Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle [Hardcover]

Geoffrey O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 28, 2002

Sixteen years of film criticism from one of America's leading cultural critics.

Castaways of the Image Planet collects sixteen years' worth of Geoffrey O'Brien's essays on film and popular culture, most originally published in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Film Comment, Filmmaker, and the New York Times. The topics range from the invention of cinema to contemporary F-X aesthetics; from Shakespeare films to "Seinfeld"; from '30's screwball comedies to Hong Kong martial-arts movies; from the roots of sexploitation pictures to the televising of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony. There is an emphasis on the unpredictable interactions between film as a medium apt for expressing the most private dreams and film as the mass literature of the modern world, subject to all the pressures of financing and marketing. Many of the pieces are profiles of individual directors or actors--Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Ed Wood, Marlon Brando, Alfred Hitchcock, Dana Andrews, The Marx Brothers, Bing Crosby--whose careers are probed to look for the point where private obsession meets public myth-making.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This provocative collection of essays written over a 16-year period offers unique insight into personalities as varied as Alfred Hitchcock and Bing Crosby. O'Brien, a New York Times, Village Voice and New York Review of Books contributor, defines his commitment to film with hypnotic intensity when he states, "[b]ack in my movie-ridden adolescence, when in the company of a band of fellow obsessives I shunted from double features to late late shows." The chapter "Touch of Ego" paints Orson Welles as a man in rigid control of his own image, simultaneously involved in his artistic efforts and removed from them. O'Brien analyzes the complexity of director John Ford with equal depth, and astutely observes the free-spirited joy of screwball comedies and their destruction by postwar emphasis on realism and domesticity. Walter Winchell, "the inventor of gossip as a form of mass-market entertainment," is not the one-note monster of other profiles, but an individual whose lust for power led him to support democratic causes. O'Brien mounts an eloquent defense of Dana Andrews, never a critic's favorite, and shows why Bing Crosby's currently unrecognized genius deserves more than denigration from listmakers who place Nine Inch Nails ahead of him. Most fascinating is the homage to Vertigo, in which O'Brien convincingly turns the picture's off-centered structure and plot implausibilities into strengths. He doesn't pressure readers into adopting his point of view, but simply and tactfully makes his case through imagery, seducing readers into surrendering their prejudices and joining him on an enchanting ride.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Cultural critic O'Brien (The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading) here collects 28 essays on a range of film and pop culture topics, written over a 16-year period and published in the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice, and the New Republic, among other venues. Some of the topics include the history of Mad magazine, Seinfeld's cultural phenomenon, Hitchcock, the Marx Brothers, and Ed Wood, while other essays are aptly titled "The Sturges Style," "Brando: Pro & Con Man," and "The Movie of the Century: The Searchers." In his astute analysis of Hitchcock's Vertigo, O'Brien notes, "Only at the end is it clarified that the film has been in mourning from the first, has been grieving from before the start for the ending which was already a foregone conclusion." O'Brien's perspective is consistently thoughtful and succinct, making for very engaging reading throughout. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries. Barbara Kundanis, Batavia P.L., IL
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; First Edition edition (May 28, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431906
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431901
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,456,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emperor of the Image Planet, June 3, 2002

By 

Cornelia Read (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle (Hardcover)

I once had the great, albeit far too brief, pleasure of working for Geoffrey O'Brien. I say this not only to reveal subjectivity on my part, when it comes to his work, but to proclaim that, in addition to his being a keen critic, a lapidary-sublime-limpid writer of prose, an accomplished poet, and a man with more than encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Beach Boys lyrics to Shape-Note singers to the work of obscure naturalist painters, I know that he is, as F. Scott Fitzgerald would say, "fun on a party."

Paraphrasing the man himself on the subject of Preston Sturges, to find so immediately, in _Castaways of the Image Planet_, "yodeling, bubble dancers, corsets, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'My Indiana Home,' hypnotic catalepsy, and the remark 'in China they eat dogs," establishes that we are indeed in O'Brien territory. Since it is impossible to discuss his work without the use of eclectic compendia, allow me to add that only O'Brien could have penned this double-fistful of essays on topics as far-ranging as Japanese _Manga_, Orson Welles, the cinematography of Hong Kong and the PRC, Shakespeare, _Mad_, Brando, and the photography of Edward S. Curtis, and have the collective effort rise to such an exquisite acme above mere paean, homage, or pastiche.

Most importantly, though, this collection goes beyond critique in that it strikes a blow for thinking audience members everywhere against the static presumptions of our existing meta-culture. As O'Brien remarks in "Free Spirits," a meditation on the work of film critic James Harvey and the Golden Age of Hollywood romantic comedy, "film books these days, with their emphasis on semiotic codes and quantitative analysis, tend to reduce moviegoing to a rather impersonal experience, as if we brought nothing to our encounters with the screen and emerged from the dark imprinted with precisely identical patterns."

O'Brien lets the light and the air and the sheer pleasure of surrender to the screen, the page, the image--the spectacle--come romping back into the equation. He makes reading about these phenomena as moving and profound an experience as imbibing them first-hand. He lets you know that not only does someone else sitting in a library wing-chair or a plush seat in the darkened post-modern arena get it, he gets it in an incredibly cool and funny and enlightening way. Having this book of essays is like having sixteen great late-night café conversations with an effervescently witty and erudite friend on tap. My advice? Buy 'em, collect 'em, trade 'em with your friends. Once again, O'Brien is kiss-the-hem-of-his-garment good.

2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's the dead center of my very being, June 26, 2004

By 

Gooch McCracken (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Castaways of the Image Planet: Movies, Show Business, Public Spectacle (Hardcover)

Geoffrey O'Brien. Now here's a truly fabbalicious writer despite the faggy-pretentious Brit-git spelling of his first name. I recently saw his piece about the Christopher Plummer/Jonathan Miller production of KING LEAR. And I'm here to berate Geoff for not mentioning a certain ultra-mentionable thing. Namely, the mere fact that stage-actors are capable of memorizing all of that dialog. A capability that strikes me as being far more miraculous than the play itself (which is pretty corny).

CASTAWAYS contains a piece about a movie called LAURA. And LAURA contains a policeman played by Dana Andrews. And I love what Geoff said about him: "In the dead center of the movie, at its witching hour, he sits up all night looking at her picture, smoking cigarettes, pouring himself one drink after another."

Memo to Geoff: That scenario also happens to be *my* scenario. That's *me*, Geoff. That's me vis-a-vis you. In the dead center of my afterlife, at its witching hour, I sit up all night looking at your book-jacket pics and guzzling Thunderbird in your haunted wine cellar.