TRUST IN HAL HARTLEY

With a new movie out is it finally time for Gen X's most indie filmmaker?

Collage by Jim Hanas

The signs have been accumulating for more than a year.

The in-crowd millennials of The Drift wrote a squib on their Instagram about discovering Trust. Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers deployed “Theory of Achievement” in the New York Times to shame Gen X bros who had careened to the right. I even heard the filmmaker is blurbing a friend’s novel. Is the Hal Hartley revival finally afoot?

Yes and probably—ultimately—no. (It’s been tried before). But in case I’m wrong I want to get down what Hal Hartley was before it arrives and everyone has their own ideas. Such an exercise would be possible for other ’90s auteurs, of course. What did it mean to see Reservoir Dogs (1992) the week it opened or to see Rushmore (1998) before Wes Anderson became an adjective? But Hartley has managed to remain that most important thing to Gen Xers: a shibboleth. A secret handshake exchanged by those in on the bit. To persist as shibboleth is not easy. (Maybe Jim Jarmusch has succeeded?) One must avoid dated irrelevancy on the one hand (has anyone heard from Neil LaBute?) and commercial self-parody on the other. (Pick an Anderson.)

Hal Hartley does have a new movie out. His first feature since Ned Rifle (2014), the conclusion of the Henry Fool trilogy. Did you know that? I suspect that either you did not know that or have known it for so long that you now suspect I am a poser. (That’s what shibboleth-speakers call people who have gained, but not earned, access to the shibboleth. Tedious, but it comes with the territory.) It’s called Where to Land, he paid for it via Kickstarter—as he has for his projects since Ned Rifle—and I doubt a large audience will see it. Hartley produces and sells his own box-sets and offers his movies via streaming on his website, but the new one isn’t there yet. It had a handful of screenings at the Roxy Cinema in New York, which is where I saw it.

I loved it, and you if you like Hal Hartley, you will too. Hartley is an acquired taste, and seeing the new movie made me recall the experience of first seeing Trust (1990) and Simple Men (1992), the final two movies in his so-called Long Island Trilogy. Actors don’t exactly act in Hal Hartley movies. They say their lines and are. Robert Bresson, who preferred the term “models” to “actors” is often brought up in connection with Hartley, and while that is a good starting point, Hartley has a much lighter touch. He calls his preferred delivery “without interpretation” in a nod to (known Bresson stan) Susan Sontag. The spine of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag biography also seems to appear on every bookshelf in Where to Land.

Martin Donovan and Adrienne Shelly in Trust

Starting in the late ’80s, Hartley developed a troupe of performers who mastered the technique. Martin Donovan became his Jean-Pierre Léaud and Adrienne Shelly his Anna Karina. While his inspirations are many, I mostly see ’60s Godard, Band of Outsiders^¹or Masculin Féminin, but with less protective coolness. “I find I’m having a kind of dialogue with Godard by trying to describe what’s beautiful in his work,” Hartley has said. “Of course, even if I try to imitate it, I get it wrong, because I fall into my own groove.” Hartley’s relationship to Godard is something like Jonathan Richman’s relationship to Lou Reed. Deep influence fueled by an entirely different source.

The immediate effect of deadpan delivery is estrangement, which is often leavened—as in Godard or Tarantino—with a wink of knowingness that makes it more palatable to everyone. Hartley more frequently risks skipping this second layer, and it is a tangible risk. The first time I saw Trust, I remember thinking, “Is this awful or the most exhilarating movie I have ever seen?”

Where Hartley is concerned, everything rests on how you answer this question.

To do so, comparison with Kevin Smith’s roughly contemporaneous Clerks (1994) is useful. While its charm has grown on me over the years, Clerks is not a good movie. The acting is not good. It is an example of naive art made by a team working at the edge of their capacities, sort of like The Ramones. The proof of this is that the acting in Smith’s later movies, none of which I can bring to mind, got better with investment and experience. (Again, like The Ramones.)

In a Hal Hartley movie, on the other hand, the actors deliver their lines in a stilted, expressionless way because that’s the way he wants them to do it. It is not an accident or a deficiency. It is the vision. The proof of this is that the vision has hardly wavered in almost forty years.

From the opening scene of Where to Land we know we are in the Hal Hartley cinematic universe.² Rom-com director Joe Fulton (Bill Sage) talks to cemetery groundskeeper Leonard (Robert John Burke) about a job he doesn’t need and will do for free. Before the scene ends, Leonard has uttered the verbatim definition of “husbandry” from the dictionary and Joe has written it down.

We are in the hyper verbal, definitional space of Trust, just many years later.

From Trust:

MARIA: Did you mean it? Would you marry me?

MATTHEW: Yes.

MARIA: Why?

MATTHEW: Because I want to.

MARIA: Not because you love me or anything like that, huh?

MATTHEW: I respect and admire you.

MARIA: Isn’t that love?

MATTHEW: No. That’s respect and admiration. I think that’s better than love.

The effect now is the same as it was then, but what is it exactly? Where to Land includes a scene that lampoons—or perhaps attempts to exert prior restraint upon—such questions. Fulton meets with an academic who wants to write a book about his films and wants his participation. He doesn’t think she needs him. She tries to impress him with her view of how his distancing is some sort of Brechtian defamiliarization, and keeps talking until she concludes that Fulton has no method that he would be able to elucidate. In the end, they agree. He is not needed.

The plot, based on a misunderstanding that Fulton is dying when he is merely writing a will, takes all the screwball turns, and provides plenty of easter eggs. A poster for Flirt appears in his lawyer’s office. Two young filmmakers see Fulton and seem vaguely aware of the plot points of Trust. In the end, Fulton embarks on a project that is Hartley’s unrealized series turned novel Our Lady of the Highway.

Of course, there is a Hartley method and an effect, whether he wishes to authorize its discussion or not. You can feel it. Call it depth from flatness. There have always been rules of thumb that point in its direction.

“Show don’t tell.”

“If you cry, the audience won’t.”

Ernest Hemingway is the controlling authority here, at least in prose, who transmitted it to the present via postmodernists and minimalists like Donald Barthelme and Raymond Carver. Combined with philosophical dialogue, the effect is distinct, and can be found as a tool used by the Coen brothers, Aaron Sorkin (cf. Sports Night), Chuck Palahniuk, David Rabe, Lydia Davis, and others.

But Hartley’s work is an exhibition—perhaps the exhibition in film—of this principle pushed to its limit. Why does it work? I’m struggling, as Hartley did with Godard, “to describe what’s beautiful in his work.”

I have heard it said that if you have a hard heart, you will have thin skin, but if you have an open heart you will have thick skin. Paradoxically, then, though the surfaces of Hartley’s films are cool, the overall effect is of an expansive vulnerability.

Where to Land is a midlife crisis movie, with all the themes of death and regret, and Hartley faces them head on, neither undermining nor overdetermining them. The effect is the sublime breeziness that pervades all of his movies. And, I would suggest, one only gets to it if one lets go of knowingness completely.³

Godard’s Masculin Féminin is among the coolest media productions of all time, prefiguring the modernist chic of post-punk and beyond, the Europe of the mind—which mostly lived on in the British pop of that later New Wave.⁴

But there is no vulnerability—at least not for the men, who interrogate the women relentlessly—only knowingness. To retain Godard’s distancing but head toward vulnerability risks getting stuck in the uncanny valley of mawkishness. I understand why so few attempt it, and why watching such attempts might be intolerable for some. “Thoughtful people laugh because it’s a shock to be reminded how the obvious is avoided in everyday life,” Hartley’s fictional academic suggests. “Unthoughtful people are maybe a little unsettled, not sure if they understand.”

The incentives to abort, for both director and audience, are tremendous. But Hartley understands that, once started, the only risk is stopping, of not going all the way, of abandoning the bit.

To stay with it, to go all the way, you have to have an incredible amount of trust.

Still from Simple Men

1. Tarantino, of course, took the name of his production company from the former, though it is Hartley who gave us the best reworking of that film’s “Madison” dance scene, which hopefully keeps QT up at night.

2. This might sound flip, but Hartley is aware of such excrescences. The protagonist’s girlfriend—played by Kim Taff—is trying to escape a career playing a superheroine in some Marvel-like franchise.

3. “Knowingness” is one of the features of the so-called “hysterical realism” that killjoy James Wood identified in his turn-of-the-century essay on the subject. I can imagine Hartley’s movies failing Wood’s standard for characterization. According to Wood, novelists like Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith, faced with a crisis of characterization, turned to madcap overelaboration and conspiratorial linkages to take up the blank space. As he writes in the essay.

All these contemporary deformations flow from a crisis that is not only the fault of the writers concerned, but is now of some lineage: the crisis of character, and how to represent it in fiction. Since modernism, many of the finest writers have been offering critique and parody of the idea of character, in the absence of convincing ways to return to an innocent mimesis.

Of course, David Foster Wallace had pleaded guilty but incorrigible—addicted?—seven years before when he pined for something new, artists who might “return to an innocent mimesis” as Wood was still hoping for almost a decade later. Foster Wallace wrote:

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in the U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval.

The return to immediacy, to innocence and quaintness, for which Wood and Foster Wallace both pine has manifested in this century, but the results are not what they might have hoped. From banal “smarm” to malignant neo-reaction, attempts to “go back” are doomed to deformation and successful attempts to juke self-consciousness off its feet so we can get at the matter at hand are rare. George Saunders, particularly in his early work, has a way of sneaking up on real life that left him mostly clear of the irony debates. And I can think of two others.

The first might be predicable, but—as I maintain—this is a rare event. Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 In the Aeroplane Over the Sea combined the laconic vocal delivery of indie rock with an earnestness so unnerving that the liner notes required a disclaimer from frontman Jeff Mangum, explaining that he was not invoking Jesus Christ as a joke.

More recently, Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One is Talking About This, succeeds in delivering on Foster Wallace’s prophecy from within a knowing dexterity that rivals his own. To read David Foster Wallace in 1995 and Patricia Lockwood in 2025 are eerily similar experiences, as each channel the inner monologues of their respective eras. (When I first made this association, I was sure I was suffering from apophenia, until Lockwood wrote a long consideration of DFW for the London Review of Books.) But Lockwood’s novel, from its very title, turns against this knowingness. “No one is talking about this,” might as well be the tragic motto of the Internet, as untold armies daily cry out to correct whatever it is they see as its deficiency, seemingly unaware that everyone is talking about everything always, or at least about everything that does not matter. In the second part of the novel, Lockwood pulls the rug out from under her extremely online narrator. When her niece is born with a terminal genetic disorder, the thinness of knowingness becomes instantly obvious as we see what the “this” is that “no one is talking about.” Death. Eternity. “How strange it is to be anything at all,” to quote Jeff Mangum.

These are same things Hal Hartley’s characters were talking about with straight faces, just as Foster Wallace was diagnosing the need for such talk. Mark Leyner may have been the target of this diagnosis, but Hal Hartley might have been its shadow.

4. Justin Smith-Ruiu, writing about the generation we share for Harper’s, notes that, in grasping for the last known configuration of unsullied counterculture, Gen X lunged for the interwar avant-gardes, which of course is true. (The Bauhaus becomes a band.) But there was also a geographical grasping, just as obvious, in the musical New Wave, both in name and style.