The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Thomas Anderson · a film · 1999 · 188 minutes · written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson · the theatrical cut
Mode
Ensemble melodrama of linked lives, played at full volume; family tragedy, satire of television and biblical fable in one
Mythos
The prodigal son at the dying father’s bed; the sins of the fathers visited on the children; the plague of frogs, planted as 8:2 and half built
Phase
One day and night in the San Fernando Valley, divided by weather cards, after a prologue of three tales of coincidence and before a short coda
Presentation
Feature film in colour, anamorphic widescreen, in English, 188 minutes; Robert Elswit’s photography, Dylan Tichenor’s cutting, Jon Brion’s score under most of the first two hours, songs by Aimee Mann
Register
From a seminar’s comedy of male aggression to two deathbeds; a song passed across the Valley, and a rain of frogs grotesque, comic and terrible at once
Scale
Nine strands, two dying fathers, two quiz kids thirty years apart, one city of interiors joined by roads
Governing Proposition
Across one day and night in the San Fernando Valley, two dying fathers, each with a child he wronged, are set among a nurse, a policeman and two quiz kids thirty years apart, until a rain of frogs falls on every strand at the hour of its crisis. The wager of the film is that what parents do to children is not finished when the children grow up, that nine separate lives cut together can be shown to share one injury, and that a story so wide can be held at full emotional volume for three hours, broken once into song and once into plague.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins before any of its people, with a narrator and three tales. A man is murdered at Greenberry Hill by three men named Green, Berry and Hill. A diver is found in a burned tree. A suicide becomes a homicide. Each tale is a coincidence too exact to be chance, told as a case for the claim that such things happen. Only then do the titles come. The prologue has no part in the story that follows, and it is required by it: it states the wager on which the whole film is placed, and teaches the viewer how to read what comes next.
What comes next is one day and the night after it in the San Fernando Valley, divided by cards that give the weather as a forecast. Nine strands are laid side by side and cut together. Robert Elswit’s camera moves through a television studio, a hospital room and a run of houses, and Jon Brion’s score runs under nearly every scene of the first two hours, so that the cutting from one life to the next is carried on a single sound. The effect, long before anything converges, is a mounting dread whose cause is not yet named.
At the centre are two dying men. Earl Partridge lies in his bed with a nurse, Phil Parma, beside him. Jimmy Gator is dying too, and he has a daughter, Claudia. Around them the film sets a policeman, Jim Kurring; Linda Partridge; a quiz kid of the present, Stanley Spector; and a quiz kid of the past, Donnie Smith, grown up and spent. From early on a number, 8:2, is planted in the film, and it recurs. The film does not explain it, and on a first viewing it is easy to pass over.
Movement II
Frank T. J. Mackey teaches men to take revenge on women. He runs a seminar under the slogan “Respect the cock”, and he runs it as a performer before a room of men. The scenes are comic, and the comedy is of male aggression put up for sale. In a break in the seminar a television interviewer sits down with him, and in the course of the interview the biography he has invented for himself comes apart.
Elsewhere in the Valley, Phil is on the telephone. Earl, dying, wants his son, and Phil, his nurse, works the telephone to reach him. The search is tender and a little absurd, and it is the thread that will pull the son to the deathbed. Earl tells Phil what he did. He left a wife who was dying of cancer, and a boy to nurse her.
The boy is Frank. The film lets the two strands meet in the viewer before they meet at the bed: the man who teaches revenge on women is the son a father left to watch his mother die. His rage is shown as an abandoned boy’s grief, and the seminar becomes, looking back, a performance staged over a wound. It is the clearest disclosure the film makes, and it makes it in the structure, by setting the confession in one strand against the performance in another.
Movement III
Stanley is a child on a television quiz show, used by the adults around him as a performing child. On air he wets himself, and he refuses to answer. Television in this film is a machine for using people, and the quiz show and the seminar are its two engines, one making children into entertainment, the other making a wound into a product.
Donnie is what Stanley will become. He was a quiz kid himself, long ago, and now he is a man of forty, sitting in a bar and declaring his need to the bartender. The scene plays a single need at great length, and the comedy of his braces runs through it. The film puts the two side by side across the cutting, so that one injury is shown at ten and at forty, and the second tells the end of the first before it has finished happening.
Claudia and her father are the third pair. Jimmy cannot say whether he abused her, and the not saying is the answer. Kurring, a policeman of great earnestness and many speeches, takes Claudia out, and their date is long and full of confessions. He has lost his gun, and the comedy of the lost gun runs on through the day beside the two deathbeds, in a register that never quite meets theirs.
Movement IV
Earl speaks his regret from the bed, nearly without a break. It is the longest speech in the film and its summit in words: an old man going back over a marriage and a desertion, at the end of his life, with only a nurse to hear it. Linda, meanwhile, goes through a pharmacy and a lawyer’s office in a guilt that does not change key. The film is at its most exposed here, between a monologue that holds the screen and scenes that repeat one note at the top of their voice.
Then the film does something it has given no warning of. Its principal characters, each alone in a different place, sing Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” in turn, and the song passes from one to the next across the Valley. Nothing in the realism of the first two hours licensed it. It is sung without irony, and it lifts.
What the song says is what the cutting has been saying for two hours: that nine people in nine places share one state. The form says it in a single passage, more briefly than any story could. Frank comes at last to his father’s bedside, and the seducer is a son again, cursing the dying man and weeping over him. He comes back, he refuses, he curses, he stays: the oldest story of a son and a father, enacted rather than referred to.
Movement V
Night brings every strand to its crisis at once. Jimmy has a gun. Donnie has turned thief. Linda has taken an overdose. The cutting draws every life into the same hour, and the dread the score built through the first act comes due.
Then frogs fall from the sky. They fall on all the strands in one sequence, thudding on windscreens and on a man on a ladder, grotesque, comic and terrible at once. The rain stops a suicide and a robbery, and it does what the prologue said such things do. The number planted since the first hour is a verse of Exodus, the plague of frogs, and the film lets the plague fall on fathers who will not let their children go. It was placed in plain sight, and it rewards the viewer who comes back to find it, though the frogs do their work in the story whether or not the verse is seen.
The narrator returns at the close and declines, as he did at the start, to call any of it mere chance. The last turn belongs to Kurring and Claudia. The last shot is of Claudia’s face, and she smiles: the one injured child in the film who seems, at the end of the night, to have been reached.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test strand by strand, and the design holds: two dying fathers, Earl Partridge and Jimmy Gator, each with a child he wronged, and a quiz kid of the past and one of the present, so that the ruined child is shown at ten and at forty. The prologue is required, since it states the wager the frogs will cash; Phil’s telephone search is the thread that pulls the son to the deathbed. No strand could go. Much of the length could. Donnie’s declaration at the bar plays one need at twice the length it requires, Kurring’s date with Claudia is drawn out in its confessions, and Linda at the pharmacy and at her lawyer’s strikes one note of guilt twice. The design is required; much of the three hours at full volume is permitted rather than compelled. That holds the axis lowest of the twelve, and below the cap.
Score: 7.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: what parents do to children is not finished when the children grow up, and the parent who asks forgiveness at the end of his life asks for something the child may not be able to give. Earl, dying, confesses through Phil that he left a wife dying of cancer and a son to nurse her; the son became Frank Mackey, who teaches men revenge on women under the slogan “Respect the cock”, and his rage is shown as an abandoned boy’s grief. Jimmy cannot say whether he abused Claudia, and the not saying is the answer. What holds the axis well below the bar is how often the film says what it has shown, in Kurring’s speeches, the narrator’s close and confessions the second half overwrites: much of what it discloses it first announces.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Height is real and of several kinds. Robards’s monologue on his regret, delivered nearly unbroken from the bed, is the summit in speech; Frank’s collapse at his father’s bedside, the seducer reduced to a son cursing and weeping, is another. The sing-along of “Wise Up” rises by a device the film had not licensed until it uses it, and it lifts. The frogs are grotesque, comic and terrible at once, and the long first act, cut against Brion’s score, builds a mounting dread. What holds the figure is the price of that frequency. It is bought by pitch: Moore’s scenes and some of Macy’s are played at a hysteria that does not lift, and the volume of the whole is so constant that its peaks stand less high above it than they should.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Two archetypes are built rather than evoked. The prodigal son returning to the dying father is the spine of the Partridge strand, enacted, not alluded to: the son comes back, refuses, curses, stays. The sins of the fathers visited on the children are the plan of the cast, ordered in generations. The plague of frogs, the largest mythic gesture, is half built. The number 8:2 is planted from early on, so Exodus is designed into the fabric, and the plague falls on fathers who will not let their children go; it does plot work, stopping a suicide and a robbery. But its meaning rides on the planted number more than on the action, and a viewer can take the frogs as a Fortean event with no loss to the story. That half holds the axis well short of the bar.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the American ensemble mosaic proven by Altman, in Nashville and above all Short Cuts (1993), which had already closed a Los Angeles mosaic with a natural catastrophe. The frame is a proven path, and its catastrophe has a precedent. The turns are real and local: a sing-along that breaks naturalistic drama into something like musical theatre, without irony; frogs of no natural cause in place of Altman’s tremor, prepared by a prologue that insists such things happen; and a pitch, three hours of near continuous emotional volume with music under almost every scene, far from the cool observation of the model. The stake was large, a third feature at three hours with sequences that could have been laughed off the screen. But the form itself is inherited, and that holds the axis well below the bar.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Its knowledge is that these separate lives are one condition, and the form says it by cutting between them until they rhyme: Earl and Jimmy on their beds, Frank and Claudia refusing their fathers, Stanley and Donnie at either end of one injury. The prologue teaches the viewer to read the cross-cutting as meaningful; the sing-along shows nine people in nine places sharing one state; the frogs, falling on every strand in one sequence, make the convergence physical. A single-protagonist film could tell any of these stories; it could not say the injury is general. What holds the axis here is that the film does not leave its form to say it: the narrator argues the convergence in words the cutting has already made, and scenes held past their length slow the rhymes.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Twenty-seven years of return have yielded several readings that do not cancel one another: the religious, in the plague, the forgiveness and the narrator’s refusal of mere chance; the Fortean, raining animals as the world’s indifference; the psychological, a son’s working through a father’s death; and the generic, a film about television, where the quiz show and the seminar are the culture’s machines for using people. The planted 8:2s reward repeat viewing as a design found in the background. What holds the axis is where the readings arrive. They converge on one statement, that the past is not done with us and forgiveness is the only way out of it, which the film states itself through its policeman and its narrator. Much of what return finds, the first viewing was told.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s, and force and reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation of register more than of structure: the ensemble mosaic played as melodrama at full emotional volume, with music as the binding agent and a rupture of realism at its centre, rather than as Altman’s ironic survey. Structure had already moved further in the same decade, in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film of linked lives became a fashion in the next decade, but its main lines, Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel, descend from Altman and Iñárritu as much as from this film. Its clearest reach is a register of earnest, maximal American filmmaking and the consolidation of its maker’s standing, which belongs to the later films as much as to this one. Real, shared and diffuse.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Survival is weighed across about twenty-seven years. The form is whole: the theatrical cut survives complete, and nothing is charged for loss. Presence has held, in continuous circulation on home video, in repertory and on streaming, with a strong place in critical and popular regard for its decade, wide though not the widest of its films. The surface carries some charge: the late-1990s Valley, the quiz show as a cultural centre, the self-help seminar’s idiom and the Aimee Mann songs fix it to its moment, though the seminar has, if anything, gained point since. A presence that has held, weighed against a surface partly dated, sets the figure at the foot of what a span of twenty-five to twenty-nine years allows: the highest of the twelve, at the bar of the gate and no higher.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The command is real, and load-bearing in some departments. Robert Elswit’s photography and its Steadicam passages move through the studio, the hospital room and the houses with an energy that carries exposition. Dylan Tichenor’s cutting of nine strands across three hours, above all in the first act’s long build and the convergence at the frogs, is the film’s central achievement of craft. Robards, Hall, Cruise, Hoffman’s tender nurse and Reilly’s earnest policeman bear weight, and Jon Brion’s score binds the cross-cutting. But strain shows in several departments at once, and it holds the figure: the volume is often unmodulated, Moore’s performance is pitched at one shrill level, the second half’s dialogue overwrites its confessions, and the score in places tells the viewer what to feel. Real force, well short of a making in which every department bears weight without strain.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The two most distant elements are the seminar’s comedy of male aggression and the rain of frogs. They are put under one law, stated in the prologue: the world produces coincidences too exact to be chance, and the film treats its people as caught in such a pattern. Under that law the sing-along and the frogs are meant as its fullest expressions, and the 8:2 markers bind the last act to the first hour. The range is very wide, from game-show comedy to two deaths. What holds the axis is that the range is held more by declaration than by tone: Kurring’s comedy of the lost gun and Donnie’s braces sit outside the dread of the deathbeds, and the frogs, for all their preparation, can still read as a device placed upon the film rather than grown from it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Many orders are present: consciousness in the dying, the addicted and the ashamed; the family across three generations; television and the culture of performance; commerce in Earl’s production company, Frank’s seminar and the quiz show as an industry; labour in the nurse, the policeman and the electronics store; the law in Kurring and the lawyer; the natural order in the weather and the plague; the sacred in the Exodus frame and the question of forgiveness. What holds the axis is how they are held. Every order passes through the one lens of father and child, each seen as a version of the family wound rather than in its own right. History is absent, the city is a set of interiors joined by roads, the state is a single patrolman, and the sacred is invoked more than examined.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.0. A film that survives whole in its theatrical cut after twenty-seven years, its presence held though its surface is partly dated; a form that cuts nine lives together until they rhyme and makes their convergence physical in one sequence; and a making whose cutting and photography carry three hours, against a volume often left unmodulated.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.1: a strict design of two fathers, two children and two quiz kids, carried through scenes that say the same thing more than once, so that much of the three hours is permitted rather than compelled. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 7.5: a reorganisation of register whose reach is shared with Altman and Iñárritu, and many orders of life held through the one lens of father and child. Then The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 7.6: readings that arrive where the film has already said, and a law declared more firmly than its tone keeps it.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.1 falls four tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.0, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.7, The Swerve at 7.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.5 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.1, below 7.5; Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Magnolia in its theatrical cut, the version scored, released in the United States by New Line Cinema in December 1999, 188 minutes, in colour and anamorphic widescreen, in English, from the prologue’s three tales to the last shot of Claudia: written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, photographed by Robert Elswit, edited by Dylan Tichenor, with a score by Jon Brion and songs by Aimee Mann; with Jason Robards, Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, Philip Baker Hall, Melora Walters, John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Jeremy Blackman and Melinda Dillon, and Ricky Jay as the narrator. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted; the film is described in its strands and principal scenes, not shot by shot. One slogan is quoted, whose words are certain; all other speech is described, and songs are named by title alone. The Golden Bear at Berlin in 2000 and three Academy Award nominations are facts of reception and are not evidence on any axis. Details that could not be verified, among them whether any other cut has been released, the events in its maker’s life commonly cited as a source, the take lengths, the scene count and the share of running time given to each strand, are not given.