earlier work; I will say visually it is a more complicated film than I first gave it credit for)--that I started to think in earnest about writing about these films. It's a useful reminder that there is very little overlap, or should be, between cinephilia (or fandom, pick your poison) and what ultimately provokes ideas for scholarly writing.
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