This is what J.D. Salinger hoped to avoid

The Salerno film Salinger, shown (director's cut?) on PBS American Masters, is an anti-Salingeresque project in every way: too long, to heavy handed, too detailed - everything his best fiction is explicitly not. And of course it feels like a stalker movie, as the whole point of it is to strip away his privacy and reveal as much as possible about J.D. Salinger's life. So I feel like a voyeur watching it - but did so anyway, and I hope I did so in part as a tribute to Salinger's work. As the film makes clear, and so have other writings about him he was not a recluse; he led an active if somewhat eccentric social, marital, and paternal life - but the public saw him as a recluse simply because he declined virtually all interview requests. In other words, he could have been a celebrity, but he preferred not to. Salerno does make a few contributions in this film, which not all about dish: mostly, he makes it clear that JDS was writing throughout his life and uncovers the themes and topics and expected release dates of the manuscripts JDS left behind. He also give more info about JDS's wartime experience, which affected him deeply, and his first marriage, to a former Nazi no less - adding more elements to the picture, or to the mystery (he does not at all look into JDS's Judaism, or lack thereof - there must have been a lot of self-loathing, wouldn't you say - and his fiction is split between the very WASP HC and the half-Jewish Glass family.) The best part is that this film makes we want to go back and read more of the work - we see pretty clearly, from the tributes of (too many) critics, that he was a completely original, completely confident talent, and that his work spoke to millions and still does. Worst part of the film is too many talking heads, absurd jump cuts, pounding background music, over-playing the too-few images of JDS that do exist, using too much background footage and making us think it may be about JDS when it's not, and some shaky connections drawn between Catcher and the minds of several assassins or killers. Hell, everyone read Catcher. One of the best sequences is the interview with an obviously disturbed stalker - no doubt one of many, and it gives us an idea of what JDS was trying to avoid. Weirdest part is the revelations about his many strange (though not abusive) relations with young girls and girlish women - and this is a theme of his fiction as well, the struggle against that impulse in part. The Joyce Maynard segments are revealing - she tells a lot - and repulsive: e.g., Maynard says she saw some stacks of paper in a safe and she knew they were completed manuscripts because: "I've published 9 books so I know what a manuscript looks like." Well, I've been to Staples and I know what 300 pages of paper look like. Anyway, kind of wish I hadn't seen it but: I just had to look, having read the book ...