This was an inside joke from Akthelt and Gunnel. When people in the kingdom of Thak wanted to congratulate one another for a job well done, a war well fought or sex well made, they said, 'Gaf throgs!' ('Give thanks!'). They even had a Thanksgiving Day devoted to such feelings; they called it Throgsgafen Day.
It was a perfect September football weekend when Trumper lugged his suitcase and his thesis bound copy of Akthelt and Gunnel to the Iowa City bus station. He had his PhD and his memories of selling pennants and buttons and bells. He guessed he was going to look for a job. After all, what was a PhD for? But it was a bad time of year to look for a teaching post: the academic year had just begun. He was too late for this year, and it was too early to find an opening for next year.
He felt like Maine, seeing the new baby and being with Colm. He knew he'd be welcome there for a while, but he couldn't live there. He felt like New York, too, and seeing Tulpen, but he didn't know how to introduce himself. He had an image of how he'd like to return - as someone triumphant, like a cured cancer patient. But he couldn't decide what disease he'd had when he left, so he hardly knew if he was cured.
He spent a long time looking at a Greyhound map of the United States before buying a ticket to Boston. He supposed there was much to recommend Boston, in the dim light of teaching jobs; furthermore, he had never seen the birthplace of Merrill Overturf.
Also, on the Greyhound map of the United States, Boston was roughly halfway between Maine and New York. And on a map of me, he thought, that's about where I am.
37
Audience Craze, Critical Acclaim
and Rave Reviews for Fucking Up
VARIETY ANNOUNCED THAT 'Ralph Packer's newest film is clearly the best thing to come out of the so-called underground this year. Of course this distinction could conceivably be awarded to any film with some content and style, but Packer's film is even subtle. He has at last expanded his documentary approach to a finely focused situation; he is dealing with characters at last, instead of groups, and technically his work is as fine as ever. Admittedly, not many viewers will find much to interest them in Packer's rather self-centered and inert main character, but ...'
The New York Times said, 'If an era of commercially successful, low-budget films is truly upon us, we may at last give birth in this country to the vital documentary style which the Canadians have been producing with such excellence in recent years. And if small, independent film makers can ever achieve widespread and major theater-distribution, then the sleight-of-hand style - which Ralph Packer has at last found a home for, in his "F--ing Up" - is going to be much imitated. I am not sure that it is a truly enriching or satisfying style, but Packer has sharpened his craft well. It is Packer's subject which eludes me. He doesn't develop a subject; he simply keeps bringing it up ...'
Newsweek called the film 'An elaborately polished, honed, slicked-over, bantering movie which disguises itself as a quest: to explore the psyche of its main character - through a choppy montage of pseudo-interviews with the character's former wife, present girlfriend, dubious friends, and with irritating interruptions from the main character himself, who plays a cute game of pretending he wants nothing to do with the movie. If that were true, he would indeed be wise. Not only does the film never get to the bottom of what makes the main character tick, but the film stops ticking long before its end.'
Time, honoring a long tradition of disagreeing with Newsweek, trumpeted: 'Ralph Packer's "F--ing Up" is a beautifully compressed film - quiet and understated in every way. Bogus Trumper, credited with the film's innovative sound track, gives a fine acting performance in the role of an aloof, tight-lipped failure with one busted marriage in his past, one cool and shaky relationship in the present - an absolute paranoiac victimized by his own self-analysis. He is the unwilling subject of Packer's uncannily delicate scrutiny, which takes the form of a trim, point-blank documentary which pieces together and overlaps interviews and random comments with some exquisitely straight and deceptively simple shots of Trumper doing perfectly ordinary things. It is a film about making a film about someone involved in making a film, but Trumper emerges as a kind of hero when he rejects all his friends and the movie - Packer's subtle way of putting down a psyche-picking belief in the discovery of any true motives ...'
Trumper read all these in his father's den at Great Boar's Head.
'Is that the Time review?' his mother asked him. 'I like the Time review.'
His mother had collected and saved all the reviews, and apparently the reason she liked the one from Time was that it mentioned Trumper by name. She hadn't seen the movie and didn't seem to realize that it was about her son's cruel, sad life. Neither did the reviewers.
His father said, 'I don't suppose it will ever be shown up here.'
'All the films we want to see never get up here,' his mother said.
The film hadn't gotten out of New York yet, though it was scheduled to be show in Boston, San Francisco and a few other big-city art cinemas. It might reach a few large campuses too, but it wasn't likely to turn up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire - thank God. He himself hadn't seen the film yet.
He'd been through a month of teacher interviews in and around Boston and had come home for a weekend now and then, to console his father's ulcer and to appear grateful - which he truly was - and for the new Volkswagen his father had given him. A kind of graduation present, he supposed.
It looked more and more likely that he'd have to wait until spring to find a job; he had discovered that his new PhD had about the same appeal and importance at an interview as having freshly shined shoes. About the only openings at this time of year were in public high schools, and somehow a PhD in comparative literature, with a thesis in Old Low Norse, did not seem suitable training for a class in world culture, from Caesar to Eisenhower, and English composition. Also, he didn't even know how to look at a sixteen-year-old.
His father fixed himself another milk and honey, and made Bogus another bourbon with an expression on his face that revealed how much he'd like to trade stomachs with his son.
Bogus read some more of his mother's collection of reviews.
The New Yorker said that it was 'rare and refreshing to see an American film with enough self-confidence to trust in a light touch. What Packer manages with his new crew of non-actors should make some of our superstars feel insecure - or at least angry with their screenwriters. Lead actor Bogus Trumper (whose sound tracking is just a bit too clever) is remarkably effective in portraying the self-protective, shallow cool of a man who has failed to communicate with women beyond a self-satisfying level ...'
'The women are beautiful!' proclaimed The Village Voice. 'What's missing in Packer's film is any clue whatsoever as to why two such frankly open and stunning complete women would have anything to do with such a weak, enigmatic, unfulfilled man ...'
Playboy termed the film 'hip and complex, with the sexual vitality of the characters just barely concealed, like the impression of a voluptuous body under silk ...'
Though it enjoyed 'the vivid pace of the film', Esquire found the ending 'a cheap emotional device. The pregnancy scene is simply an old and over-used gimmick for soliciting audience response.'
What pregnancy scene? wondered Bogus.
The Saturday Review, on the other hand, found the ending 'pure Packer at his understated best. The light casualness of the pregnancy brings all the airy intellectual speculations up against the hard fact that she loved him ...'
Why? Trumper thought. Who loved him? Loved whom? Was Ralph wringing sentiment from Biggie's recent child by Couth? But how had he tied that in?
Life fumbled to articulate it. 'The surface vignette approach almost demands a nonending sort of ending; a progression which fails to develop in depth, but instead elects to swivel a story - simply showing more facets on the surface - would be pretentious in choosing a dramatic ending centered on an inevitable event. "F***ing Up" leads to no such inevitable event. Rather, in that last blunt image of pregnancy - brief and matter-of-fact - Packer achieves a definitive non-statement ...'