Jonathan Demme's Wild West fix

How appropriate that, on the evening after the Democrats' victory in the House (and possibly the Senate?), I watch a documentary that, inadvertantly, celebrates victory when it meant to enshrine perserverance. Heart of Gold, Jonathan Demme's filmization of Neil Young's performance of Prairie Wind captured Shakey shortly before brain surgery. The prospect of dying frightened him into writing and recording a bunch of hummable throwaways no one will call classics (yet got him his first gold studio album since 1995's Mirrorball). HOG uses the same technique that made Stop Making Sense a triumph: the camera drinks deeply of the performer's idiosyncrasies, with no cutaways to the audience. Demme flatters like a painter trying to persuade a model to undress. As I've gotten more accustomed to Demme's technique, I'm grown suspicious. Like Bob Woodward, he's so dependant on his sources to establish tonal control and perspective that the absence of the authority we expect of an artist strikes me as weird if not feckless. If the lingering shots of David Byrne in Stop Making Sense captured his antiseptic weirdness, the ones of Young casting lovelorn glances at Emmylou Harris and wife Pegi matched the corniness of the Wild West backdrop and battalion of acoustic strummers substituting for sheep: in a ten-gallon hat and singing tunes like "My Old Guitar," Young asserts the right to claim the Western mythos without a trace of irony. Like his old hero Ronald Reagan, Young genuinely believes that John Ford's movies represented the West, especially when the four strong winds are a-blowin' and remindin' him that death's a-knockin' (he's like a lifelong agnostic asking for extreme unction).