Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Why would I watch a documentary about a writer I’ve found unreadable? Reinforced in my belief that Last Exit to Brooklyn is a collection of stories set in the same place (the Brooklyn of Hubert Selby Jr.’s mind) rather than a novel, I guess I can claim to have read three of his stories. And I was impressed by the 2000 movie Darren Aronofsky made from Requiem for a Dream. “It/ll Be Better Tomorrow” conarrated and codirected by Michael W. Dean (conarrated by Robert Downey, Jr., codirected by Kenneth Shiffrin) made me regret not having seen the 1989 movie of Last Exit to Brooklyn that Uli  Edel (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) made. And maybe I’ll try to read more of Last Exist to Brooklyn someday.

Those are endorsements of the movie at least that it made a writer whose writings have not held me interesting enough to spend 79 minutes contemplating. What Selby read of Selby was not particularly compelling. That he lived to the age of 75 (1928-2004) is amazing given long spells of heroin addiction and heavy boozing, but before them, he had six ribs and a lung removed in 1940s treatment of tuberculosis. Doctors did not expect him to survive that. And, for that matter, when he was born, the doctor did not expect him to make it to a third day, let alone a 75th birthday.

Selby contracted tuberculosis in the Merchant Marines during World War II and spent three-plus years hospitalized with it. He had dropped out of school in the eighth grade to join the Merchant Marines and was physically disabled. He started writing, and his raw writing about unsavory realities led to obscenity charges against the Provincetown Review for what became the “Tralala” section of Last Exit to Brooklyn (with the gang rape). The book was published in 1964 and Grove Press was found guilty of obscenity in Britain. John Mortimer (creator of the Rumpole of the Old Bailey series) won an appeal, and the notoriety led to sales and royalties. The royalties went into Selby’s arm, leaving needle-tracks.

To get away from his circle of junkies, he moved from New York to LA, and soon had a new circle of junkies. After serving two months for heroin possession in 1967, he stayed off heroin. He taught writing workshops at USC and wrote some more, though there was a 20-year gap between Requiem for a Dream (1978) and his next novel, The Willow Tree (1998).

Among those with interesting things to say about Selby and his work are directors Darren Aronofksy and Uli Edel, and Nicolas Winding Refn; writes Amiri Baraka (who back when he was LeRoi Jones recommended a literary agent to Selby), Richard Price, and  Gilbert Sorrentino; actress Ellyn Burstyn; actor Jeared Leto;  singer/poets Lou Reed and Henry Rollins (who toured with Shelby).

There are clips from three movies based on Selby writing (Fear X and the two already mentioned) and from Ludovic Cantais's 2000 documentary, "Hubert Selby Jr., 2 ou 3 choses...” For all the rage seething in his writing, it seems that Selby was quite a gentle and unbitter man, called “Cubby” by his friends, of whom there seem to have been many (425 turned up for the LA memorial from which some of Rollins’s eulogy derives). And the big obscenity trial in London…

The tale of his first writing is very moving (you’ll have to hear it for yourself!)

There is little about the context of American writing (Beat or other) of the late-1950s. I certainly wonder what William Burroughs thought of Selby’s writings (I’ve actually ready all the way through four Burroughs novels). Since Allen Ginsberg blurbed Exit, Burroughs couldn't have hated it. There is some discussion of the greater regard for his writing in Europe than in America (fitting with European views of America rather than American ones).

The movie reinforces the view that movies are more important than books, reaching more people, which I want to take as exoneration for being more interested in the writer than in his writing.

BTW, Selby explains why he used slashes for apostrophes in the rare instances he thought they served some distinction (distinguishing “ill” from “I’ll” in the movie title quotation is one of these): the slash bar was more convenient, not requiring moving to the bar of characters above the three with alphabetical characters on the typewriter.

©2009, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: Yes