Welcome to OSV Field Notes, a weekly, high-signal curation of things worth your time.
This week: swimming pools and suburban dread, a “computer-written” book with some fine print, what Kobe Bryant changed for Team USA, a sword that waits for the truth, and Wes Anderson’s handmade world of miniature hotels and beautiful pastries.
1. The Swimmer : Burt Lancaster Comes Apart (1968)
This is an odd, desperately sad slice of late 1960s ennui, adapted from John Cheever’s short story. Burt Lancaster plays Ned Merrill, a charming and handsome advertising executive who lives among the wealthy suburbanites of leafy Connecticut. We meet him at a friend’s beautiful house atop a beautiful hill overlooking the beautiful neighborhood. It is summer, and he wants to swim.
Ned concocts a plan. He will swim all the way to his home on the other side of the valley, using the pools of his neighbors like stepping stones. So off he goes, wearing nothing more than tight trunks and a plastered-on smile. At each pool he meets increasingly hostile acquaintances, revealing more about this unsettling, childlike man.
Released in 1968, the year after Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, The Swimmer contains the kernels of what would come to be known as the New Hollywood: a slippery editing style, psychological decay, and a rejection of conventional plot mechanics. At times these choices sit uneasily against the vestiges of Hollywood’s golden era (not least the overcooked orchestral score), but the film’s contradictions are held together by Lancaster.
He is extraordinary. This is an allegorical film, but he builds a character rather than a cipher at the center of it, allowing the early facade of movie-star charisma to crack and eventually crumble. [Ed]
🎬 The Swimmer (1968)
2. The First Book Ever Written by a Computer?
The cover is a loud shade of red, and it makes a big promise: The First Book Ever Written by a Computer. I recently found this relatively rare copy of The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed (Warner Books, 1984), a slim paperback of prose and poetry credited to “Racter,” a program running on a Z80 microcomputer with 64K of memory. That’s less memory than a single app icon can take up on your phone today.
The writing is strange and grammatically perfect. And it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. Racter likes to talk about lamb chops, electricity, and philosophy, often all in the same paragraph. In the introduction, programmer William Chamberlain asks a question that could have been written this week: What would prose look like if it didn’t depend on human experience at all? The book describes this as “fundamentally different from artificial intelligence programming, which tries to replicate human thinking.” According to the book, Racter could write original work without promptings from a human operator. Once it’s running, Chamberlain says, it’s “cooking by itself.”
Turns out the truth was a bit of a mystery. Researchers eventually concluded that the book was selected from a large amount of output (sound familiar today?) and shaped by templates (sound familiar today?) Chamberlain wrote himself. The original code has been lost. His co-creator, Thomas Etter, has mostly disappeared from the record.
The question of whether computers can write is older than most people tend to believe. In 1952, Christopher Strachey programmed a Ferranti Mark 1 to write absurd love letters. Racter came out three decades after that, and then the conversation stayed in the lab for another thirty years. Now it’s everywhere, and things are moving so fast that each week makes the last one feel like it’s long out of date.
Unearthing this book at a flea market this past weekend brought me all sorts of feelings, the familiar hope, the hype, and the fine print of a book that had largely been forgotten. But this book published almost four decades ago is asking the same questions that we’re talking about and debating today. [Taylor]
📘 The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed by Racter (1984; Internet Archive record)
3. The Redeem Team (2022) : What Kobe Changed
A friend once described my writing process as “method writing.” She meant it the way people mean method acting: the actor who doesn’t break character, even when the cameras stop rolling. I don’t go quite that far. But when I’m mid-book, I can become annoyingly single-minded. I read the subject, I watch the subject, I bore my friends with the subject.
So because I’m finishing a sports book at the moment, that means almost the entirety of my media consumption is in some way linked to sports. But this recommendation works for sports lovers and for those who unselfconsciously use the phrase “sportsball.” It’s called The Redeem Team, a Netflix documentary about the 2008 United States men’s Olympic basketball team. Four years earlier, in Athens, a group of NBA stars lost three games and came home with the bronze — a national embarrassment for the country where basketball was invented. The 2008 team, assembled by Jerry Colangelo and coached by Mike Krzyzewski, was built to make that right.
The film moves briskly, and I think it’s a vivid portrait of two things: what a coach can accomplish with a team, and the effect a single player can have on one. In this case, Coach K of Duke fame, and Lakers star Kobe Bryant. The film follows the athletes as they decide to play, contend with the difficulty of balancing it against their NBA commitments, and come to understand what motivates them to participate. It’s an inspiring look at Olympic competition at the highest level, and it also shows you why a team of stars does not necessarily make a team of winners.
I won’t spoil the best Kobe and Coach K moments, but I will say that even if you’re unfamiliar with the life and work of both men, you’ll learn a great deal watching this. You’ll see how a college coach could inspire them. And you’ll see how a player often tagged as aloof, selfish, or worse managed to push his high-achieving NBA colleagues to achieve even more. [Jimmy]
🎬 The Redeem Team (2022)
4. Mononoke : Where the Monster Isn’t the Villain
I found Mononoke the way I find most things these days, through an Instagram reel. Even though I’m not a horror person, I’m an anime person. So, I gave this one a shot and ended up binge-watching all twelve episodes last weekend.
Mononoke are spirits that latch onto human grief, guilt, anger and other dark emotions. The story begins with a medicine seller with gorgeously painted eyes wandering old Japan exorcising the mononoke. He does that using a curious sword which only leaves its sheath once it knows three things about the spirit: its Form, Truth, and Reason (I wish that were a rule for all weapons). So before anyone can be saved, someone has to confess.
A woman in a prison cell confesses to murdering her husband’s entire family. A pregnant woman takes a room at an inn already full of the spirits of children who want to be born. I used to think blood and gore would be the most horrifying part of horror. Here, the confessions and the secrets take you to dark, dizzying corners of human nature you’d rather avoid.
It satisfies my visual appetite too, like you’re watching an illustrated book come alive. The art borrows from very interesting sources: old Japanese woodblock prints, Noh theatre and… wait for it… Pattachitra paintings from the Indian states of West Bengal and Odisha!
The sword fascinated me, perhaps because of the man wielding it. He was not a typical monster hunter. He was a healer, a medicine seller. So, the killing of the monster happens after the truth has come out. The confession is the cure as well as the horror. [Aashisha]
📺 Mononoke (2007) by Kenji Nakamura
5. The Grand Budapest Hotel : Wes Anderson at Full Strength
I recently watched Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel with my kid. It’s such a fun film, though I have to warn you: Anderson’s style is a love-it-or-hate-it type of deal, so if you ever bounced off hard on one of his films before, this probably isn’t for you. It’s all of Wes Anderson’s idiosyncrasies packed tightly together.
But if it’s for you, it’s probably really for you. Ralph Fiennes is great as Gustave, the hotel’s concierge. I love when his elaborate manners break. The unexpected swearing is a big part of the fun.
I also love the handmade quality of everything. For one train-window shot, Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori were sitting on a little wheeled platform with a window frame, out in the snow. Everything is part of the world-building, from the multiple miniatures to the beautiful pastries.
And if, like me, you’ve seen this multiple times and want more, I recommend Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel. A beautiful coffee table book full of interviews, artwork, behind-the-scenes shots, and production design materials. Knowing how they did it is part of the fun. [Liberty]
🎬 The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
📘 The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel by Matt Zoller Seitz
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