Good evening!
It feels like Spring is starting, which is nice, but I’m kind of sad about how quickly Autumn and Winter passed by. My favourite seasons! Gone again! (I start this newsletter with a small reportage on the weather most weeks it seems, but I am truly a woman who agonises over which jacket or coat to wear every day, so you see how it is prescient to me).
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
Despite my intention to alternate between books about Hollywood and books not about Hollywood, I picked up an advanced copy of Jennine Capó Crucet’s Say Hello to my Little Friend, which is out next month from Riverrun books. I loved this, and if I hadn't been so busy this week I would have raced through it.
I think the majority of people who have met me or come into any proximity to me at all know that I have a deep and unwavering affection for Al Pacino. There are a lot of reasons for this, not least because I think he is a good actor and an interesting person. One of the main ones, I think, is that I watched The Godfather when I was about 15/16 and it wouldn’t be dramatic to say that it changed the trajectory of my life. I immediately recognised it for what it was (a masterpiece) and it got me much more interested in film on a general scale, but also specifically the mob genre. It is still my all-time favourite film and my most-watched film; when I was an undergraduate I would put it on in the background and study with it on, knowing that by the time it had finished I had gotten a sizeable amount of work done (this has meant that whole scenes and lines of it are embedded into my brain, which sometimes randomly float to the top and I get something like let me tell you something my kraut-mick friend stuck in my head). Even though Marlon Brando was, at the time, billed as (and culturally thought of) the protagonist, it is actually Al Pacino’s film. I think he is a good actor, but he is more than good in The Godfather, he acts like his life depends on it, and that is largely what makes it a masterpiece. And so, I am more than fond of Al Pacino -- I feel like I owe him a debt, because of the interests he gave me.
I watched Scarface not long after (as well as almost every other film he has starred in, even The Devil’s Advocate), and also loved it -- but I think I understood even then that I probably didn’t understand it fully. It’s very often spoken of a film that has its message both made glaringly obvious (doing violent crime to win capitalism bad), but also wilfully misconstrued by a mostly male audience that choose to think that Tony Montana and his actions are good, or at the least, misunderstood at some level. Both of these thoughts about it disregard Tony’s migration from Castro’s Cuba, which is a place where someone like Tony would never be satisfied because his seemingly boundless wants would be clipped. What then, is the middle ground? I think what Scarface says is that, even though its protagonist is a hyperbolic, satirised version of a person who does not want to live in a communist state and would prefer to become a big shot in a grossly capitalist country, there isn’t a middle ground for a lot of people in his situation, and so they have to choose an allegiance.
What Crucet’s Say Hello to my Little Friend argues is that in the intervening years between Scarface and the contemporary moment, that allegiance has gone to Miami. Not America, and certainly not Florida (at one point the novel’s protagonist says ‘I don’t live in Florida, I live in Miami’). Miami, however, is not a haven for Cuban-Americans to flourish -- it is a city very much affected by climate change, by greed, by unanswered questions, and by its slightly embarrassing son Pitbull. The novel’s protagonist Izzy begins the narrative by receiving a cease and desist from Pitbull’s legal team, after crafting out a semi-lucrative career as a Pitbull impersonator. Feeling stuck, he turns instead to one of the few other prominent fathers of the Cuban-American community -- Tony Montana. Izzy seeks to emulate his rise in the film, largely ignoring that it ends with (spoiler) the destruction of all of his personal relationships and then his violent death.
The premise is what sold me on this novel, but its delivery is what made this a great read. I felt a bit bamboozled when it opened with a scene in which a whale is captured and then put into a Sealife-adjacent park to perform and live in a too-small tank. The whale is called Lolita, and she really provides the backbone of the story as she contemplates her decades-long position away from her whale pod, and as a performer for people she couldn’t care less about. I didn’t really think that the point of view of a whale, and how this develops into a psychic connection with Izzy, would work on a sustained level (you may remember how I felt about the talking mirror in Blonde Venus), but it absolutely did. Crucet uses Lolita to talk about climate change and animal captivity, which became very moving and anger-inducing. Something I was not expecting of a book that sells itself as a novel about a Pitbull-impersonator turned Scarface-obsessive.
Something else that worked really well is chapters that acted as asides, meditating on the fundamentals of the film it takes its name from. These chapters think through things like how its narrative works, how it was mostly filmed in LA thanks to backlash from Miami residents and how they thought it would portray them, Al Pacino’s Spanish and how the Miami property market works. You can tell that Crucet has spent a lot of time mulling over Scarface and its place within the Cuba diaspora, as well as the relative lack of role models that its young men really have. That Izzy feels he can only really choose an objectively odd rapper or a hyperbolic cocaine don portrayed by someone who is not Cuban is quite telling, made even sharper when he goes to visit a professor who has spent his life researching his community, but has absolutely no idea how to relate to, or even talk to, a young man like him. There is nobody for him to look up to, and what this novel does is deconstruct the consequences of that, in a setting that is slowly sinking under the sea. I loved it, please pre-order it.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I think its time to read something about Old Hollywood again, so I think I will pick up the biography of Judy Garland I have here -- my favourite woman!
About 20 years ago they rereleased the Godfather in the cinema and I went to see it, on my own, along with about six other such nerds; we all watched rapt but when it got to the line near the end where Al promises Diane K he had NOTHING to do with anything, we all separately cracked up ❤️❤️❤️