“Son of Friedman”
by Emma Cline
from the July 1, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
This is Emma Cline’s third story to appear in The New Yorker since her breakthrough novel, The Girls, came out in 2016. I’m afraid I’ve yet to read a one, but this one is about the movie business — or, at least, takes place in that world — so I’m keen to check her work out finally.
Here are the story’s opening lines, which introduce us to George Friedman, a film producer:
The light in the restaurant was golden light, heavy light—an outdated sort of light, honestly, popular in the nineties but now a remnant of a kind of gaudy, old-school pleasure it was no longer fashionable to enjoy. It had been five years, maybe more, since George had been to this place. It was true that the food was not very good. Big steaks, creamed vegetables, drizzles of raspberry coulis over everything, all the food you ate back then because caring about what you ate wasn’t yet part of having money. Still, he liked the fleshy Mayan shrimp on ice, the gratifying emptiness when the meat popped from the socket. He wiped his fingers, tight from lemon juice and shrimp, on the napkin in his lap.
However successful he’s been, George is on his way out. He’s getting old and he no longer has the clout he once possessed. When we meet him he’s been waiting twenty minutes for an actor. He’s got his ultimate demise on his mind too:
The scientist wrote about hovering above his own life, seeing each part of it like a dream from which he would soon wake. This is just a dream, George told himself. It’s all vapor. George had squeezed out nothing but a vague awareness of the grammatical errors in the text. Some lines of inquiry were not ultimately helpful. He was on his second Martini. Another thing that used to be stylish and had fallen out of favor. The antiseptic chill, the bracing rinse—why had he ever stopped drinking them?
From her interview, I understand that this is going to some more uncomfortable places. George’s son has taken on filmmaking and the film will debut later. Apparently it doesn’t go well. Let’s see what happens . . .
Please feel free to comment below with your thoughts on this story or Emma Cline’s work in general.
I finished the story. While I found it predictable in its larger movements, I still enjoyed it for the small moments. For example, even if George and William are nothing new, I liked a lot of their interactions. Cline captures the fine details. If George’s late-in-life disappointment is also nothing particularly new, I liked this part in particular:
All in all, a good portrait of George’s lousy night out.
The only work by Emma Cline I have read are her three most recent short stories published by The New Yorker. All three are stories of pitiable older men who have problematic relationships with their adult or near-adult children. In all three cases I found the men she depicts to be either uninteresting, inauthentic, or both. While I have not disliked any of these stories enough to dread seeing another one show up in The New Yorker, I have gotten little enjoyment from any of them. Perhaps this one is a little better than the previous two, but not enough that I would recommend it.
.
One problem Cline makes for herself is having George be a producer instead of an director or actor or writer. A movie producer need not be a creative person at all. Some producers are just good at getting the money to finance films. Some are good at knowing who the talented writers, directors, and actors are. So there is no reason to think that George is a creative type of person at all, and thus Benji’s attempt to make a film is not really the case of a “son of” situation like Cline seems to want it to be. Also, by making him a producer it takes all the punch out of the moment when the women recognize William and don;t know who George is. Of course they don’t recognize him. I wouldn’t recognize any Hollywood producers if I came across them (unless they have also been successful as actors or directors), even the most successful ones working today. That they don’t recognize him means nothing other than that he is a producer.
.
There were two things I did like about the story. First, throughout the story it seems pretty clear that everyone is pretty happy except George. Benji has made a bad film, but so what? He is really happy he even got to make and show it and seems to be having a good time with his friends after the showing. Even William, his godfather, seems happy for him and not too worried that the film was bad. It’s only George who struggles with this. This does a nice job of making him more isolated from others in the story. Second, I like how Cline has George ask William for a favour right after the women leave. It draws a nice parallel between how the women impose on William and he has to gracefully sidestep their request and then he has to do the same again with George. George is reduced to being just another person who wants something from William.
David, Unlike you I found the character quite authentic. It is not hard to imagine that the inner life of many intelligent, successful people is an interior monologue of “all this is meaningless, maybe it would be more meaningful if I were more successful like William but probably not…” And after all, we have no idea what William’s interior monologue is, and it is not hard to imagine (how his face suddenly slumps, his practiced camraderie, the hand on the shoulder) that he too is continuously going through the same monologue. In fact (an actual fact), after listening to the story, I shuffled to a song, by Lambchop called In Care Of 8675309. KurtWagner (now 60), sings:
When your day implodes
And your afternoon grows old
And you step outside to the rain drops glide
And your dog slips out and you shake the cobwebs free
Is there more to this breath that you are taking?
And then Cline’s story had George (mis)quote Oliver Sacks: “I was just grateful to have been a sentient being in this world.” But George is thinking just before that, “So many opportunities, on this Earth, for embarrassment.” Not gratitude, but misogyny, straight up no chaser.
On the other hand, I totally agree with you that a short story about one man’s inability to find much grace or gratiude in the world, all dried up, “an asshole” as his ex-wife notes, is not much of a way to pass 30 minutes.
The Danny Boyle directed, Beatles-themed movie Yesterday is being released today. According to Wikipedia, they paid $10 million for the rights to the Beatles songs they used. The entire production budget for the film was $26 million. I was reminded of George’s thought about his son’s film that paying for the rights to the Beatles songs in it would be prohibitively expensive for him. The Wikipedia information, if accurate, gives a good idea just how much it would have cost him.
I found this story to be underwhelming. The characters are pretty stock, and never go beyond the confines of how they are initially portrayed. The protagonist seems about the same at the end of the story as he was at the beginning, and ditto for me as a reader. I don’t recall any of the sentences or images standing out to me — the language is quite plain. Maybe there is another level to this story that I’ve missed, but to me there just isn’t much here. [shrug]
Beautifully written but extremely miserable story. To shrug & say there isn’t much there undermines the writer’s skill & achievement. All the same it is a bleak little piece
poor benji!
Pretty much retired film producer George’s relationship with once famous actor William as outlined in the pre-film screening dinner meeting at the bar/restaurant is the best part of Emma Cline’s “Son of Friedman” short story. It seems real. The dialogue sounds convincing. And Cline could have ended the story when the two of them left to go see Benjy’s film because their friendship is the centerpiece of the story.
Everything else seems shallow, slipshod and unbelievable. A short film about love with no plot mentioned, no cast mentioned and with interviews of adjunct college professors teaching at Santa Monica City College and an unaffordable limited Beatles song compilation soundtrack? Such a scriptless music video masquerading as a quasi film short/short feature seems so cliche. And the film business parts seem so generalized compared to Joan Didion’s “In Hollywood” piece from her nonfiction book “The White Album”.
Of course, Cline sets up Benji as lazy and unserious because he never went to film school at either UCLA or USC and Santa Monica College does not have a film school (although hypothetically Benji could have transfered to UCLA for his last 2 years as an undergraduate and possibly been accepted as a graduate student into UCLA’s film school program). And if Benji really wanted to make a serious film about love (another cliche) it would have had a plot, student actors and maybe a few original songs, but certainly not a Beatles songs soundtrack (their songs being a unique way of talking about love that makes it so Benji really didn’t have to create anything but still wants to be perceived as having been creative).
A serious film school student makes his or her film, submits it to Sundance or Tribeca film festivals where it is either rejected or screened with hopes of it getting distribution to a limited number of art film theater screens. Maybe this is his only his slacker film student “idea” or “formula” even though the best “formula” films such as Natalie Portman’s first film, “The Professional” features characters and a more character-centric offbeat relationship that was so much more creative than the first Bruce Willis “Diehard” film. Even Cline’s reference to a “David Hume thing” is superficial. Hume is known for the idea that physical and spiritual reality can be perceived but not quantified or as one commentator wrote, “Although he would almost certainly have believed that there was indeed an independently existing world of material objects, causally interacting with each other, which we perceive and represent to ourselves through our senses, his point was that none of this could be actually proved.”
What does that have to do with the story of a rich producer’s son making a shlock film that will only over get one screening? I know Hollywood film has deteriorated a lot since films like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “Sunset Boulevard” or even “It’s A Wonderful Life.” But it’s ironic when the deterioration of Hollywood is described by technically deteriorated Hollywood short stories.
For some reason, I am empathetic to this and it may have to do with seeing Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yesterday, and having some sympathy for has-beens such as the character played by De Caprio in that film. Someone called this beautifully written and miserable above and I agree. Nothing here is new yet she engrossed me through her good, yet not flashy, engaging literary style. Why, though, did I think George was a director not a producer as seemed clear to others?
Ken: “Why, though, did I think George was a director not a producer as seemed clear to others?”
.
Probably because the story would have been much better had he been a director and the only fairly specific reference to what kind of work he does is when referring to plays, not films, that he produced. Her vagueness left the door open just enough for you to think he might be a director and your mind decided to take the better option. In Willing Davidson’s interview of Cline about this story he states that George is a producer in the first question. Those who read the interview might be less likely to think George is a director because of that. But speaking of Cline’s vagueness….
.
.
Larry: “Even Cline’s reference to a “David Hume thing” is superficial…. What does that have to do with the story of a rich producer’s son making a shlock film that will only over get one screening?”
.
Cline does not do her reader any favours by being unnecessarily vague here, but I did a little searching to track down what she is talking about. Cline writes, “The Hume had been mentioned in one of these columns everyone was reading, part of a series by this scientist who was terminally ill.” I googled and found that the scientist she was referring to was Oliver Sacks (Why not mention his name? Odd.) and the work she is referring to when she says “the Hume” is the brief (3000 word) autobiography called “My Own Life” that he wrote in the final year of his life after becoming terminally ill with cancer. It’s a very simple recounting of his life. Cline presumably mentions Hume and Sacks because they were both men of great accomplishment who had a chance to reflect on and write about their lives before they died. George is not dying (so far as we know), but is reflecting on his life as well. Hume and Sacks might represent the level of greatness he had hoped to achieve in his own field and serve as a contrast for his actual lesser significance.