Alan's Something Shining in the Stream

Alan's latest effort, Something Shining in the Stream, is a return to form for the eclectic artist, and it proves beyond a doubt that he still has the capacity to surprise.  Something Shining is a collection of short stories, except that it starts with a novella, "Pear-Shaped," which revolves around a  Washington farmer named Frank Gustafson.  For Gustafson, we are told, things have indeed gone pear-shaped.  He is trying desperately to hold his family together in the face of various struggles—his son can't get his career on track, his daughter has just broken up with her boyfriend and moved back in, and his wife wants to spend more time in Seattle, where many of her friends live.

But as we eventually learn, Gustafson is hugely grateful that things have gone pear-shaped.  Gustafson owns a pear orchard, and if the fruit on his trees hadn't gone pear-shaped he would be financially ruined.  As it is, his excellent harvest enables him to support his children while renting a small apartment in Seattle where he and his wife can spend time when they want to be in the city.

It is this sort of unexpected and yet logical turnabout that makes Alan's fiction such a delight.  Other stories in Something Shining describe a middle-aged woman who, we are told at the outset, has been taken to the cleaners by her financial adviser, a sarcastic country doctor who gets a taste of her own medicine, a love lorn student who is barking up the wrong tree, an archaeologist who can read the writing on the wall, a lawyer who puts on a dog and pony show for his clients, a studio musician who knows where his bread is buttered, and an elderly author who has lost his marbles and whose son is a few bricks shy of a load.  In each case, Alan sets expectations at the beginning of the story and then dashes them by the end, and his ability to startle us with these plot twists is unparalleled on today's literary scene—to be honest, it sometimes feels as though no one else is even trying.

Dave's As Long As Life Endures

Dave's latest effort, As Long As Life Endures, is starkly simple—in fact, it was reportedly shot in under a day.  The film lasts only 10 minutes, it is set entirely inside a New York City subway car, and includes no dialogue apart from the conductor's announcements.  For the first few minutes there are few indications that anything is out of the ordinary, as the camera turns from person to person, some of them reading, some of them occupied with their own thoughts.

Then a muffled explosion sounds, and the subway car rocks slightly from side to side.  Its power goes out and it slowly rolls to a halt.  When the lights come back on, the conductor tries to make an announcement, but there is too much static for her words to be comprehensible.  For the most part the passengers remain strangely calm, as though an attack was not unexpected, but we can see the fear on their faces.  Another explosion sounds.  The lights flicker.  The conductor tries again, her voice rising with panic, but it's still impossible to make out her words.  The passengers look around, as if to take stock of who might lose it and become dangerous.

Then we hear a quavering voice:  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..."  The camera searches from face to face, looking for the passenger who has started the song.  A few more voices join in.  The hymn is ragged, but it begins to swell as more and more people start singing, and it keeps going strong even as the explosions resume outside the car.  A black man holding an umbrella starts shouting out the lyrics ahead of each line, so that everyone can sing the less well known verses.  Still they stumble over the words, but enough people know the lyrics to keep the thread.  Many others just hum the melody, creating a strange, other-worldly effect.  The lights go out again, but the music continues.

Critics have argued that As Long As Life Endures derives its power from Trump's election, and that it will be soon forgotten with the ephemera created by the literary opposition.  But the movie need not be read in such a literal way, and I predict that it will retain its power after Trump is gone, assuming anyone survives to watch it.

Translating The Carriers

When Dave published The Carriers in the middle of 2015, he received his usual plaudits from the leading lights of the literary world (you can read my review here).  But the book was published in translation, having been written in a private language of Dave's invention called Üxtil.  When Calista read the book in its original Üxtil, she identified scores of errors in the hastily-prepared English translation, some of which have serious implications for the way the book has been analyzed and understood.

Calista's discovery drew the attention of practically every major writer and unleashed a flood of academic papers re-appraising the book.  As new translations have appeared, writers have been forced to take sides, and at this point partisans of one translation can scarcely bring themselves to talk to partisans of another, much less collaborate or share a stage at a literary conference.  The resulting chaos makes the perennial Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky argument look like child's play.

The main contenders for "best translation" are Alan's, Nora's, and Calista's, while Pevear and Volokhonsky's is the most commercially successful.  The book was originally translated by Dave's longtime collaborator Akina Uehara, who in fairness was operating under severe time constraints, as well as having to learn Üxtil from scratch based on Dave's fragmentary instructions.  Despite all this, and despite the errors that Calista has identified, Uehara's translation is still the favorite of a small but committed minority of writers, who regard her mistakes as more than compensated by her natural, poetic sensibility.

Notably absent from this list, of course, is Dave's translation, which was published earlier this year.  The dearth of critical support for the author's own translation has sparked a heated discussion of how "authoritative" the author is, particularly in a case like this one, where the author created the language from which the work is being translated.  Alan has made much of this "novel" situation, but it is not my concern at the moment.  Instead I will take a close look at a few passages from The Carriers, and I'll explain how the translators handled the interpretive issues that they present.

The first passage is a playful one.  A sailor teases a woman selling tea cakes by the dock, and she chastely responds.  Here's Uehara's original translation:

"That certainly looks tasty," the sailor called out, leaning nonchalantly against the rail. Katie turned to face him, wrinkling her nose.

"The blue ones are a day old—still good, and half the price!" she replied.

"What about the pink ones?"

"Too expensive for you!" the captain bellowed, clapping the sailor on the back. Katie giggled.

In her original paper, Calista questioned whether this passage should be so sexualized.  One problem is that "tasty" is much more specific than the Üxtil word used in the original, a memoridt, which simply means "pleasing" or "sufficient."  It seems likelier that the sailor is commenting on the entire scene, not the cakes or the woman.  Moreover, "What about the pink ones?" is a bit of a reach—in the original, Dave uses the term nuori pestel'e, which literally means "this dawn's harvest" or "this dawn's catch" and only connotes pink inasmuch as that is the color of the dawn.  Here is how Calista translates it:

"This is a fine scene!" the sailor exclaimed, gesturing from the main deck, his hand on the rail. Katie looked up at him and squinted.

"The blue cakes are from yesterday. Half price!" Katie sang out.

"And what about this morning's batch?"

"You have no money to spare for cakes at any price. Back to work!" the captain shouted, with a hearty back-slap. Katie laughed gaily and turned back to her customers.

But there is another difficulty here, one that Uehara and Calista both avoid.  Where is the captain during the first part of the dialogue?  Has he come up behind the sailor during the exchange, or has he been there the whole time?  In this case, the word for "captain" includes a particle that indicates the writer is gesturing toward someone the reader is already acquainted with.  (The closest English approximation would be something like, "the cat appeared" vs. "a cat appeared."  The former indicates that we the readers have already met the cat.)

Conveying this information in English is difficult.  Here is Nora's effort:

The sailor stood on the deck next to the captain and surveyed the scene before them. "A fine day!" the sailor exclaimed, indicating the bustling docks. Katie squinted at him in the bright sunlight.

"Cakes for sale! The blue ones are a bargain, day-old but still good!"

"What about the ones you baked this morning?"

"Enough banter! We have work to do," the captain grumbled, clapping his hand to the sailor's back. Katie's merry laugh rang out as she turned back to her cart.

Nora preserves a sense that the sailor and Katie are flirting, but resists the over-sexualized reading given by Uehara.  However, she also omits the captain's slightly insulting remark regarding the sailor's finances.

After this relatively low-stakes warm-up, let's turn to a much more difficult passage.  By way of background, Clara Newgate has learned that her husband's lover is displaying symptoms of the disease, but Charles Newgate himself is asymptomatic.  Again we'll start with Uehara:

"When did the symptoms appear?" Clara asked, her voice clipped.

Charles turned from her and examined the books on the wall. "In the middle of January," he said. "You were in the north."

Clara quickly calculated while Charles pretended to read. "Charles, in January!" Clara gasped. "But we—"

Charles grabbed her by the elbow and spun her around. "As if you're so innocent!" he snarled.

This is not one of the passages that Calista flagged in her initial paper, but her translation is markedly different from Uehara's:

"When did you begin to fight?" Clara asked sharply.

Charles examined the books on the shelves. "In the middle of January, when you were visiting the north."

Clara did the math in her head while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles!" Clara said with surprise. "So you and I—"

Charles took her by the elbow and brought her into an embrace. "You're safe," he said.

In Uehara's version, Clara is asking when Charles's lover started displaying symptoms, and she seems to indicate that she and Charles have had sex since January.  Charles then accuses her of adultery.

In Calista's version, by contrast, Clara is asking when Charles and his lover fought, that is, when they stopped having sex.  January, it appears, was early enough that Charles probably wasn't exposed to the disease.  Clara realizes that they can have sex, and Charles responds that Clara will be safe.

It's a remarkable thing that each of these interpretations is viable!  Dialogue in Üxtil can be extremely elliptical, allowing Clara and Charles to circumnavigate delicate subjects, but leaving us with little idea of what is going on.  Alan's translation mostly sides with Calista's, but at the end he adopts yet another reading of the language:

"When did the... seas get rough between you?" Clara asked probingly.

Charles turned and ran his eyes over the spines of the books lining the wall. "In the middle of January, while you were in the north."

Clara opened a calendar in her mind while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles! Then when we—"

Charles squeezed her elbow and held her close so that she couldn't see his face. "And yet you're clear," he said as if accusing her.

In Alan's translation, it appears that Clara and Charles have had sex at a time when he might be contagious, and yet Clara is symptom-free.  Perhaps Charles suspects that they are both carriers, and that Clara is the source of his lover's illness.

The passage is obviously a difficult one, susceptible to widely varying translations, and yet everyone was startled by Dave's translation:

"After all, we haven't made love since I don't know when!" Clara spat out with venom.

Charles turned away in shame, occupied with mental book-keeping. "We made love in January," he concluded. Then he added accusingly, "You wanted it up the ass."

Clara seemed to be choosing her words carefully while he pretended to read, but then burst out, "January! Charles! We didn't make love in January!"

Charles whipped her around and squeezed her cheeks with one hand. "You were drunk," he said. "Your lapse in memory is a terribly convenient way to maintain your innocence." Disgusted, he turned her head away with a sudden jerk.

To be honest, it's hard to support this translation at all.  Yes, "the north" can be used in an anatomical sense, as Üxt's northern territories are often called "the country's asshole" or "the ass-end of the country."  But this term is almost never used to refer to actual anatomy, and when it is, the point is to emphasize the back of the country as opposed to the front.  So for instance, a man might sit on a horse's "north," that is, its back—he is not sitting on the horse's ass!  This makes Dave's translation seem like quite a stretch.  In any case there's no express mention of sex in that line of the original text.

But that's just one isolated detail.  Dave's reading of the entire passage requires considerable leaps of logic.  For instance, after Clara asks her question (and by the way, it is very clearly a question in Üxtil, notwithstanding Dave's translation), Charles looks toward the wall of the room they are in, which is a library.  To assume that he is looking at mental books requires adding a concept that isn't in the text while ignoring where the characters are standing!

Moreover, in the original Üxtil, when Clara has done her mental math, she simply says the words for "Charles," "January," and "we."  All of the translations must fill in the gap to some extent, but adding a denial that they made love in January makes no sense.  If this were her meaning, she would have appended a complementary negative particle to "we."  The only way to support Dave's reading is to suppose that she is making an elementary grammatical mistake, unlikely for a woman of her class (or really any class...  this would be a very obvious mistake in Üxtil).

Finally, there is no mention of drunkenness or memory in the last paragraph.  In the original Üxtil Charles simply indicates that Clara is "spotless" or "unblemished," which could either mean that she is innocent or that she has not broken out in the lesions that are symptomatic of the disease.  Of course it could also be ironic, as in Uehara's translation.  But in any case, Dave appears to be making up most of the passage out of whole cloth.

Passages like this one have convinced most critics that Dave's translation is untrustworthy, despite the fact that he invented Üxtil, and despite the fact that Üxtil dialogue is admittedly allusive and indirect.  But I want to stay well clear of that argument, which is vexing and, in my view, ultimately irresolvable.  For one thing, much of our understanding of Üxtil and the culture and customs of Üxt is derived from Dave's magisterial four-volume A History of the Üxtil-Speaking Peoples, which was published in both Üxtil and English.  So to argue that Dave's translation of The Carriers is erroneous is to argue that he was more reliable in his translation of History than he was in his translation of The Carriers, and there is little basis for this conclusion.

Before we move on, I should mention that, in the context of the book, I think Uehara's or Alan's translation of this passage makes the most sense.  We ultimately learn that both Clara and Charles are carriers, but that Clara was most likely not the source of the disease that struck down Charles's lover.  Calista's translation is also defensible on the grounds that Charles might have thought they were both uninfected based on what he knew at the time.

The translators make other choices that involve the traditional translational choices among fidelity to the text, clarity, and elegance.  Where Calista writes that a Member of Parliament is "flying a kite," Uehara has him "floating an idea," and Alan has him "running it up the flagpole to see who salutes."  In another passage, Nora, translating fairly literally, writes that Charles is "fire-breathed," while Calista writes that "his breath was on fire with the vapors of whisky," and Alan writes that "his breath singed her nose with hot tongues of pungent whisky."  (Dave writes:  "Dragon-like, into her chest he poured the flames, igniting almost nothing in that empty space, but nevertheless consuming with a hot vengeance the pine needles shed by her wintering heart."  None of that, apart from the fire-breath, is in the text.)

But perhaps the most interesting passages are those that force us to confront the radical differences between Üxtil and English.  Üxtil contains a vocabulary of emotion that has no counterpart in English.  In one of the most beautiful and haunting passages in the book, Katie (whom we met earlier on the docks) speaks with Henry Tilden, her ex-lover, who has been incarcerated in a carrier colony on a cold, rocky north Atlantic island, where Katie has joined him.  Tilden and Katie can no longer have sex, for she might be vulnerable to the disease.  Tilden indicates all of this with a gesture toward their surroundings, and Katie simply responds, "Bueh."

"Bueh" (or "a'bueh") is an Üxtil word with no precise meaning in English.  It is used to convey emotional reassurance, and its meaning is heavily dependent on context.  Uehara renders the scene in this way:

Katie and Henry huddled in the dwindling light, heads touching, so close that from a distance they might have been mistaken for a single well-insulated seal gazing at the waves. "Katie, I have nothing to offer you anymore, not even... there is no beauty here. And I may die or go insane, leaving you with nothing. You deserve forests and cities and warmth, and here I have nothing but wasteland..."

"I know all this, and I will stay here, not in sorrow, but with gladness in my heart," Katie said. "Your love is like a million worlds to me."

Alan adopts a similar approach but puts more of the words in Katie's mouth:

Katie held Henry close, his head next to hers, their coats forming a single layer of insulation against the brisk wind. Henry looked up at Katie and half hoped that she would go live the life she deserved on the mainland.

"Don't you think I've considered all of this?" Katie said. "You would not tell me which books to like, or what kind of bread to enjoy. And yet you think to decide for me whether I would find more joy on shore or here with you! Purge your mind of this nonsense. I am here because I love you, and your presence makes this island the most beautiful place in the world to me."

Finally, Dave's translation is the most literal, while remaining uncharacteristically restrained:

The wind picked up, but Henry and Katie had overlapped their coats and now peered out at the waves like a polar bear from its cozy den. Henry turned his head, as if to say, "Can this ever be enough for you?"

With a single word Katie set his mind at ease.

One can complain that this translation fails to capture the full richness of the word "bueh," but it's hard to argue with its elegant simplicity.

And so we are, I think, left with no single "best" translation, but instead with a rich diversity of approaches, each with its own merits.  For those readers who don't have the time to learn Üxtil, I don't know which one to recommend, but ultimately I don't think there's a wrong choice.  The beauty of The Carriers comes through in all of them.

Alan's Tooth and Claw

Alan's latest project, Tooth and Claw, has perhaps the most emotional depth of any of his efforts.  What makes this surprising is that there are no human characters whatsoever, apart from the dry, economical narrator.  In fact, you can barely call it fiction—Alan prefers the term "speculative ecology."

What Alan has produced is a series of "field notes" documenting the behavior of species that do not exist.  Birds that glide upside down, lizards that engage in primitive agriculture, carefully cultivating little shaded patches where desert plants can thrive.  A cow-like ruminant that has evolved to brew beer in one of its stomachs, though it serves no discernible biological purpose.  Calista provided sketches, which she rendered in a traditional, realistic manner that looks as though it could have been found in a natural history book published anytime from 1700 to 1900.

My favorite field note describes a symbiotic relationship between a bison-like animal and a diving seabird.  They live on a sparse, windswept, sandy seaside bereft of trees.  Because of the lack of trees, birds have evolved to nest in the warm, insulating tangle of hair that grows above the bison's shoulders.  Our naturalist observes a fox greedily approaching a nest full of eggs, which appears to have been built on a hillock.  But suddenly the ground lunges up, and as the fox tumbles to the sand, a giant bearded face swings around, its horns pointed right at him.  He scurries away to find an easier meal somewhere else.

The birds have learned to communicate with the bison, flying high over the sand to scout out edible vegetation and report it back to the bison.  This allows the bison to conserve energy as it looks for food or a mate in the inhospitable land, which is too poor to support the large herds that are familiar from the American West.  At times, when vegetation can't be found on land, the pair will strike out into the ocean, the bird guiding them to a rich patch of seaweed for the bison to eat, tarrying sometimes while the bird dives into a rich school of fish.

When a bison gives birth, a young bird befriends the calf, and they grow up together and become lifelong companions.  They know each other's voices and use their distinct, evocative calls (high and haunting in the case of the seabird, low and rumbling in the case of the bison) to find each other over long distances in the sere landscape.  The birds are quasi-monogamous, but their relationships with their mates are nowhere near as close or enduring as their relationships with their bison companions.  Because of the effectiveness of their cooperation, both bison and bird can satisfy their nutritional needs in relatively little time, and they spend much of their days playing games or simply chattering to each other and enjoying each other's company as they wander along the shore, occasionally taking a dip in the salty ocean.

It is unclear whether they understand death.  On one hand, each engages in elaborate mourning rituals if the other dies.

On the other hand, if they do understand death, then the animals' subsequent behavior is hard to explain.  If the bird dies first, the bison ceases its itinerant grazing pattern and spends most of its time tracing wider and wider circles around its companion's burial place, behavior that resembles a searching pattern.  Likewise for the bird, which upon the death of the bison launches a search that will last for the rest of its life, circling high in the air, swooping down sometimes when it sees a lone bison in the sand, but flying away once it recognizes that it has not found its lifelong friend.  In either case, the widower from time to time emits the cry that it once used to summon its companion, and then pauses, listening intently for a response that will never come.

Alan's Balls to the Wall

Alan's latest effort, Balls to the Wall, is a bold, frenetic mess of a book, almost as if Alan had adopted the title of the book as his personal credo while writing it.  The book follows Francis Vorlauf, a "speculative etymologist," as he basks in newfound superstardom.  Vorlauf, having discovered several instances of "Stonewall" being used in an arguably pro-LBGT context prior to the famous Stonewall Riots, has published a groundbreaking paper arguing that "Stonewall" (as used by the gay rights movement) actually stems not from the Stonewall Inn, but from General Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, a Confederate general who stood "like a stone wall" for LBGT rights.  (Coincidentally, he also stood "like a stone wall" for the Confederate army at the First Battle of Bull Run, and it is the unlikelihood of this coincidence that has made Vorlauf's theory such a controversial and gripping one.)

But being an academic celebrity has its downsides as well.  Al Peretti, a government etymologist working for Cook County, Illinois, is trying to get the feds to help him debunk some of Vorlauf's earlier work.  In particular, Peretti believes that Vorlauf greatly exaggerated the strength of his evidence that "bailout," meaning the government rescue of banks during the financial crisis, refers to bailing someone out of jail, rather than bailing water out of a boat.  But Peretti is getting no traction, and his stodgy attire and abrupt, nerdy way of speaking are no match for Vorlauf's smooth, polished style.  In a confrontation on Charlie Rose's show, Peretti is easily outclassed, even when the evidence is on his side.

Meanwhile Vorlauf is struggling to find new topics to write about—he is caught on something of a treadmill, since each paper needs to dial up the controversy and sexiness of his ideas, or he will fade from public attention.  He toys with the possibility that the "card" in "discard" might refer to the human heart, an idea that would bring a little romance into his work.  He can't find much evidence for this proposition, which ordinarily wouldn't slow him down much, but with Peretti nipping at his heels he has to think twice.

What neither Vorlauf nor Peretti knows is that the federal etymologists are not indifferent to Peretti's claims—they are taking them very seriously indeed.  But so far their investigation is stymied by bureaucratic infighting, as Treasury tries to shut down the investigation, forcing the investigators to come up with a "smoking gun" or give up their case.  Meanwhile they are forced to withhold public comment, giving the impression of inaction.  In a violation of protocol, they decide to contact Peretti, and they find him at a Las Vegas conference arguing about whether "a storm is brewing" relates to brewing tea (the sky darkening like the water in a teapot) or brewing beer (the atmosphere churning as if roiled by fermentation).  (Peretti's responsible, measured answer—that it could be either, and likely doesn't relate to either in particular—neatly illustrates why he will always be a public sector etymologist.)  The agents pull him aside to pool their information, leading to a shocking discovery.

I'll leave the rest of the plot to the reader to discover, for at the end of the day, Balls is a book that you read for the thrill of discovery.  Not just learning what happens next, but that sudden feeling of gratification when you realize that "sidetracked" is about railroads or that "calibrate" comes from the caliber of a gun.

As for the book's messiness and its many loose threads left hanging:  I actually found that the shagginess of the story matched the fuzziness and loopiness of its main character and his ideas.  Where others see a book that badly needs an editor, I see a book that deserves to be appreciated in its raw form, a testament to the giddy full-steam-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes style that Alan practices so well.

Sarang's Mostly Harmless

File this one under "things I don't fully understand."  Sarang has published a pamphlet, entitled Harmless Error, in which he argues forcefully that if beer is properly packaged, then non-pathogenic obligate anaerobes (bacteria that need oxygen to reproduce) should not be considered a "contaminant" or "impurity" in the beer.  He cites as his main example Acetobacter, the bacteria that converts alcohol to acetic acid (vinegar).  Because Acetobacter needs oxygen to do its work, it will have no effect on beer that is bottled or canned with minimal oxygen.  Acetobacter can cause problems in wine, which is often opened and then consumed over the next several days, during which it is difficult to prevent oxygen exposure.  Beer, though, is typically consumed soon after opening, long before oxygen exposure has any potential to spoil the beer.  (Acetic acid is actually considered an important part of some styles, such as Flanders red ale, and so those styles actually require Acetobacter to turn out right.  But Sarang does not make much of this, since the acetic acid "kick" that characterizes Flanders red ale would be completely out of place in most styles of beer.)

I found Sarang's argument highly persuasive, but I wonder whether most readers will find the issue interesting or even debatable.  I'm probably the ideal audience for this kind of thing, and even I found Harmless Error a bit dry at times.  And maybe that's Sarang's point.  Sarang has long argued that beauty, and more broadly aesthetic merit, is a moral value.  Maybe Harmless Error is an attempt to demonstrate ("show don't tell") that being right isn't enough, it's also important to be entertaining or at least engaging.  There is no flaw in the pamphlet, but no merit either, and so we can see with shattering clarity that "the truth is not enough."

Or maybe it's the opposite—maybe Sarang is satirizing our short-attention-span culture, our refusal to take ideas seriously unless they come with an emotional "hook."  Here is a serious, sober, well-written argument that will get no traction whatsoever in the broader culture, while we spend our hours poring over the latest ephemera on Twitter.  Maybe we are pissing away our lives while the truth about beer packaging stares us in the face.

Sarang's Hold a Little Something Back

Sarang's latest effort, Hold a Little Something Back, is a stunning exploration of violence.  More than most movies, Hold a Little Something Back is about us, the viewers.  Sarang interrogates our response to violence, the way we fit it into neat categories, the way we attempt to civilize it or, failing that, to banish it from civilized society.  He holds up for inspection our sanctimony, our rationalizations, even our preoccupation with positioning ourselves relative to the violence that we witness...  and then he lets us draw our own conclusions.  Nothing is forced but the encounter with ourselves.

Visually, Hold a Little Something Back is perhaps his most accomplished movie to date.  Emotionally, it is strong but manipulative—but as suggested above, it is maybe stronger for the manipulation, for there is a kind of honesty in its transparent machinations.  Its cumulative force is overwhelming—if you wear mascara, I advise you to use the water-proof variety when you see this movie.

As Hold a Little Something Back opens, it replicates a typical NFL broadcast from the mid-1980s.  Low-resolution by today's standards, and featuring what now seem like retro uniforms, the film puts us into the living room on a lazy Sunday afternoon.  Sarang even airs period-appropriate commercials for beer and cars, which may explain how he was able to afford the movie's exorbitant production costs.

About ten minutes into the game, the announcer expresses surprise at a particularly brutal hit on the Cowboys quarterback, a fictionalized star named Drew Layton.  At this point, the film begins a subtle shift.  The resolution sharpens gradually, and the commercials stop airing.  Soon, the score is no longer displayed on the screen, and the shots become more cinematic, zoomed-in to show the action instead of the whole of the play.  The announcers fade away and we hear only the roar of the crowd, the grunts of the players, the sickening crunch of helmet on helmet.  We are not in our living rooms anymore.

And now we see with our own eyes that D'Shawn O'Neill, a (fictional) defensive player for the Los Angeles Rams, is indeed going after Layton as if he is trying to injure him.  At one point he is called for a late hit, but the referees mostly allow him to keep the hits coming.  By the standards of mid-80s football, O'Neill is simply playing hard.  To a modern viewer, the reckless violence is shocking, and I found myself wondering if Hold a Little Something Back were Sarang's foray into the CTE debate.

But after half-time, O'Neill steps up the violence.  We see what the referees can't:  at the bottom of a pile of players, O'Neill methodically punches Layton in the ribs, not even trying to wrestle the ball from him.  O'Neill would rather inflict pain on Layton than win the game.  Or maybe he just wants the Cowboys offense to stay on the field so he can keep hitting Layton.  This thuggishness is hard to watch, particularly since O'Neill is black and Layton is white, so that the behavior fits into very uncomfortable stereotypes.

In another encounter, Layton is carrying the ball when O'Neill slams him head-on in a helmet-to-helmet hit that rattles Layton's brain so hard that he loses control of his body for a second.  The ball drops from his momentarily paralyzed hands, but the camera stays on Layton's slack face while the players scramble for the loose ball.  This kind of hit was legal in the 80s, and unlike some of O'Neill's other behavior it actually promotes the Rams' chances of winning, but it is very difficult to watch.  We now know that the brain suffers permanent and cumulative damage from this kind of injury.

Suddenly and without prelude, the camera jumps to a children's hospital, where the Rams, in uniform, are spending time with chronically ill children as part of community outreach.  The children are dazzled, but soon it is time for the players to leave, and the camera zips back to the game, where one of the Dallas offensive linemen is getting into a fistfight with O'Neill, presumably in defense of his quarterback.  The Rams coach pulls O'Neill aside and yells at him, a short, fat, balding white man dressing down an impassive, brutish black man in face paint—the racial dynamic continues to be very uncomfortable.

The camera moves back to the children's hospital.  This time O'Neill is unaccompanied by his teammates, and he's not in uniform.  A nurse looks on gratefully while he plays checkers with a painfully skinny Mexican boy, who looks bashfully at O'Neill from under his long eyelashes, clearly starstruck.

O'Neill is sitting on the sidelines and his quarterback, a handsome sweaty white boy, sits next to him and leans in to ask him if he is all right, feigning nonchalance, but clearly worried about O'Neill's mental state.

A doctor is asking if a young black girl in pigtails is all right.  She has vomited on the book that O'Neill is holding in front of her, and now she is crying.  O'Neill lifts her up in his giant hands and turns her around to cry into his shirt.  Oh baby, there are plenty more books, don't you worry.

O'Neill is crying on the sideline.

Layton gives an impromptu interview on TV:  "Honestly, I wonder if it might actually clean up the cities.  It doesn't seem like too many regular people are getting it, does it?  Drug addicts and homos, mostly."

A doctor is explaining to O'Neill that children born with HTLV are living under a death sentence, that they will be lucky to celebrate their fifth birthday.  The doctors can only treat the secondary infections and hope for the best.  (HTLV was an early misnomer for what we now call HIV.)

O'Neill flattens Layton with his most brutal hit yet.  (We can't see whether Layton had the ball at the time of the hit.)  Layton doesn't get up.  His body lies perfectly still on the ragged green field, strangely peaceful.  O'Neill, too, appears to be hurt, though he rises to one knee, hunched over and breathing hard.

A Chinese-American doctor in scrubs puts a comforting hand on O'Neill's shoulder and tells him he is a good man.  Behind them somewhere a machine beeps regularly, delivering medicine or glucose or oxygen, or maybe just counting out the seconds of a life cut short.