The words and
ideas of GQ magazine
Excerpts of pieces up for National Magazine Awards
By Diego Vasquez
Apr 9, 2008
Last year, GQ won a National Magazine Award for feature writing, giving the title its first Ellie since 1996, and that came amid a string of nominations. It's been nominated for 27 Ellies since 2000, and that figure includes the five nods it's gotten this year. It's up for general excellence among titles with circulations between 500,000 and 1 million, and it has also received nods in the design, feature writing, photography, and reviews and criticism categories. Today, as part of an ongoing series on this year's NMA nominees, Media Life excerpts passages from three of the GQ pieces that were nominated.
Feature Writing
One of GQ’s nominations came in the feature writing category for “Underworld,” a piece by Jeanne Marie Laskas that asks the simple question, “Why do we even have coal mines?” The story ran in the May 2007 issue, here’s an excerpt:
Billy was a gentleman. He smelled like Old Spice. If there’s an upwardly mobile coal miner, it’s Billy. He tries. He believes. He even shows up at the company picnics. Even his house, brand-new, with a big, bright porch and cats running around, says “winner.” An eighteen-foot Playtime motorboat in the driveway, a shiny Dodge, and a Suburban. His house sits across from his dad’s place, over from his brother’s. The original family farm, intact. Billy has two boys now, and can’t you just picture little Brody and Gage riding four-wheelers real soon? They have three miniature horses. Next year, an in-ground pool. For Billy, this whole thing is like the most unbelievable dream come true, even though he swore he’d never be a fourth-generation coal miner.
“The only thing I think about is the danger part of it,” his wife, Tynae, said one day when we were all sitting in the living room, watching Brody tumble.
“It’s not that bad,” Billy said to her. “I mean, the danger isn’t even a thought for me anymore.”
“I know,” she said, even though you could tell she didn’t.
“Anything that happens is just a freak accident.”
“I know.”
“That’s the only stuff that happens is freak accidents.”
“I know.”
Then she turned her attention to a Smurfs cartoon Brody had settled on, and nobody said anything.
A few days later, when I was in the mine, up on section, Billy said, “Look, I don’t talk about the bad stuff in front of my wife, okay?”
Reviews and Criticism
Another of GQ’s nominations came in the reviews and criticism category, for three pieces written by Tom Carson: “You Actin’ Like Me?,” from the February 2007 issue; “Don’t Cry For Me, Iwo Jima,” from September 2007; and “Strong, Silent, Ultraviolent,” from December 2007. Below are excerpts from two of the pieces, starting with “Don’t Cry For Me, Iwo Jima,” a review of the WWII documentary “The War”:
That’s why it’s even more impressive that “The War” makes the best case for dropping the atom bomb on Japan of any doc I know. The reason couldn’t be more basic; we’ve been made vividly aware that invasion is the only other option, and we’ve watched our soldiers, sailors, and Marines go through so many meat grinders from Guadalcanal on that we revolt at the idea of putting them through another. And yes, we quail at sitting through two more hours of “The War,” too. But that’s not meant to be a joke: It’s a compliment.
Sorry, but size does matter. Over these fourteen hours, Burns does every saccharine, sonorous thing that drives his naysayers up the wall, avoiding hard inquiry in favor of summoning memory’s mystic chords and splurging on emotion. I think “The War” is simpleminded. I think it’s unduly obsessed with slaughter—not the fact of it, but the mystique, fetishizing combat as the ultimate crucible when only a cruelly punished fraction of the American military went through anything of the kind. I dread the perfect storm of national self-love it’s likely to provoke, especially at a time when clear thinking about our no-longer-so-Manifest Destiny wouldn’t come amiss. But by the end, you know you’ve seen a monument.
If you can stay dry-eyed or less than spellbound, more power to you: You’ll make a better historian than Burns one day. But while people can and should argue with his Hallmark-card notion of history, even a grumpy-guts like me can’t gainsay his achievement in expressing—and for better and worse, helping to shape—how later generations feel about it. In a perfect world, “Too much and not enough” would be my verdict on “The War.” But I’m only human, and something in me can’t help adding, “Hell, that must mean it’s just right.” My main regret is that only one of my parents is still alive to see it.
And here’s an excerpt from “Strong, Silent, Ultraviolent,” a look at the movie “No Country for Old Men”:
The Coens have always had smart ideas about actors, and the performances here are at once comic turns and dramatically expressive. Javier Bardem is the one most likely to wow audiences. Made up and coiffed in a blatant tribute—once a film nerd, always a film nerd, eh, Joel?—to Lon Chaney’s getup in “London After Midnight,” uttering every line with the sepulchral calm of a man who thinks his larynx is a government, he’s terrifyingly funny. You may feel you’ve had it with movies whose psychotic villain gets all the big laugh lines, but at least Bardem’s drolleries don’t make him any less scary. Unlike Hannibal Lecter, whose from hunger bons mots impressed many credulous people into half believing that a man this witty and exceptional had a right to be a cannibal, Chigurh (as in chigger? just wondering) spouts nonsense so stupefying he’d almost need to be murderous to avoid having people guffaw in his face.
Though it may not look it, Josh Brolin’s job is more demanding than Bardem’s, since he’s got to convince us of Llewelyn Moss’s resourcefulness and matter-of-fact way with life-changing decisions without any explanation of his actions from the character’s own mouth. I’ve never paid too much attention to Brolin before, but this year he’s come on like gangbusters. Not only good as a weakling cop in Valley of Elah and even better as a corrupt one in American Gangster, he was one of the funniest performers in the Tarantino-Rodriguez Grindhouse. Moss is a big role for him, and he makes the most of it by refusing to make much of it.
Several actors in lesser parts also stand out. As Moss’s wife, Kelly Macdonald is uncannily plausible; you wonder if even McCarthy knows as much about Carla Jean as the actress does. Woody Harrelson, who’s always as good at playing sly, self-satisfied dipsticks on-screen as he is annoying doing the same thing in reality, has a few good scenes as a Stetson-hatted operator out to play middleman between Moss and Chigurh. Heck, “No Country” even has a great performance by a dog: a misshapen black pit bull who first shows up in Moss’s binoculars like a messenger from Hades, then swims after him down a river in the most hair-raising of the smaller chases inside the overarching big one.
Ultimately, though, it’s [Tommy Lee] Jones’s movie, despite the fact that he’s probably got less screen time than either Bardem or Brolin. He dominates “No Country” because his haggard pan and threatened sensibility are what the movie is about; the other two are just occasions for displaying it. You probably won’t be knocked over with a feather to hear that Jones can deliver a line like “If this ain’t a mess, it’ll do till the mess gets here” about as expertly as any actor in film history. But he’s also got a scene opposite Kelly Macdonald where the tiny shifts of emotion—little flickers of rue, kindness, bafflement, and an old man’s temptation to retreat into cryptic joviality—must rank up with the most delicate work he’s ever done. It’s one thing to have a face and a rumpled Texas twang like his, but it’s another to keep showing us the questing mind and cornered heart behind them.
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