Like a spectre left haunting the grounds after her fellows have moved on, the Haley character spends the second half of Ham on Rye in emptied-out spaces like bedrooms and street curbs, completing the articulation of a metatextual idea first initiated by those kids-television cameosthe image of the child stars left behind. Filed Under: A+E, Film. In a mainstream teen film, that sense of social abandonment is a unifier, redeemed in one way or another with the promise that life has something better in store. I trust that I am in honest company when I confide this, but still I am tentative to say it. Brewer, Gay. Director Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) ratchets up American gothic to psychological horror as he distorts time, place and relationships, scattering uneasy references to the musical Oklahoma, the film Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, and poetryIntimations of Immortality. Louisa may be thinking of ending itbut Jake may actually be the one to end it after all! Like his previous autobiographical novels, Ham on Rye centers on the life of Henry Chinaski, this time during his childhood and teenage years. We talked about pointillism too, said Lund during the call. This deliberately coy prologue begets the opening credits sequence (introducing characters with more close-ups of little details, like a tie being fastened or a nail being painted), which then feeds directly into the films real first section, where for about 20 minutes small cliques of seemingly high school-aged kids walk through various neighborhoods on their way to an unspoken happening thats eventually revealed to be a literal ceremony at the center of Taorminas debut feature. Twayne Publishers, New York, 1997. p. 40, 41. Ham on Rye is a 1982 semi-autobiographical novel by American author and poet Charles Bukowski. Without giving away too much, lets say the rest of the plot recalls the great Shirley Jackson story The Lottery. But theres no overt horror element, or violence, here. In the beginning, and just for a little while, Tyler Taorminas Ham on Rye seems like every other no-budget suburban coming-of-ager youve ever seen, if maybe better shot. We learn more from the young peoples dress, groupings and actions than from the sparse and often inaudible dialogue. Written in the first person, the novel follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's thinly veiled alter ego, during his early years. The girls talk about fashion and popularity. And so by the time it reaches the mythic ceremony that occurs near its halfway point. He taught Chinese and American History at the college level, worked with Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Org. 65. His father was a mean-mouthed man who never showed his son any love or compassion. Carson Lund's superb cinematography, apparently influenced by photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore, picks out boys riding skateboards, borrowing Dad's Volvo, and talking about the crucial [] Where Kaufman jams his long sweeping camera shots and claustrophobic car journey with anxious forced repartee, Taormina pushes his lens uncomfortably close for extended runs with little dialogue. In my opinion it was like a "time to grow the fuck up" wake up call for Charles. As Henry grinds his way through Junior High School, he discovers the manifold pleasures of alcohol and masturbation. She is, in fact, a victim of her husband's brutality as well. This deliberately coy prologue begets the opening credits sequence (introducing characters with more close-ups of little details, like a tie being fastened or a nail being painted), which then feeds directly into the films real first section, where for about 20 minutes small cliques of seemingly high school-aged kids walk through various neighborhoods on their way to an unspoken happening. To most patient eyes, it will look like a gentle ode to those who seemed part of the crowd in high school, then simply didnt transform into the kind of adults their peers chose to be. Football is difficult for him, but he enjoys the violence that comes with it. Tyler Taormina's debut 'Ham on Rye' follows an anonymous town's teenagers through one fateful day. First time director Tyler Taorminas landscape in Ham on Rye (85 minutes) is both smaller and larger than Kaufmans Im Thinking of Ending Things. Original Language: English. As Mass Reconsiders Life Without Parole For 18 To 20-year-olds, Will Race Matter? It is an uneasy journey where some find purpose, escaping their suburban constraints, as others remain behind, their blank faces reflecting more circumscribed lives. Brewer, Gay. Taormina has an unusually firm grasp on the intangible uneasiness of bland middle-class Americana, and in his debut feature, he drags into the foreground the kind of stuff that usually happens in the corner of your eye. Same goes for something that Taormina said to, in early 2019, which seems way too key not to reproduce here: The script was born through that feeling of nervous confrontation to [rituals] and then it bloomed into What happens to those who dont get selected?,, Yet by placing its emphasis on the shared cultural detritus of American teenagerdom, like all those tokens of first cars and first kisses seen in the loving insert shots that dominate the first halfrather than underlining its more specific themes or subtexts (which Broyles, Lund, and Taormina say were pared back even further than expected during editing), reaches a very interior place: an evocation of an experience, or maybe even just a feeling, rather than a, Transgression becomes even more unfathomable when an entire global generation seems to share the same path in gentrifying the cities, Taormina, (also suggesting one of his films many productive contradictionsthat its a lament for the loss of a suburban experience produced almost exclusively in urban spaces). Does Massachusetts Underestimate Its Greenhouse Gas Emissions? Production companies: Tago Clearing Film Studio, Omnes Films A puzzling but artful look at teenage alienation. In the beginning, and just for a little while, Tyler Taormina's "Ham on Rye" seems like every other no-budget suburban coming-of-ager you've ever seen, if maybe better shot. But then, ringleader Gwen (Audrey Boos) really has to shit and skips across a lawn to up to a house, and however, the shot is framed and lit, it looks like 70s De Palma, all glowy and romantic with a foretaste of horror. Taormina sets us in suburban America, among high school students, walking through a social ritual of conversation, dance, and food at a local deli. She flees. Same goes for something that Taormina said to AwardsDaily in early 2019, which seems way too key not to reproduce here: The script was born through that feeling of nervous confrontation to [rituals] and then it bloomed into What happens to those who dont get selected?, he said back then. No. He doesn't repeat a lot of stories in his novels since they all take place at different parts in his life. You are using an out of date browser. And then some of them are magicked away, a process that happens here with a crude, pencil-eraser-style effect the whole film is drenched in old-fashioned stylistic flourishes, that somehow manage not to foreground themselves but create a mood of heightened ambiguity: long, slow-fading dissolves; abrupt sound edits; janky close-ups; and sudden, non-sequitur inserts, like of a father giving his son a manly, go-get-em pep talk. However, he rarely is completely confident with his own abilities and often second-guesses himself. He achieves a number of other startling effects in this impressive movie, which sheds its naturalism slowly as it embraces a surrealism thats both disquieting and poignant. State Wire: Affordability Limits MAs Higher-Ed Attainment Goals, So Much For Contracts: State Report Blasts MBTA Contractor. keys best up at one end of the piano where there was hardly any sound at all-- the sound the keys made was like chips of ice striking against one another. The post-facto rationalizations they concoct for their hostility, however, involve his inability to play sports and his being viscerally revolted by cruelty to animals, the latter being one of the favorite past-times of neighborhood men and boys alike. The novel focuses on the protagonist, Henry Chinaski, between the years of 1920 and 1941. We didnt want anything to seem like it was supposed to speak to some general moral or lesson, [but to] just let the mood and the vibe point in those directions instead we couldve very easily ruined the film with just a few lines of dialogue, I think, and Eric was very commandeering about us not doing that.. For example, Henry's parents, like Bukowski's, had met in Germany after World War I. Like a hoagie sandwich filled with meat and lettuce, thats a quintessential American suburban item.. "Ham on Rye" can be taken as an allegory for middle-class suburban life in America, but it's got added value as a potent mood piece, accomplished with a bare minimum of means. Ham on Rye, the feature film debut of Long Island-native, Los Angeles-beached Tyler Taormina, is one of the strangest and most discomfiting "coming-of-age" films of recent memory.I put "coming-of-age" in quotes because, yes, ostensibly it follows children between the ages of 15 and 18 becoming Something Else, Something Bigger. Like Henry, the rest of the Chinaskis are modeled after Bukowski's own family. Boys and girls start pairing up as if they were choosing teammates for a kickball game, and not everybody is picked. It seems like in some poems somewhere I've seen Bukowski talk about reading the great philosophers and he seemed to work his way out of the classes, to become his own man free from all the constraints of the working man.It took a hell of a long time, but he did it through perseverance. Ham on Rye makes no such assurances which of course makes it more honest, even if its oblique lessons will be heard by a tiny, tiny fraction of the number who navigated adolescence by the. has successfully conjured up a cinematic space where all those aforementioned experiences have been quite purposefully blended together, forming a sunlit anxiety dream of a generic suburban upbringing. This is emphasized by Bukowski's grave being engraved with the words: "Don't try." 16 poolside__convo 2 yr. ago Really enjoyed this take. Henry agrees to teach little kid how to play a game and by the end of it he just walks out. If this novel is basically autobiographical, the author leaves himself no place to hide. He only wanted to be left alone to drink. I dont get it. Were not told when the film is taking place, or where the film is taking place, or even whats the deal with this big local event all the kids are moving towards. And then, also being from the suburbs myself, youre dealing with these signifiers that are very familiar to me. Are we here alone? Though of course Taormina can pull the episodes whenever he wants, or Youtube or Vimeo could take them down for any reason including none whatsoever, and then theyd be left to a small handful of hard drives, at most, where a random crash might erase them on any given sunday. One passage that always reminds me of Nietzsche was from factotum ". For example, Henry's parents, like Bukowski's, had met in Germany after World War I. I was like, this is going to be fun to shootits like shooting a bunch of still lifes, he continued. Dilbert is gone from Americas comics pages: Creator Scott Adams is The Lifespan of a Fact explores the world of true-ish journalism, The Rosenberg Case: A play reading, one night only, Congress punts decision on draft registration into 2022 or 2023. The end of Ham on Rye was most likely meant to emphasize that Chinaski was done with trying. There are dorky guys in ill-fitting suits and bowties; worldly girls in short ruffled skirts and make-up riding on foot-scooters; cooler types who rock up to the parking lot in a car; and theres the central threesome of girls, dressed in demure virginal pastels, who are walking to Montys through untended suburban wilderness that makes them sometimes look like fairytale princesses in an enchanted forest. Its also about the inherent strangeness of rituals like the prom, though the prom is not whats about to unfold here, and few participants seem to think its very strange. The vista of the road was super important, or houses that were pushed far back from the curb, said Taormina. I dont get it. special is how dutifully it avoids the lack of depth that usually accompanies utilizing deliberately generic settings. ". Researching the creative figures behind, (2020), what stuck out to me was the inevitability of certain voids. But it quickly morphs into a different sort of anticipation, the distinctly pleasurable dread of the wholly unfamiliar, or rather, the deeply uncanny, the thing that looks so much like life that all you can see are the ways it is not at all lifelike. Jake tries to persuade Louisa to spend the night at the house. with miners, and was an officer of SEIU. [3] It begins with Chinaski's early memories. I was able to participate in a group reading of that last work quite recently and found it, somewhat predictably, to be exceptionally pictorial in natureeven on the page. She was 12, and now shes 18 going on 19 The fun little tidbit I like to say about working with her on these projects is that I only realized during the rehearsals, which was a months-long process, that the character of Haley in Ham on Rye is actually the same character as Poll Flowerpot from Suburban Legends but grown up in Suburban Legends, her curiosity always brings her closer to other peoplethats what her youth afforded to her. Always an outsider. The post-facto rationalizations they concoct for their hostility, however, involve his inability to play sports and his being viscerally revolted by cruelty to animals, the latter being one of the favorite past-times of neighborhood men and boys alike. As recently as four years ago the films now-29-year-old director, Tyler Taormina, maintained a website for his then-new webseries Suburban Legends, which starred Haley Bodell as Poll Flowerpot, a 12-year-old cynic [who] discovers the absurdities of the world; the site is down now, but if you search around you can still find all three episodes on certain video-uploading hubs. Ham on Rye explained Ham on Rye is a 1982 semi- autobiographical novel by American author and poet Charles Bukowski. Though Haleys one of the prettier girls here and has no apparent social shortcomings, shes still unchosen as the room empties out. The air is often dead, even when people are ostensibly being social: Asking a question or making an observation is no guarantee anyone will say anything in reply. A bizarre rite of passage at the local deli determines the fate of a generation of teenagers. The reader eventually follows Chinaski to college and reads of Henry's attempt to find a worthwhile occupation. The hoagie sandwiches arrive right before the ceremony itself, which blends the standard beats of school dances with suggestions of awkward youthful sex and celebratory school graduations, not to mention just about every other young-adult maturation ritual you can think of, at a spot named Montys Deli. Chinaski relates that he has an abusive father, and his mother does nothing to stop his father's abuse. Jake disappears and appears. Its such a music-driven filmwere all musiciansand one of the things we did talk about a lot in preparation, especially for the Montys party sequence, was 80s music videos, Lund mentioned later. As they wend their way through more or less quiet streets, the boys talk, crudely but with awkward innocence, about sex. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. To make matters worse, Chinaski develops horrible acne so severe that he has to undergo painful, and mostly ineffective, treatments, essentially becoming a human guinea pig for various experiments thought up by his uninterested doctors. Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, Portions from a Wine-stained Notebook: Short Stories and Essays, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ham_on_Rye&oldid=1056996657, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 24 November 2021, at 20:05. Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is Copyright 2009-2022, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Has. There's a girl called Haley who features more than most of the other characters, but mostly it just shows all the different kids. Composer: Deuter, Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day. This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. It became about the suburbs I grew up in, and those teenagers left when college began and they didnt come back and a whole generation of teenagers disappeared and who was left? In Im Thinking of Ending Things (134 minutes), Jake (Jesse Plemons) drives Louisa (Jesse Buckley) through snow-covered country roads to meet his parents at their remote farm. 1985. . Henry is not athletic but wants to be and therefore tries hard to improve. His young people reveal themselves in their dress and facial expressions. Producers: David Croley Broyles, Michael Basta, Carson Lund, Sergio Uguet de Resayre, David Entin "That boy," said my grandmother, "when I tried to pick him up out of I doubt if it would be published in modern times (first published in 1982). Cinematic didacticism has given way to filmmakers content to raise questions they wont or cant answer. His life never became better. if you want to talk Nietzsche, bukowski always reminds me of Nietzsche's passages on the morality of ressentiment/resentment. Jake seems intent on displaying his shaky self-worth. Filed Under: A+E, Film Tagged With: arts, Film, slider, https://digboston.com/author/jake-mulligan/, The passage of time from adolescence to early adulthood is an uncanny experience for I presume just about everyone, but the ephemerality of modern digital life must only make it worse. 4 [deleted] 2 yr. ago You might even feel the anticipatory dread of the familiar: oh no, not another prom movie tenderly observed, with just enough acne-ridden raunch to give a little edge to its otherwise placid, complacent lament for childhoods passing not again. So to both make and spruce up the required disclosure, let me say that I not only consider Carson Lund a close friend, but that I also consider myself a dedicated fanof. But things like that were very important [to me]. The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Can anyone with expertise or understanding please explain? Screenwriters: Tyler Taormina, Eric Berger Ham on rye ending explained - international conference on. Press J to jump to the feed. Quiet and carefully made but cryptic, it relies on the viewer to complete its metaphors. Its a day were going to remember for the rest of our lives, says the opening dialogue, and the generic phrasing blurs certain lines to build upon the very particular biorhythmic point where Taorminas movie takes place: A kid who says that might be talking about their prom, or about having sex, or about moving out, or maybe even about school graduation, among other possibilitiesbut no matter what, theyre probably talking about something meant to happen in the period that weve come to calling the teenage years. His writing skills make it empowering. While its eventually seen that some of the kids have mobile phones, Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land. As Lund has written about himself in an indispensable piece for Filmmaker Magazine headlinedOver 100 Cast Members and No Permits: How I Shot Ham on Rye in Los Angeles, the films faceless neighborhood locations were stolen from various spots across that cityso for example Ham on Ryes semi-decontextualized meeting spot Montys is in real life actually Berges, a deli in the La Caada Flintridge area of Los Angeles County. But in the bazillion short stories and poems and recorded interviews, you do eventually start to hear some of the same stories again. Viewers will likely feel similarly connected to the characters whether they graduated high school in the 60s or last spring. He has served as a supernumerary with the San Francisco Opera for years without getting to sing a single note on stage! Ham on Rye has been one of my two favourite novels for almost thirty years. s semi-decontextualized meeting spot Montys is in real life actually Berges, a deli in the La Caada Flintridge area of Los Angeles County. Of course the same is true of books, films, and everything gathered under the sunit all goes eventually. "Will you stop that?" my father said loudly. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to New York City to become a writer. Watch through virtual cinemas. Enjoy them. The one character that carries over from the pre-ceremony segments to the post- is Haley, played by the same Haley Bodell of Suburban Legends, whose only acting credits to date are for Taormina. 5 (3): 5, Fontana, Ernest. I mean, pig, pork, hamthats all a thing isnt it? This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. [4] He often resorts to violence when confronted with those who alienate him, giving him a tough guy image to his peers. is the key word there: During this first movement of, whats most narratively engaging is the matter of whats been established for sure vs. whats left deliberately unclear. And itll cause you a lotta grief. Its roots go that far down, and spread that far wide under the strange earth of the American suburb. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Ham on Rye despite having been published in the early 80s has 60s spirit written in between the lines. So sometimes the film is Dazed and Confused via Picnic at Hanging Rock, sometimes it is Carrie via Superbad and sometimes, as in a shot of a flowering hedgerow seething with chirruping crickets, it is absolutely Blue Velvet overtly acknowledging that you cant really do suburban surreal without begging the Lynch comparison. Charles Bukowski. Ham on Rye is a 1982 semi- autobiographical novel by American author and poet Charles Bukowski. So not only do we shoot La Caada as the stand-in for our kind of upper middle-class neighborhood, but we also shoot in the deeper parts of the Valley more north, like Sylmar, where it [suggests a different class]., Yeah, Sylmar was more the latter half of the film, feeling all the dread and the emptiness, continued Broyles. Unspoken is the key word there: During this first movement of Ham on Rye, whats most narratively engaging is the matter of whats been established for sure vs. whats left deliberately unclear. Calonne, David Stephen. But what other shorthand would you use for this strange, atmospheric work, which is 100 percentnot a comedy but does share a spiritual connection refracted through art-film aesthetics and anomie with the aforementioned landmarks? [Bodell and I] worked on Suburban Legends, then a short film Wild Flies, and finally Ham on Rye, Taormina said. Ham on rye (2022) . This type of description does not venerate or idealize the city, a contrast to other so-called "Los Angeles Novels". All the dread and the emptiness is what comes up after the big Monty's scene, when day turns to night, and when most of Ham on Rye's first-half cast disappears from the picture. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. Honest company when I confide this, but he enjoys the violence that comes with it and... On stage than from the young peoples dress, groupings and actions than the... Omnes Films a puzzling but artful look at teenage alienation state Wire: Affordability MAs... Served as a supernumerary with the San Francisco Opera for years without to! From the curb, said Lund during the call novels '' brutality as well pushed far back from the peoples! Or less quiet streets, the rest of the plot recalls the great Shirley Jackson the... 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