I finally got the chance to see Peter Bogdanovich’s last fictional feature recently at the Museum of Modern Art. Technically speaking, I saw Squirrels to the Nuts, the director’s cut of She’s Funny That Way, the title it was released under in 2014 in a heavily redacted form.1 For a movie with virtually no reputation, even among ardent cinephiles, this director’s cut turned out to be a surprisingly entertaining little movie—that is, if you were willing to accept it on its own, admittedly idiosyncratic, terms.
The film is an oddity, a throwback to a 1930s screwball sensibility. This madcap farce follows a theater director played by Owen Wilson and a young call girl turned actress played by Imogen Poots whose paths cross sexually, romantically, and professionally as he commences rehearsals on a new play. But it was this old-fashioned approach, I understood immediately, that had been the source of audiences’ and critics’ negative reaction back in 2014. So many people today think that they admire “realism” and “plausibility”—but, to my mind, that just means that they’ve unthinkingly accepted the arbitrary narrative conventions of their time. Bogdanovich and his co-screenwriter (and former wife) Louise Stratten, on the other hand, were ostentatiously embracing a quite different aesthetic agenda. They’d consciously orchestrated their screenplay around a series of increasingly odd coincidences whose implausibility was the very source of their ideas about both comedy and their characters’ lives.
I was at MoMA on assignment, and I assumed that I’d write an article that compared the two versions of the film. And eventually, I did come around to preferring the director’s cut (even though I liked that they’d edited out most of the scenes with the old judge for the release version), but when I left the theater, the differences between the two versions was not the aspect of the experience that interested me. Instead, I found myself thinking about artists’ late careers, that sometimes frustrating but sometimes fruitful period when their decades-long drift from the triumph that originally made their reputation has provided them with a surprising sense of artistic freedom. But I also found myself thinking about questions of taste—about how our artistic judgments sometimes emerge from within as an unbidden response, but how other times they’re the product of a conscious act of will. I’d found myself in the theater chuckling along with the movie sometimes without fully understanding why; but I also knew that on some level I’d made a mindful decision to like the film precisely because I understood that most other moviegoers wouldn’t. When a filmmaker makes unusual decisions, we have to decide whether we want to undertake that same aesthetic journey along with them. But I’d been interested in Bogdanovich’s career for decades, so I was primed to be open-minded. And once I willed myself to be liberal with my judgments, I found myself reconsidering—surprising, given Bogdanovich’s very obvious conservatism—the extent to which we might think of him as a radical filmmaker.
I’d happened to be reading—speaking of funny coincidences—Edward Said’s last book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, an examination of artists whose final works especially intrigued him. Throughout the book, he channels Theodor Adorno, who saw Beethoven as the paradigmatic late stylist because his final compositions veered off—perhaps because of the wisdom one gets from the nearness of death—into unexpectedly avant-garde territory. Said was interested in Adorno’s conception of a “late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness.”2 He admired a certain type of creatively intransigent antagonism that emerged only in an artist’s final years, “a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.”3 It was this type of late-stage experimentation, Said and Adorno believed, that became the harbinger of modernism. It was “late-style Beethoven,” Said wrote, that “presides over music’s rejection of the new bourgeois order and forecasts the totally authentic and novel art of Schoenberg.”4 We usually conceive of artistic innovation sprouting from the intrinsic rebelliousness of youth. But for Said and Adorno, the most innovative art could most fruitfully derive, surprisingly, from the vexations of old age.
I never would have thought about Bogdanovich along these lines. I’ve liked almost all his movies, but I’ve never thought of him as any kind of radical. He’s always struck me, instead, as a backwards-looking traditionalist. Enamored with the classical auteurs he’d interviewed throughout the 1960s, he’d seemed like a man who didn’t quite fit in with the ethos of the freewheeling Hollywood of the 70s. While peers like John Cassavetes and Robert Altman were taking bold artistic risks, Bogdanovich wanted to retreat into the old studio system, turning each of his movies into an homage to—or parody of—some old classical genre: What’s Up Doc? felt like a newer version of Bringing Up Baby, while At Long Last Love felt like a reimagining of an Astaire-Rogers vehicle. If anything, Bogdanovich seemed to be the very antithesis of this Saidian/Adornian model of the late avant-gardist. It was his friend Orson Welles–with his never-ending experimentation on F for Fake and the Other Side of the Wind—who was the real cinematic paradigm of the forward-looking late career radical.
But maybe there is an opposite figure, I began to wonder: the anti-late-Beethoven, the obverse of the aging Orson Welles—in other words, the type of artist who stands equally outside of his or her own era, who is equally idiosyncratic, equally antagonistic to the mores of the present day, but who travels in the opposite chronological direction. There are plenty of artists who work against the present with a gleeful skepticism about any notion of the intrinsic teleological development of their artform and who thus feel that it’s just as valid to lean backward as it is to travel forward in time. Each of these two types of artist is moving in a centrifugal trajectory antagonistically away from the same fixed point of the present—perhaps with the same passionate velocity—and their final destination’s equal radial distance from that center creates a circle that defines the aesthetic periphery of the present age’s possible experimentation. So though they end up on opposite sides of this circle, they’re each as radically distant from the banal assumptions of the contemporary culture that they’re both working against. In this sense, Peter Bogdanovich’s aesthetic anachronism is as much a strident critique of the artistic norms of his time as are Beethoven’s final string quartets or the hyperbolic montage of The Other Side of the Wind.
It was this very anachronism, after all, that was the cause of audiences’ and critics’ complaints at the initial screenings of both Squirrels to the Nuts and She’s Funny That Way. The preview audience during post-production remarked that the film struck them as “old fashioned” and “unbelievable.”5 It was this negative reaction that led producers to demand revisions, edits, and re-shoots. But as is usual in cases like these, none of their post-production hijinks could fix—commercially, at least—what had always been destined to be a minor moneymaker. With a new flashback framing narration, a new ending, and thirty minutes shorter than Squirrels to the Nuts, audiences and critics still considered She’s Funny That Way just as old fashioned and implausible as the original. In The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis referred to it as a “creaky throwback” that was “choking on nostalgia.”6
Maybe because the Said book had already gotten me thinking about artists’ late careers in spatial and temporal terms—as a chronological distance from contemporary aesthetics, whether forward or backward in time—I similarly began to see Bogdanovich’s unlikely radicalism making itself known along spatial and temporal coordinates as well. Though most filmmakers wouldn’t typically deploy terms like these, their ideas about stories are often predicated on a set of spatiotemporal assumptions. A conflict between a protagonist and some antagonistic force in the beginning propels a story forward in time on some journey, traveling from one place to another in order to overcome the antagonist and resolve the conflict for the sake of the future. And Bogdanovich and Stratten’s organizing principle for their screenplay—the crazy agglomeration of coincidences that continually brought the characters together in unlikely places at unlikely moments—was similarly constructed on idiosyncratic spatiotemporal principles.
Wilson and Poots meet, for instance, in a room at a posh hotel, where one of his actors is coincidentally staying across the hall and where, later, Wilson and Poots have a second rendezvous at the exact same time when the actor is meeting up with Wilson’s wife and the older judge happens to be meeting another call girl in the room next door. There are three scenes in the office of the therapist played by Jennifer Aniston, where two of the characters, coincidentally, turn out to be her clients. Four characters converge at the Cloisters, while another three bump into each other at two different department stores. There’s a scene at an Italian restaurant where almost every character shows up in wave after parallel wave, there are three chance encounters with other call girls from Owen Wilson’s past, and there are three scenes at the theater, where Bogdanovich and Stratten try to mix and match every combination of characters they can think of. In fact, almost every scene is one of these chance encounters, as if the entire movie is an ongoing elaboration of the crowded ocean-liner cabin sequence in the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. And it is this constant convergence that dictates the heightening emotional tension that continues to propel the story—not forward, exactly, but on an arc that’s always curving back in on itself.
Bogdanovich and Stratten constructed this unusual spatiotemporal design of their plot not because of any random formal inclination but because they’d begun from an atypical philosophical stance about human character and its possible amelioration. That is, they were skeptical in the original script—as they should be—that people are capable of bettering themselves through struggle. Instead, they seem to think that it’s perfectly understandable and, in fact, rather amusing that people are so incapable of being good. So instead of a protagonist journeying through time and space to some successful endpoint, they arrange the story around a collection of spaces that echo and mirror each other. The characters move, but they keep returning to the same places. They do not develop, but merely reiterate their personality over and over again. And every character keeps returning to the same locations because their goals and desires are all roughly equivalent. No one can solve their psychological dilemmas any better than the others; their frivolous sexual and romantic desires are all equally basic. They cannot overcome their primal impulses. So they merely circle and return, circle and return, facing the same type of partner or the same type of foe in the same type of crisis over and over again. Bogdanovich and Stratten thus designed the narrative around contrasting spatial forces: a centripetal force that continually pulls every character together like a magnet into the same physical spaces and a centrifugal force that continually explodes them out of those same spaces. But because they are tethered together by the equality of their trifling passions, they’re inevitably drawn back together to re-enact the same conflicts all over again.
But by abandoning the typical plot trajectory, Bogdanovich and Stratten stage a world in which the characters’ romantic tensions eventually come to be seen—by the characters and the audience as well—as not weighty enough to merit the anguish and consternation that they had engendered earlier in the narrative. Why care about your spouse’s cheating, after all, if you know that these forces will just keep on playing out in the future? The structure itself emphasizes the insignificance of their emotional conflicts. But theirs is not a nihilistic vision. On the contrary, it is the characters’ eventual wise acceptance of this ongoing centrifugal rupturing that creates the centripetal force that will, by the end, bring about their modest reconciliation.
This is why I’ve come to prefer the ending of the film’s director’s cut, Squirrels to the Nuts.The change in the movie’s title, after all, hinted at the revision’s ideological shift. Most people want to feed nuts to the squirrels, Owen Wilson says repeatedly in a line he’s cribbed from Ernst Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown, but if someone wants to feed squirrels to the nuts, God bless them. So it had originally been a movie about the liberating power of an incongruous reimagining of cultural mores, but the producers felt the need to tame it into an innocuous entertainment with a conventional message. In the original, all the characters—appropriately enough—convene into a single room in the final scene, some of them gracefully returning to the person they loved at the beginning, others trying things out with a new partner. But none of the various romantic entanglements seems to have harmed or helped anyone that much in the end. In She’s Funny That Way, on the other hand, Bogdanovich acquiesced to the producers’ entreaties: he added a new beginning to center the entire story more explicitly around Imogen Poots’s reflections on her rise to fame, and in the revised final scene, Quentin Tarantino appears as a comic deus ex machina to triumphantly sweep her away to a world of Hollywood celebrity. When I first saw the movie on DVD, I thought that this resolution was charmingly funny. But this new scene was the producers’ way of imposing a classical narrative structure and thus a concomitant conservative ideology that suggests that we can find emotional fulfillment from money and prestige. And in doing so, they erased the film’s original—perhaps radical—celebration of humans’ innate infallibility that Bogdanovich had admired in old-fashioned inspirations like Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game.
That being said, my increasing distance from the film after the screening at MoMA seems to be reinforcing the notion that our aesthetic taste is a conscious act of will—an act of will with spatial and temporal dimensions. If we choose to do so, we can adopt the idiosyncratic decisions of a late-career stylist like Bogdanovich as our own and make the decision to travel with him backward rather than forward in time. From that radical distance from the present, we might remind ourselves of an aesthetic sensibility and thus an ethics that our culture has forgotten. The revivification of these abandoned creeds may be just as valuable as the insights of some utopian future. It’s probably good for us to consciously make this type of journey now and then, even if we sometimes feel a nagging suspicion bubbling up from our unconscious, as admittedly I do, that the aesthetic voyage into the future—as in Beethoven’s late string quartets and Orson Welles’s over-the-hill experimentation—might ultimately be more promising.
1. James Kenney, a lecturer in the CUNY system and ardent Bogdanovich fan, came across an eBay listing for a SONY HDCAM tape that appeared to contain the original 113-minute version of the film. The tape had been part of a haul from an unpaid Manhattan Mini Storage locker purchased at auction by a full-time E-Bay seller. Originally listed at $150, Kenney bargained the dealer down to $100. Later, he managed to make contact with Bogdanovich himself, who was thrilled to get hold of this version that he assumed had been lost forever. See Kenney’s account of the story on his own blog.
2. Edward W. Said, “Timeliness and Lateness,” On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New York: Vintage, 2006: 7.
3. Said, 8.
4. Said, 13.
5. Ben Kenigsberg, “Peter Bogdanovich Had a Vision for This Film. Now It’s Finally Being Seen,” The New York Times, March 25, 2022.
6. Jeannette Catsoulis, “Review: ‘She’s Funny That Way’ Offers Tomfoolery Amid the Floodlights,” The New York Times, August 20, 2015.