Shortcuts

In Who Am I This Time? and other remarkable studies based on his clinical experience as a psychoanalyst living in Los Angeles, Jay Martin surmises that what nowadays brings patients to his office is not, as in the past, feelings of isolation, alienation, or estrangement from other people or from

the world, but rather what he calls feelings of oppression—that is, almost paranoidlike feelings that the world is out to get us, drat it is collapsing, tumbling in upon us from all sides. Robert Altman's Short Cuts comprises an analysis and cinematic reconstruction of many of the sources of oppression. The film is so long (3V & hours) and so intricately woven that its viewing, more than drat of an epic or a passion play, is creatively oppressive. Twenty-four stories are crafted from Raymond Carver's sparsely written prose that treats of unnameable events—loss, separation, tragedy—in me suburban malls and fast-food joints of plastic America. As we hear in the din of a cartoon that blares from a television set in a living room, Carver and Altman aim at a poaching of platitudes. From an aesthetic or artistic angle we might say that in his collaboration with the writings Alt-man sets as his goal, like Gustave Flaubert before him, the creation of an enduring representation of universal banality.

And, as in Flaubert's or Carver's work, the reigning visual impression is arid, dry, saccharine. Nothing in the images or their montage elevates us to a sublime view or yields a higher truth about everyday life in L. A. Altman's frame recalls the perplexing effects of a quashed volume of illusion that was the signature of the gambling dens seen in California Split or the barroom basements in Nashville, where characters roamed in a depdi of field flattened by a telephoto lens. In Short Cuts, when a vista over Los Angeles does appear, it is seen as a sheen under a matte haze of smog; when town house courtyards, garages, or streets open onto broader views, the latter appear as creased maps