March 21, 2010
Across the Universe (2007); Dir. Julie Taymor
In the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, it was accepted that suddenly, in the middle of a scene of dialogue, a character would break into song. Another way to say it is: There was confidence in the genre. We've lost a lot of that in our more ironic age, which is even true in Broadway musicals themselves at the present moment, where the classic old-school musical is now out of style, and when it is done, more often than not it is done with a wink-wink at the audience, making the whole thing into kitsch. This is all fine - sensibilities change, and the musical then becomes a problem that must be solved. Good directors know how to handle this. They understand that they must create a context where the genre can live again, and it seems organic.
I was not an admirer of the movie Chicago, but one of the reasons it worked (I admit grudgingly) was that Rob Marshall dealt with this problem head-on. He made the songs into interior monologues, the characters going into psychological dream-spaces, where it would make sense that they would sing. Marshall realized it was an issue - that you can't go old-school with this stuff, not now, modern audiences don't tolerate it - and so each song occurred inside a character's mind. I didn't like the movie, but I liked how he handled the "problem" of the musical. It worked. Dreamgirls (the movie) did not deal with this issue well at all. When the scenes were flat-out performances, of the girls onstage, or rehearsing, it was fine. Then, the movie knew what it was: basically a concert movie. But when suddenly characters were singing in the middle of their lives, breaking into song, essentially, the movie totally lost its way. I felt that it was embarrassed for itself in those moments, especially in the number "Family". I winced through that scene, watching the actors try to pretend that a context had been provided for them where it would make sense that they would break into song. Jamie Foxx seemed mortified. Nobody knew what movie they were in. Like I said, when the movie showed actual performances, it was fine - but the problem of the musical had not at all been handled, and so the movie was very wobbly. If you're doing a musical, then you need to have confidence in the genre, and that's final. Dreamgirls didn't. They WANTED to be a biopic, they knew HOW to do a biopic, but that's not how the thing is written. It's a musical. Don't condescend to the genre. Figure out a way to make it palatable to a modern audience or don't do it. If the conversation-songs had been left out of the film, or somehow turned into onstage performances, perhaps the movie would have felt like it had more confidence in itself.
Julie Taymor, director of Across the Universe, knows a little bit about Broadway musicals, having created and directed The Lion King, although much of that project (the huge puppets, the handmade quality of the effects) breaks the mold. I saw it and it certainly doesn't look like anything else. Her film projects so far have been eclectic and fascinating (Frida, Titus, and her next project is The Tempest, which I cannot WAIT to see) and she is working at her full powers with Across the Universe, the "musical" made up only of Beatles songs. It is hard to express the joy and enthusiasm in this film, not to mention its wild creativity in lighting/production design/visual effects. How many worlds does Taymor create here? It's dazzling. Suburban Massachusetts, all golden light and green grass. Liverpool, England, cramped alleyways and dark muted tones. The lower East side of Manhattan, early 60s, with colored grafitti and crowded sidewalks. A drug trip in a psychedelic school bus. A dreamy gorgeous underwater sequence. Strawberries pinned to the wall of a bohemian apartment. The Detroit riots, with cars burning, and handheld cameras. Each world created with total confidence in the story being told, and also the genre itself. There is maybe half an hour of straight dialogue in the film. The rest is told through song.
The film opens with a shot of an empty beach, with a young man sitting in the sand by the shore. The color palette is muted, greys and browns, a bleak setting. The camera moves in slowly towards the boy. He stares out at the ocean. As the camera pulls in close to him, he turns and looks directly at the camera, and starts to sing. "Is there anybody going to listen to my story? All about a girl who came to stay. She's the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry. Still you don't regret a single day."
Taymor says in the director's commentary that they wanted to start off immediately with a song, and to make it even more explicit, have the young man sing directly to the camera. This works on multiple levels, but the main reason it works is because it tells the audience right away that This Is a Musical, no bones about it. He breaks the fourth wall, as people do all the time in musicals, and he sings. There will be no caginess about the genre. There is no embarrassment, like: "sorry, just going to break into song here, I know it's weird, bear with me ..." which is how I felt Jamie Foxx performed his numbers in Dreamgirls. He seemed embarrassed. Like: "Hey, I thought I was in a serious biopic - what is THIS shit you're making me do now??" Taymor was so smart in this choice, for the opening of the film, and also smart in the song she chose to start the movie. How perfect is it that the young man is saying, "Please listen to my story. I want to tell you a story ..." So the opening moment works on the genre level - it is a song, sung to an audience - and it also works on the story level. "I am going to tell you a story now." It is not realistic, and the film tells you right away what it is, and what you can expect.
Directly following this, the camera moves to the waves, with a change in music. The melancholy tones of "Girl" change, to the jarring screaming of "Helter Skelter", and in the curls of the waves we start to see black and white footage, newsreel-style, of the protests of the 1960s, with cops in riot gear, chaos, screaming, people being hauled away by the cops, with a couple of shots of gorgeous Evan Rachel Wood, screaming and fighting back.
The connection is made visually: this is "the girl" of whom he sings. Immediately clear, done with no dialogue. But yet another thing happens in this segue: Taymor lets us know that the style of the movie is going to be non-realistic, like a collage or mosaic. We will be moving through different worlds, and we should not expect things to unfold in a literal fashion. Music will be key to this. The Beatles are introduced head-on. That's the whole point of the movie.
In this short opening sequence, from the young man on the beach to the waves revealing scenes of protests and chaos, Taymor tells us, with total confidence, Here is what we will be doing, here is what you can expect.
That is confidence.
And because she (and her team) have confidence, I can relax. I know she knows where she's going, what she's doing, and while that does not always translate to a good or moving movie, in this case it does. There are scenes that have quickly become favorites of mine, things I will go back to again and again (the opening sequence with two versions of "Hold Me Tight" - American suburbia and Liverpool underground).
There is a whimsy here, yes, and a creativity with the song choices and their placement; they obviously had a lot of fun weaving the songs into the story. It doesn't sacrifice reality. The first time I saw it, there were literally moments that I found myself laughing out loud, not because it was funny, but because I was so overjoyed by what had been created, the ridiculousness of it, and how ... wow .... in many cases I was seeing something I had never seen before. There are references, certainly, to pop culture through the 60s, Hard Day's Night, of course, and the Monty Python animated sketches. It's fun to revel in it.
It's a rare movie that can provide that. Most visuals in movies are variations on a theme. Sunsets, dinner tables, horse stables, whatever - they can be quite beautiful but we have seen them all before. When a director can show me something I literally have never seen before, I fall in love. It's one of the reasons why I love foreign films so much, and especially films from Iran and Central Asia. The context is so different, the worlds so different, the perspective so different - that often I am confronted with a landscape or viewpoint that I have literally never seen before. Love! Julie Taymor gives me that over and over and over again in Across the Universe, which tells actually a rather conventional story (6 characters converge to New York City in the early 60s, their paths intersect, and the Vietnam War changes everything), but the WAY it is told, and how it LOOKS, is completely its own.
Some of the storytelling devices here annoyed some critics, and I see their point, but it all worked for me. The 6 lead characters are named Jude, Lucy, Prudence, Max, Jo Jo and Sadie. I loved that. Cutesy? Perhaps. But it also was practical: if you want to include "Hey Jude" in a movie-musical of Beatles numbers, then it certainly helps, in terms of story, if you have a character named Jude. If you want to have "Dear Prudence" act as a sort of "Cheer Up Charlie" number, then it helps that the character who needs the pep talk is named Prudence. Perhaps it's a bit literal of a choice, but I didn't mind that. I thought it was an effective device, and got us even deeper into the story. The entire context for these people is Beatles songs. There is no other music in the film, no other suggestion that other bands may exist. We are inside the songs. So in that world, of course all of the characters would have names from the songs themselves.
There were also many in-jokes, for anyone familiar with the Beatles songbook, and I loved that. It's a bit of a wink-wink, but it seemed appropriate with the non-literal material, where the entire world is a Beatles song. If you get it, you get it. If you don't, it doesn't exclude you. Back in Liverpool, Jude worked at the shipyards, and when he goes to pick up his paycheck, he makes a comment that tells us it will be his last paycheck, he's taking off. The guy behind the counter says kindly, "I felt the same way when I was your age. I told myself, 'When I'm 64, I'll be long gone from this place.'" In New York, Jude has hooked up with a bunch of bohemian characters and they all live in one apartment. One rainy night, a girl named Prudence crawls in through a window and stands there, she needs a place to stay. Sadie looks at her and says, "Where did she come from?" and Jude replies, "She came in through the bathroom window." I loved these in-jokes. Maybe they're a bit corny, but so are musicals. It fits. It's funny and irreverent and a little bit stupid. Perfect for the material and context.
Jude (Jim Sturgess) is a boy from Liverpool, working in the shipyards. He leaves his mother behind, and sails off to America, in search for his father, who had impregnated his mother while stationed in Liverpool and then left.
Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) is a young American teenager, whose boyfriend has just shipped off to Vietnam. It is the early 60s, so the turmoil and strife of the late 60s is yet to come. Lucy lives in a big sprawling house, goes to high school, and writes love letters to her boyfriend. She is conventional, perhaps, but there are clues that she is also a searcher, a questioner (she doesn't want to have kids, for example, she doesn't see the point). This will be important later in the story.
Max (Joe Anderson) is Lucy's wild brother. He is currently an undergraduate at Princeton, and he spends most of his time goofing off and getting drunk ("high with a little help from his friends"), not going to class, and rebelling. The spectre of the draft is just starting, but he really wants to drop out of Princeton, and hang out for a while, find out what he really wants to do. His parents are horrified.
Jo Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) is a guitarist, who moves to New York in the wake of the Detroit riots, to escape the carnage and get a new start. A kind of Jimi Hendrix character, he tries to find his own style of music, while also supporting others, but it soon becomes clear that he is a solo artist, end-stop.
Sadie (Dana Fuchs) is a singer of the Janis Joplin variety, and she lives in a sprawling apartment in the East Village, filled with other artists and bohemians. Jude and Max live there, and eventually Lucy moves in too. Sadie is a struggling artist, playing small venues, but she is being courted by a major label. A kind of den mother to the strays who come her way, she exemplifies the communal aspect of so much of 60s youth culture, yet also the need for the individual to assert herself. With a rocking raspy voice, she KILLS "Oh, Darling", and "Do It in the Road" and "Helter Skelter".
Prudence (TV Carpio) is a runaway from Ohio who also ends up in New York. An Asian American teenager, isolated, not only by her race but by the fact that she is attracted to other girls, she finds solace and comfort in the idiosyncratic world of Bohemian New York, where she doesn't have to try to fit in, but can be herself.
The acting is good. I cared about these people. I liked the sense of breath that was in the songs, the sense that the songs were just extensions of the scenes.
The film is a masterpiece of integration. There's an organic feel to the plot, despite all the artifice, and the story is involving. Jude finds his father who works as a janitor at Princeton University. During his time at Princeton, he befriends the wild good-hearted Max, who takes him home for Thanksgiving. This is where Jude meets Lucy for the first time. Love at first sight? Perhaps, but she has a boyfriend. Max drops out of Princeton and he and Jude travel to New York. They get rooms at Sadie's apartment. Jude gets a job as an illustrator at an underground magazine. Max gets his draft notice and burns it at the table. Things are starting to get serious, but at first nobody really notices. Lucy does, however, because her boyfriend is killed in Vietnam. Heartbroken, she moves to New York to be with her brother, to get away for a bit before she goes to college. Jude and Lucy start a romance, sweet and sincere. Max begins to spiral out of control. He gets drafted. He goes to Vietnam. Lucy becomes involved in the anti-war movement.
With cameos by Joe Cocker (who plays, in one song, "Come Together", a hobo, a pimp, and a hippie), Eddie Izzard (who plays a Mr. Kite, who runs an insane carnival in the middle of a field), and Bono, who plays Dr. Robert, a drug guru along the lines of Timothy Leary, the 6 leads are relative unknowns, which makes their singing and acting all the more potent, since we only know them in this context. The conversational quality of many of the songs (Jude whisper-singing in his girlfriend's ear as they make out, "Close your eyes and I'll kiss you ...") makes this world seem completely logical and true: These people sing Beatles songs and that's how this world operates. If that sense were not in place, if that context had not been created, then the entire thing would have seemed flimsy and pointless. (As in: what, you can't write your own script? You need to use Beatles songs to hang your hat on?) Taymor and her team (especially the musical arrangements, done by Eliot Goldenthal) are absolutely specific in every moment. Nothing repeats. The songs live and breathe, not just because they are classic songs, but because they live in this particular context, they help tell this very specific story. It's mind-boggling how successful this is, when you imagine how much it COULD have gone so wrong.
Another thing that really makes Across the Universe special is that it is (for the most part) live singing. Normally, with movie musicals, you record the songs beforehand, and then when you film the scene, you lip sync to the recording. It's a practical matter, a sound issue, all that, but Taymor is up to something different here. She wanted to create songs that feel like speech, choreography that feels like regular movement, but never to forget that this is, ultimately, an artificial universe, one where people sing their language. So most of the singing that you see in Across the Universe is live. This is amazingly rare.
Because Julie Taymor is the director, and her work with puppets and giant hand-made creations is her forte, there is a lot of that here, so what you see is real, as opposed to computer-generated effects. There is choreography, which adds to the effect, never taking away. Businessmen stomp around in midtown, moving as one. Max, in a VA hospital, is haunted by dancing sexy nurses holding syringes. Prostitutes writhe on fire escapes in the lower east side. What I loved so much in all of this was not just the acceptance of the musical format, but the wholehearted embrace of it.
What could have been a series of gimmicks turns into a heartfelt story about the last years of the 1960s and the upheaval, both political and social. It does not become didactic, it has a spirit to it, all held together by the vast songbook of the Beatles catalog - the early innocent rock and roll tunes like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", which here is upended by having Prudence sing it, in her cheerleader uniform in Ohio, staring longingly at another female cheerleader. Quite unbalancing. And the song is slowed down to a ballad. I loved Ebert's comment about the use of the song in Across the Universe:
When Prudence sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand," for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It's not happy if it's a hand you are never, never, never going to hold. The love that dare not express its name turns in sadness to song.
That flexibility inherent in most of the Beatles songs, and how they can "take" so much interpretation, is one of the reasons they are so extraordinary. The movie has a lot of fun with that.
And one of its strongest features is that despite its startling visuals and the fact that, you know, it's a musical, it keeps its eye on the ball, and never forgets that why we will invest, why we will enter into this magical world where people sing instead of speak, is that it presents to us characters who seem real to us, who we care about. It has some things to say, about the radicalization of American youth during the Vietnam years, and it's not what you would expect. There is a depersonalization that goes on when politics becomes the filter for all of human life. The symbol of having a television put into your living room so you can watch the war, instead of talk to each other, or make love, or art, or have a personal life, is made potent here. Ultimately, what Across the Universe is about is about the friendships we make along the way, the bonds we create. All you need is love. Love will not stop wars. But it sure makes our time here better, and if you forget that - if you abstract experience into just a political journey - you miss the whole point. Of course none of that is clear in times of upheaval when the stakes are high, but Across the Universe attempts to address that situation. Lucy begins to cut off from personal relationships. They seem trivial in the face of what is happening in Vietnam. Her boyfriend died over there. Her brother is over there. What does it matter that her boyfriend is angry that she works too much? But it does matter. Without love, we are nothing. There is a great scene where Jude bursts into the offices of the anti-war movement organization where Lucy works and sings "Revolution" right at her, mocking her commitment, mocking the earnestness, and mocking the cause above all else. This was a no-no in those days, and is certainly a no-no still, in some quarters. But Jude nails it. Not that there are not causes that are worth fighting for, but to what end? The humorlessness of activists is sneered at here, and it reminded me of the great scene in Reds when John Reed reprimands one of his colleagues for missing an important meeting, and Louise Bryant, his lover, looks on, disturbed, realizing that he has changed. He is no longer a journalist. He has a cause. The cause above all things. He crucifies his former friend, who couldn't make the meeting because his wife was hemorrhaging. In the world of high-stakes revolution, such events are trivial. Personal life must take a back seat. It's brutal. Inhuman. Across the Universe, in its own quirky way, captures the heartlessness of "community" when it insists on coming before the individual. Now that's radical.
A rich experience, fun and moving and connected, Across the Universe was one of my favorite films of the last decade. A true gem of creation. It made me clap my hands in glee at its sheer inventiveness and joy, and how often can one say that?
Ulysses playing cards
I bought these a while back, and find great pleasure in flipping through them, from time to time. Ulysses playing cards. They're quite beautiful and evocative, and pry open the famous episodes of the book. The back of each card is black with white lettering, and a collage of words found in Joyce's book. The other side are typical playing cards, nothing out of the ordinary, the suits are the same, the amount of cards - you could play Solitaire with these - but each card is different, each card represents a theme/object/character in Ulysses.
If you're familiar with the book, then you will have a response to such words as "kidneys", "ashplant", "rhododendrons" - these are all here. And I love the two Joker cards as well. Of course it would be those two on those two cards. Remember Joyce's statement about Ulysses: "The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it."
"No note can take in all the permutations ..."
I mentioned my sonnet ritual here, and talked a little bit about Stephen Booth's (the editor) acceptance of multiple meanings to such a dizzying degree that there are times when you do get lost. He's okay with that, very unlike most scholars (and readers, come to think of it). His 1970s edition of the Sonnets
And one of the footnotes struck me as indicative of the kind of analysis that Booth is so good at, so I thought I would share it. It should speak for itself, and if you are at all familiar with a lot of Shakespeare scholarship, you will know that almost nobody writes or thinks like Stephen Booth. At least not nowadays. There are times when he reminds me of T.S. Eliot, who wrote eloquently on Shakespeare, and sometimes Auden (who gave a series of lectures on Shakespeare - here's just one example) - but that should tell you how singular Booth is, because Eliot and Auden are not academics. They are poets. Their focus and filter is different, and, in my estimation - when I read them on Shakespeare, much of the text starts to literally come to life for me, jumping off the page. The opposite is true of so much Shakespearean scholarship - which seems to deaden the text, silencing it completely through the exhaustive analysis.
1 As fast as thou shalt wane so fast thou growest -
2 In one of thine, from that which thou departest,
3 And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st
4 Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
5 Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase;
6 Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
7 If all were minded so, the times should cease,
8 And threescore year would make the world away.
9 Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
10 Harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perish.
11 Look, whom she best endow'd, she gave the more;
12 Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.
13 She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
14 Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.
The sense of this seems pretty clear to me. If I had to paraphrase: "Nature means for you to pass on your genes to your wife, and to create children. Without children, there is no meaning to life."
Booth doesn't disagree, but what he does with the footnotes is so spectacular: he does not search for the ultimate meaning. He goes word by word by word, teasing out thoughts, references, puns, different meanings - and then just leaves you sitting in the kaleidoscope he has just created. It may seem MORE confusing when you're done, and part of the fun is to read his footnotes (some of which go on for pages at a time), and then go back and read the Sonnet full through again. Watch how different it appears. The prism has shifted. You're in the rainbow. I am a great lover of the Sonnets - always have been, since high school - they appealed to my OCD nature, I liked that they were all together, that there was some mystery to them, that if you read them in order they start to tell a story, but you just can't see enough of it to get the whole thing. I liked that. Booth's notes, and HOW he "analyzes" here - really jars me, and I love him for that. Who is so willing to sit in the not-knowing but Booth? He helps me. He shows me HOW to think. Or, let's say, another way to think - which involves shattering apart each word, and leaving it all in pieces, and then moving on. Don't try to put it back together. That's the failing of the modern reader.
So let's look at just one note for this Sonnet, which seems to illustrate Booth's startling gift for 1. analysis and 2. openness to confusion and incompletion - a rare combination of assets in anyone, but totally bizarre in a scholar.
Here he is on line 2 in the Sonnet.
2. In one of thine (1) in the womb of your wife; (2) in the person of your child. from that which thou departest (1) out of that (i.e. sperm) which you bestow (this reading enhances a probable sexual meaning of wane in line 1 as male loss of tumescence after sexual emission; for other Renaissance examples of "depart" and "depart from" meaning "bestow", see OED, 2, 13); (2) as a result of that (your youth) which you now leave behind. No note can take in all the permutations that occur among the various meanings of the words and phrases in lines 1 and 2 in all their relationship to one another. The crush of meanings in these lines is further swelled by overtones of three other common uses of "depart" - all pertinent to this context, all called up in a reader's mind, but, unlike the two meanings given above, not syntactically harnessed to the sentence in which they appear or capable of inclusion in its particular logic: (a) "depart" meant "put asunder" (OED, 3), and the use of the word here invokes an echo of the Elizabethan marriage service (in which its use - "to have and to hold ... till death us depart" - would have been as familiar as the words that replaced it in 1622 - "till death us do part" - are now), an echo that relates to two topics of the sonnet, marriage and death; (b) "depart" was used intransitively as a synonym for "die" (OED, 7); (c) the common construction "depart from," which ordinarily means "go away from," appears here in a context in which that meaning is substantially relevant but syntactically impossible.
March 20, 2010
It's everywhere
Now that the teal and orange trend in cinema today has been pointed out to me, I see it everywhere.
And I mean everywhere.
"[The authorities] don't even really know what they're opposing. They don't see that music brings energy and good nature to society."
So says Negar Shaghaghi, Iranian indie-pop songwriter, one of the stars of Bahman Ghobadi's new film No One Knows About Persian Cats. The film tells the story of two aspiring musicians in Tehran, trying to connect with other musicians, in an atmosphere fraught with danger. Rock music (ie: Western music) is banned in Iran, so the stories of some of these youngsters are harrowing. The article is a great profile of not only the two musicians Ash Koshanejad and Negar Shaghaghi but also of the situation in Iran right now (including the generation gap, the theme of so many Iranian films). The two applied for asylum in England, which is where they now live, but it is still not an ideal situation. I am sure they would rather be home, and be able to make their art, than living in exile and free. The conundrum. Iranian cinema takes issues that may seem commonplace in Western films (teenage romance, rebellion, depression, etc.), and they become emblematic of the tensions within the entire society. Every film becomes political, even when it is not explicit. The filmmakers work under great strain (see Jafar Panahi for an example of what can happen), and have to deal with censorship and also the bleak fact that their films, if not given the stamp of approval, will never be seen in Iran. Imagine working like that. These people are heroes to me.
I can't wait to see the film. Bahman Ghobadi has worked with actual musicians before (Half Moon was full of them - my review here), which gives his work an immediacy and potency that it wouldn't have otherwise. It becomes a snapshot of a culture. As a Kurd, he has a tremendous sense of identity and loss, which reverbs through his work, and I love that the article compares his latest film to Richard Linklater (there was a Linklater-esque feel to Half Moon as well, even with its elegiac requiem storyline.) It's about people who wander. Looking for ... their tribe. People who are like them. Kindred spirits.
From the article:
When Ash and Negar were kids, the only opportunity they had to hear western rock music was when somebody from their community travelled abroad and brought back CDs. "They'd be copied on to a tape over and over again," says Negar. "We used to write the track names in class when the teacher wasn't looking and take it home with such excitement to listen to it." Even so, whatever they got depended on the tastes of the traveller; often hoping for something similar to Nirvana, they'd end up having to make do with ABBA.The advent of the internet changed everything for Iranian teenagers, who were suddenly able to participate in global youth culture, employing their technological nous to stay one step ahead of government censors. The fact that the bands in No One Knows About Persian Cats wear Strokes T-shirts and pass around copies of the NME shouldn't seem that strange. But what is the attraction to Ash and Negar of the kind of fey indie music that even within its countries of origin is often considered a bit insular?
"Well, we are indie!" declares Ash. "We had to do it ourselves in bedrooms because if you step out into the streets, you cannot even tell anyone you've just written a song. We would make our own imaginariums in our rooms."
If they'd grown up in England, Take It Easy Hospital's wan, organ-driven indie-pop, topped with earnest observations about the "human jungle", might stand accused of being a little bit twee. But once you learn how hard Ash and Negar have had to fight just to get their songs heard, they take on a whole new complexion. And despite their ugly experiences in Iran, they are determined not to make rebel rock. "Me, I don't care about politics," says Negar. "The value of art is a lot more than politics. Politics is something that passes, but art stays for years."
It's tremendously moving and just goes to show you that things like Nirvana - or Leonardo DiCaprio - are often far more effective cultural ambassadors than any political or social figure, or any "hearts and minds" campaign. To paraphrase Camille Paglia: "If we ever meet beings from another planet and want to show them who we are, it is by our art that we will want to be known."
No One Knows About Persian Cats opens in the US on April 16, 2010.
March 19, 2010
Dahmer (2002); Dir: David Jacobson
Shot in only 23 days, David Jacobson's Dahmer (he wrote and directed it) caused a lot of flak when it came out. Dahmer was shown as a human being, as opposed to a villain from a comic book. Because that's what he was. A human being. No excuses. Stalin was a human being. And what does THAT mean about the rest of us? The people who complain about this do not realize (or do not care) that it's far worse to show him as a human being rather than a Balrog from the deeps of Middle Earth. The implications are terrifying. I understand the victims' families issues here, but we're talking about art. Dahmer is not glorified here and his victims are not demonized (as they often were, by the cops at the time, and the press). Excuses are not made for him, we are not asked to defend him, but he is shown in a realistic light. Here is what happened.
Dahmer does not attempt to explain it all away, because honestly it can't be. However: the fact that Dahmer obviously had feelings about what he did, he spoke them very clearly afterwards, that he knew it was bad (he was meticulous in covering it up), and yet still he refused to suppress his actions based on those feelings that it was wrong (the definition of morality, in my opinion) is interesting. It makes him cinematic. Watchable. Even likeable at times. This is the reality of Dahmer. Oh well. Art's complicated. You want black and white go to Jesus Camp; don't go to the movies. People seem to feel certain things shouldn't be shown at all because perhaps it would seem like the actions in the film were being condoned. This attitude would wipe out most works of art that I find relevant, exciting, challenging, and important (bye bye Crime and Punishment!), so I'll leave all that behind so we can move on and talk about the movie.
Dahmer was no dummy. He experimented, he knew what he needed (as horrible as it was), and so calculated and planned to get that need met. You know, I need good friends, intellectual stimulation, and the love of a good man. Dahmer needed to create his own sex zombies. Whatever floats your boat, Jeff. But in terms of getting his needs met: There was something charming about him to get these guys to come with him back to his apartment. People in the gay community at the time referred to him as a "honey". Certainly not a catch, like the writhing six-pack-ab boys in tank tops at the nightclubs, the ones Dahmer stalked, but he wasn't a pariah. A friend of a friend of mine actually went on a couple dates with Dahmer. He was nice, and kind of boring, this person said.
Later on, when it was discovered that he had been slipping sleeping pills into boys's drinks and raping them in downstairs rooms at the bar, word got out pretty quick - but before that, he didn't make waves. He operated by stealth. He had a harmless persona. He was a cunning and very organized killer (until the end). He came off as completely unthreatening, almost a beaten-dog, with a shy smile, and he had boyish good looks. He may have been socially awkward, but he didn't seem frightening or dangerous. It's hard to see that now, because we only view him through the filter of his actions, but if you can picture that you didn't know what he had done, and you saw a shy kind of sweet guy buying you a drink ... it's a very effective ploy. While "cunning" has connotations of the Shylock-sterotype, the character rubbing his hands together and cackling with glee ... that kind of characterization is not what Jacobson is after here, thank God. Dahmer was one of God's lonely people, to paraphrase, Travis Bickle, another cinematic psychopath. The two performances have a lot in common. There's one brilliant shot in Taxi Driver where Travis calls up Betsy (played by Cybill Shepherd) to ask her out for another date, after their disastrous first date where he takes her to a porn movie. The camera is in a hallway, and we see Travis on the payphone. As the conversation goes down, and you can tell, by Travis's responses, that she is turning him down for a second date, the camera slowly backs up and then - amazingly - goes around the corner so we can't even see Travis anymore. Oh, Marty, I love you so. The moment is so painful, and the camera move is so specific - it is objective yet subjective as well. To me, it IS the eye of God in that moment. God is useless in the world of Taxi Driver, yet very much present, and in that moment, He cannot bear to even look at Travis during the moment of rejection. And yet the camera also, in that moment, operates in a totally subjective way: it IS Travis, and in that moment, he completely detaches from himself - the pain is too great - he can't be in the moment, he has to back away from himself and go around the corner. Granted, Bickle is a fictional character, while Dahmer is real, but the psychological portrait is quite similar, and why Bickle resonates to such an intense degree. He explains so much. And yet he also explains nothing.
That very lack of explanation, which makes Bickle so terrifying, is what makes Dahmer such an unbalancing experience. The film has some composite characters, but most of it is based on either trial testimony or what Dahmer himself said in interviews (hitting the tree with the baseball bat, for example, or how he cried after he killed his first victim when he was a teenager - he said it was the last time he ever cried).
The film has a dreamy pace to it, which also may have been jarring when it first came out, to audiences expecting action. I, for one, was riveted by it, and chilled. There isn't much killing in this movie. There is only one scene of explicit gore, and it is a very specific moment in Dahmer's life - his first killing - which shows him reaching the point of no return. In a way, Dahmer resists, totally, the titillation of a horror-thriller by concentrating solely on the psychology of a totally isolated human being. It would be far far worse to have slo-mo scenes reveling in Dahmer's killing, which would, by default, become sensationalistic. This is just my view, obviously not shared by everyone, but I think the film is strong because it resists easy answers. Like Steinbeck's Cathy in East of Eden, Dahmer is a monster. Born to human parents. He cannot feel things for other people. He doesn't have it in him. His parents now must grapple with this fact, and they are, but he split off, at a very young age. Trauma of his parents' divorce? Sure, probably. But plenty of children go through a divorce and don't become Jeffrey Dahmer. Any attempt at explanation would be puerile, in my opinion. Showing him as a human being is not making excuses for him. It is the reality.
Despite the fact that it was nominated for a couple of Independent Spirit awards (Jacobson as director, and Renner as Best Actor), it went to video pretty quick. I was fortunate enough to see it when it was out (I adore serial killers), and my main response was in regards to Renner. WHO. IS. THAT. I didn't track him down or follow him (which is strange, considering my track record), but I never forgot him, and the second I started hearing about Hurt Locker, and I saw his face in the promos, I knew exactly who it was. That's Jeffrey Dahmer. He gives an extraordinary performance.
He reminds me so much of Peter Lorre in M, one of the best portrayals of an anti-social criminal personality that I can think of.
Even Renner's face, boyish, babyish even, with big eyes, and baby fat around the edges, calls to mind Lorre. His very looks are disarming, similar to, oh, Ted Bundy, although Bundy was more of a chameleon, and could adapt freakily to any situation. Dahmer has the blunt-eyed flat-affect face of the classic psychopath, and Renner captures that exquisitely.
There are moments when things don't go exactly as he wants them to go, and you can see his eyes, flat-lidded, like a reptile, flit away for a second, trying to process this new information, and all you can see is a coiled predator who needs to be in control at every moment. He doesn't seem ferocious when things don't go his way. He seems more baffled, and uncomfortable. When he does turn violent, it is swift, sudden, and horrifying. Because nothing has prepared you for it up until that point (besides your preconceived notions of the character, which gives the film a wonderful tension).
When I first saw the film, I remember wondering how old Jeremy Renner was. When he needs to be 18, you would never believe he was anything else. When he needs to be older, that is completely believable as well. The facial hair changes slightly, the glasses, the haircut, but it almost seems as though the contours of his face actually alter, which is a startling accomplishment in a film shot in only 23 days, and not at all in sequence. This was my first glimpse at the master that Renner is, and the industry is filled with people such as Renner, and 99% of them are NEVER honored with an Oscar nomination. I am always on the lookout for people doing good gritty work, and the scope of the accomplishment here, in Dahmer, made me sit up straight in my chair. It had a low budget (which shows, from time to time), and a compressed shooting schedule. Renner had to be totally in charge of his own transformation, from day to day ("Today I'm playing 17 year old Dahmer, and tomorrow I'm playing Dahmer the day before he's busted") - and he is. Wardrobe certainly helps, but that's only half the battle. The look in his eyes hardens, and yet also dulls, as he gets further and further into his obsessions. It is a compulsion (as Dahmer said again and again). He doesn't question it. Does a lion question tackling that gazelle? Dahmer was acting according to his own nature, which is the most frightening thing of all.
Davidson and his cinematographer, Chris Manley, knew, going in, that they would not have a lot of time to create their mood/light/set. They did a ton of research beforehand, and came up with a plan for shooting. Dahmer does not play out sequentially, you leap around in time, and so Davidson and Manley came up with a color palette to signify the different times. It's not quite as obvious as the schematics of Traffic, where each section looks completely different from all the others, telling you where you are, but it is similar. The earlier scenes, of Jeffrey's teenage years (with a wonderful performance by Bruce Davison as Jeffrey's father - more thoughts on Davison here) have a soft contrast, with lots of natural light. There are outdoor scenes, daylight scenes. There is a grain to the film in the earlier years, giving it more of a documentary home-movie feel. The later scenes, showing Dahmer's exploits in the gay bar scene in Milwaukee, become dark, curtains drawn, no daylight or natural light, rooms saturated with color, deep reds and browns and blacks, with soft pools of light picking up the sides of Dahmer's face, like a Caravaggio.
The earlier scenes feel real, not editorial. The camera is objective. Detached. It keeps its distance from Jeffrey, more often than not, including a scene showing Jeffrey walking down a long hallway to go to a therapists' office (at his father's insistence), which calls to mind Scorsese's use of the hallway and the distant camera in Taxi Driver that I mentioned before. This is all very specific thought-out stuff, which clearly needed to be in place for such a short shoot.
Dahmer's apartment, the infamous apartment, appears to take on different characteristics, depending on Dahmer's emotional state. The first time we see it, it's filmed naturalistically, and by the end, it's just a gleaming-red nighttime interior space, with blocks of color showing the doorways to other rooms, and shadows encroaching upon all. Subjective and objective eye going on here. It works on the viewer subconsciously. By the end, Dahmer's apartment seems claustrophobic, the cameras are in close on his face, his victim's face, you get no sense of the surrounding space, and where there would be a way out.
All of this is captured visually. Very strong work done here by Manley, and the production design and lighting design.
It's Renner's work I most remember, and I am glad to know that this movie, which so quickly disappeared back in the day, is now experiencing a resurgence, due to things like Netflix and, of course, Renner's Oscar nomination.
I have more to say about Renner. Working on something big. But for now, some screen grabs from Dahmer that seem to capture what I'm talking about, both in terms of the look of the film, and his tremendously mold-able appearance. (He's in charge of that molding, by the way. This is not a matter of slapping on a mustache and padding your belly. Humphrey Bogart said good acting is always "six feet back in the eyes". That's the kind of transformation I am talking about here - not just compared to Renner's other roles, but within the film Dahmer itself.)
A psychological portrait of an antisocial personality, someone without the ability to feel empathy, or even understand what the purpose of something like empathy is, Renner left an indelible impression.
Sheriff Jeremy Renner
Pink rides into a dusty ole frontier town, ready to stir up some "Trouble", High Noon style (the shot of her coming through the town gates a direct steal of that famous shot in High Noon). The town trembles at her approach. She sneers at them. A sheriff (Jeremy Renner) all in black stands on a rooftop, watching her ride by. He is now an Oscar-nominated actor for The Hurt Locker, but certainly someone I've been aware of for quite some time (since I saw Dahmer and my basic response was: who the hell is THAT?). The video for "Trouble" is pure fluff, but a lot of fun: one of my favorite Pink songs, and in retrospect, now knowing who this guy is, and what a brilliant actor he is, it's hysterical watching Renner, all in black, with a silver sheriff's star on his chest, haul Pink around, stalk her through music halls and saloons - naturally not just because she's dangerous - although she is that - but because he wants her. Bad.
In the end Pink prevails. Naturally.
High Noon meets Coyote Ugly, starring Pink and Jeremy Renner.
Stephen Booth's "Extremely Close Reading"
Recently I read Ron Rosenbaum's fantastic book The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
There is a whole chapter devoted to Stephen Booth, a fascinating guy, a giant in the landscape of Shakespeare scholarship, whose 1970s edition of the Sonnets
Here's the thing about Stephen Booth's version, to give you an idea: There are 154 Sonnets. In the Booth version, you have his edited version on one side of the page, and then the facsimile of the sonnets on the opposite page - so you can see the punctuation/spelling of the original. Booth is not big on messing wtih Shakespeare's punctuation, as other editors are, adding exclamation points willy nilly. He is very specific on why he edits, what he chooses to edit - his main concern is to try to provide a context where the modern-day reader can perhaps approximate the response of an Elizabethan-era reader.
But one of the most stand-out features of Booth's version, and why I recommend it above all others, is that he does not concern himself with meaning. That may sound like an odd thing to say with an edition of the Sonnets where the Sonnets themselves take up 130 pages and then there over 400 pages of footnotes. What I mean by my statement is this: too many editions of Shakespeare try to iron out his ultimate meaning, they try to explain to the reader: "Here is exactly what he is saying here." By doing so, you certainly lessen the poem itself - it's like taking apart a clock and still expecting it to tell you the time. By trying to nail down ONE meaning, you discount Shakespeare's propensity for multiple layers, puns, correlations, mysterious things connected. Not to mention the fact that when you try to paraphrase Shakespeare, you completely destroy him. Booth is different from his contemporaries in that his concern is with the MULTIPLE layers of meaning in every word, every phrase - and ... AND ... he makes no conclusion. He is not interpreting meaning. No. What he is doing is showing us how to do an "extremely close reading" of these Sonnets, and to let the mysteries stand. To not try to stabilize a world which is inherently unstable.
This could be frustrating, I suppose, for a reader who wants to know what the hell Shakespeare is saying.
Rosenbaum discusses Booth's manner of analysis - taking as an example Booth's footnotes for Sonnet 40 in The Shakespeare Wars:
Try reading aloud Booth's seven-part explication of the ambiguities; it's criticism that rises to the level of poetry itself. Booth's footnote to line 5 in which he unfolds the dazzling multiplicity of possible meanings of "for", "love" and "receivest", and how each shift in meaning in one unfolds multiple shifts in the others, is an example of the polysemous pleasures of his reading of the Sonnets. Pleasures that almost threaten to dissolve not just the singularity of meaning - but the singularity itself.Booth doesn't encourage one to choose one particular combination of "for", "love" or "receivest" but rather to contemplate - to revel in - the way the multiple possibilities are choreographed. Change one's way of looking at one word's connotation and the other two dance to a new tune. Look at another word through a different lens and the others shift into a new focus. It's a dizzying but pleasurable destabilization. One won't crack one's head open going off this cliff, but it might open the mind in a way it hasn't been opened before. Something Boothian commentary tries to celebrate. To celebrate the way words and meanings in effect enact a beautiful and pleasurable dance of significations in which one possible meaning of "for" might combine with four other possibilities for "receivest" and then four more for "love" in an exponentially more complex and yet deeply pleasurable way. The way entertaining all possible, that is plausible, meanings at once is preferable to attempting reductively to single out one.
I couldn't quite have put it into words like that, but I do know that my sensibility is drawn towards possibilities rather than certainty. It's just the way I'm built, and I respond to things that seem to suggest other things, rather than just state what they are, and demand that you accept it. I'm working on a big post right now about Jeremy Renner and John Wayne that seems to connect to this, but I'll save that for later. I also haven't thought a lot about Stephen Booth - until I encountered him in Rosenbaum's book, even though he's been on my shelf since college. But I didn't know who the dude was, didn't care, I was in it for Shakespeare and this was the best version.
Rosenbaum tries to track Booth down, they share emails, conversation ... Rosenbaum basically wants to know what it is like to be able to read like Stephen Booth. What is it like to be able to read so closely? Booth is rather cagey, and yet what I liked so much about him is how much he seems to be about pleasure. You have to listen very closely in order to get that, but it is there. It is one of the things that really sets his work apart. He is against the grain of lit-crit right now - which doesn't believe in authorship, really, only historical context and patriarchy and all that humorless boring stuff which is trying to iron out the world into a manageable narrative. Booth just never even gives lit-crit Theory the time of day. He doesn't even engage them. He is on his own. His pleasure from Shakespeare is also refreshing because much of it comes from a few specific memories of seeing Shakespeare productions when he was a kid, and having various "a-ha" moments. Regardless, I won't summarize Rosenbaum's chapter on Booth - it should be read all of a piece - but after reading The Shakespeare Wars, I decided to go back and read the Sonnets, in so-called chronological order, and also commit to going through the footnotes, sonnet by sonnet. It is a dizzying experience - and while I have used the footnotes before as reference (ie: what the fuck, Will?) - I haven't really sat in them, and then gone back to the sonnet, and then back to the footnote, and then back. You really can get lost. There is no "up", "down", "left", "right". Booth does not give meaning - although I've never been into that anyway - what a sonnet "means" is not as important to me as how it is said. Booth gives all possible meanings that he can come up with.
Some of the Sonnets have footnotes that are 5 pages long. One note alone can be two pages long.
This is a volume to literally get lost in, and that's what I am doing right now. It is overwhelming, and there is a time when the brain basically turns off - becomes saturated - so I have given myself the task of reading one sonnet (and its accompanying notes) per day. It's a nice morning ritual. Like I said, many of these Sonnets I practically know by heart, and they are things I turn to repeatedly. Not so much for their meaning, but because I find the act of reading them to be comforting somehow.
I'm reading them differently right now - that is my little assignment right now - trying to just follow Booth down the various rabbit holes, and not worry about getting lost in one damn footnote: getting lost seems to be the point.
If you want to understand me, then all you need to know is that I find this stuff as exhilarating as a roller coaster. The challenge is the pleasure. The sheer difficulty of some of it. The arduousness. Flipping back and forth from Sonnet to note and back. I never want it to end.
So I thought I'd give an example of what Booth is about. Here is Sonnet 8. Followed by just one of Stephen Booth's notes.
1 Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
2 Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.
3 Why lovest thou that which thou receivest not gladly,
4 Or else receivest with pleasure thine annoy?
5 If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
6 By unions married, do offend thine ear,
7 They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
8 In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
9 Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
10 Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,
11 Resembling sire and child and happy mother
12 Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
13 Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,
14 Sings this to thee: 'thou single wilt prove none.'
And here is Stephen Booth's note on lines 5-8. Notice the acceptance of ambiguity and multiple meanings, and a complete disregard for the need of tidiness, or A to B paraphrasing:
5 - 8: Shakespeare's use of language is such that a reader can make no paraphrase that both follows the syntax of the lines and says what he knows the lines mean. One can almost always make a general paraphrase of a Shakespeare sonnet and give a satisfactory gloss for any particular word in it, but if one puts together a new sentence replacing Shakespeare's word with their glosses, one will often get a sentence that makes no sense at all. Sometimes Shakespeare's own sentences can be demonstrated to mean nothing at all - even where readers actually understand them perfectly. This second quatrain of sonnet 8 is an excellent example. Lines 5-6 introduce the running theme of the preceding seven sonnets (all of which urge a young man to marry and beget children) by using language that is both musical and marital (e.g. unions, married, and concord [literally "hearts together"]) to say, "If polyphonic music is distasteful to you." The language of lines 7-8 continues the double frame of reference, music and marriage. Going along at a normal reading speed a reader will presumably recognize an appropriate, if imprecise, metaphor of a musician "bearing a part" (one of the parts) in a piece of polyphonic music and understand who confounds / In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear as a repetition of what several sonnets have just said: "who are doing wrong in remaining single". Editors and students are pressed for something more specific; the best paraphrase I have seen is this one by Ingram and Redpath (who make a point of its insufficiency): "who, by remaining single, suppress those roles (of husband and father) which you should play." The clause effectively says much more than that and literally says much less. The coherence of the paraphrase is achieved by means of substitutions whose meanings are not quite those of the original words: confounds is replaced by "suppress" and bear by "play". The plurality of parts is explained by a reasonable extrapolation, "of husband and father". The paraphrase gives precise form to the obvious purport of the clause and does so in one of the sets of terms in which the poem operates. The paraphrase is absolutely just, but necessarily ignores several common meanings of "to confound" that also pertain in this context and impinge upon it: (a) "to ruin", "to destroy" (the sense it has in 5.6); (b) "to waste" (a theme of the sonnets since sonnet 1); and (c) "to throw into confusion," "to disorder," "to destroy the harmony of". Taking parts to mean "roles", no reader can be expected to understand confounds ... the parts as "ruins the parts" or "wastes the parts" or "disorders the parts", but several other meanings of parts are invoked by this context, and they act to sustain the illusion that the clause actually says what it so obviously means: parts means "talents," "good qualities," "abilities" (as in 17.4), and "who waste your abilities" makes good sense until one comes to bear; moreover, parts appears here in context of singleness and gives the lines the pertinent - though logically and syntactically unmanageable - richness of a vaguely meaningful opposition between the unity suggested by singleness and the division suggested by parts as a word meaning "pieces"; moreover, the context of marriage invokes a logically casual play on parts meaning "sex organs" (see 15.6 and note). Similarly, bear, as a word meaning "give birth to", is substantively irrelevant to this clause but so urgently relevant to its occasion that it gives a feeling of rightness, a sound of sense, to the lines. A complementary and equally easy victory over reasonable probability occurs in the grammatically unusual who confounds (for "who confoundst" - see Abbott, par. 247) and in the oxymoron sweetly chide. The quatrain is an emblem of the paradoxical conditions it recommends, harmony and marriage - unities that supersede common sense in being more unified than singleness, unities made by literally "confounding", "pouring together", individual elements and potentially disabled by a confusion that results from failure to mix.
This sort of analysis is, obviously, a jumping-off point, rather than an end-stop, which is why Booth seems so problematic to those who want answers and "translations", basically.
I also love the depth he goes, digging further and further into one damn word, playing out the possibilities, each one canceling out the one before, and yet nothing specifically wrong or incorrect. The ambiguities are meant to STAND, not be eradicated.
Here he is on one word-play in Line 14 of Sonnet 8, which, to me, starts to crack the poem open for me. A universe, a solar system, contained in a walnut shell, basically.
14. Sings ... single The overt play on sings and single is shadowed in lines 8 and 12. Thou single wilt prove none (1) unmarried - and thus without an heir - your line will become extinct with your death; (2) being single (one, 1), you will turn out to be nothing (zero, 0). (There is incidental allusion here to the ancient mathematical principle that "one is no number," which - as the embodiment of the quibble on the number "one" and "one" as opposed to a multitude - became proverbial [Tilley, O54, see 136.8]. Another proverb, "One is as good as none" [Tilley, O52], also pertains; Whitney gives it thus: "The proverbe saieth, one man is deemed none, / And life, is deathe, where men doo live alone" [p.66].) none It is possible that Shakespeare had a pun on "nun" in mind. Barrenness suggests nuns to him, and nuns suggest barrenness; see MND I.i.69-78 and the "self-loving nuns" passage in V&A (752-68). For a similarly suggestive use of nun, see Measure II.iv.134-38, Angelo's attempted seduction of Isabella, a novice from a nunnery: "Be that you are, / That is, a woman; if you be more, you're none; / If you be one, as you are well express'd / By all external warrants, show it now / By putting on the destin'd livery"; see also Measure III.i.62-62: Claudio. "Is there no remedy?" / Isabella. "None..." (since Isabella is herself the potential "remedy", her response has something like the effect that occurs in AW I.i.141-42, where Helena asks how a maiden can lose her virginity to her own liking, and Parolles introduces his answer with the expletive "marry"). For a simpler play on "nun" and "none", see The Jew of Malta, lines 491-92: a "Nunnery, where none but their owne sect / Must enter in ...." (The evidence for the pronunciations of one and none is inconclusive; Shakespeare rhymes one with "sun" and "sun" with "nun", but he also rhymes both one and none with "bone" and - like Whitney - with "alone"; see the noon / son rhyme in 7.13-14.
This is what I do every morning. My morning meditation.
UK vs. US
I love this: a compare and contrast of the covers for the UK and American versions of the same book. Fascinating.
March 18, 2010
Allison: What I miss
-- I miss our weekend-long hideouts in your apartment where we would watch, oh, the entire British Office, or Slings and Arrows, or, hell, some Forensic Files you had saved, and we could stop and pause and talk about it. I miss you saying things like, "I just want to see some murder", as you would scroll through the TV Guide.
-- I miss our talks about books.
-- I miss the support we give each other (although we can certainly support each other long-distance - it's the PROXIMITY I miss). I miss the unspoken understanding.
-- I miss the breadth and depth and scope of our conversations, ranging from our various mental breakdowns, the men we were in love with, to articles in The New Yorker, to funny stories about our pets, to long conversations about movies/art/photography.
-- I miss how much we would HOWL with laughter together. Looking up pictures of Hitler in the dictionary and crying with laughter at how mad he looked? How on earth could that ever be explained? Never mind. It was awesome.
-- I miss the excursions we would take, and if you ever move back here, we are going to do more of them. Let's go to MOMA. Let's go to the Met. Let's go walk in Central Park.
-- I miss the absolutely identical sense of humor that we apparently share. That is no small feat. I never had to explain to you why something was funny or awesome. I am thinking of me re-telling you my long story of getting my car out of hock. You just GOT the subtext.
But what do I miss most?
The regular occurrence of moments like the one we just shared on the phone:
Me: Have you been watching Celebrity Rehab?
You: Of course.
Me: You know who I love? And I can't even believe I'm saying this.
You: Who.
Me: Heidi Fleiss.
You: I knew you would say that.
Me: I love her so much.
You: I have goosebumps right now.
Bahman Ghobadi: No One Knows About Persian Cats
I read this dispatch from SXSW with great interest: a review of the new film No One Knows About Persian Cats, and cannot wait to see it. The film premiered at Cannes, winning a Special Jury Prize, and tells the story of two indie rock musicians in Tehran, searching for a way to make their art, without, you know, imprisonment.
Negar and Askan's search for underground musicians through windy roads, basements, secret practice spaces is fascinating. At each stop, these real-life musicians play their music as the pair listen in, studying to see what and who will work with their band. These scenes often incorporate montages of Tehran street life. One of the most interesting segments concerns a rap group meeting on a floor of an unfinished building, and overlooking the city the group raps about class struggle in Tehran.
Awesome. Ghobadi is a definitely someone to watch. I adored his film Half Moon (my review here. Also, if you are interested, I mentioned in one of my posts about Jafar Panahi that you cannot get to my site in Iran, I imagine due to the amount of time I have devoted to Iranian cinema, and the powers-that-be have figured out a way to block certain sites from public viewing. If you look at that post for Half Moon, check out the comment from Hossein, who hacked through the firewall. I get emails quite often from inventive Iranian computer-geeks, who are able to see my site at an Internet cafe, or their computer lab - anyway, it's very moving, in an awful way. Really makes you see the importance of art there, and what it represents.) It seems with this latest Ghobadi is continuing on his exploration of the role of music in Iranian life (Ghobadi is Kurdish, born and raised in Iran, and so his Kurdish identity is even more of a potent issue - since the persecution of the Kurds has been so extreme - the real subject of Half Moon - a must-see).
One of the good things about living where I do is that if a film gets distribution of any kind, I am almost guaranteed that it will be playing in my vicinity. I am REALLY looking forward to this one.
Today in history: March 18, 1893
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."
Wilfred Owen (now known as one of the best "war poets" of World War I) was born on this day in 1893. He was killed in battle in 1918 just seven days before the Armistice. He was 25 years old.
Owen was unpublished during his lifetime. He is now recognized, along with Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon, as one of those rare poets who can put the horror of warfare into verse. Trench warfare, in particular. (Yeats disagreed. He disliked Owens' poems, and did not include him - or any of the "war poets" in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. Yeats wrote that Owen's poems were "unworthy of the poet's corner of a country newspaper".) Owen was, of course, aware of Yeats, and used a quote from one of Yeats's poems as an epigraph to one of his poems. He had an inner argument with Yeats, I suppose, and Yeats's view of soldiers, war and death.
One of the most amazing things about these poems is the dates on them - September-October, 1917 / January 1918, etc. He is writing these poems in the thick of war. He is crouching in his tent scribbling these out. There is an immediacy to the verses, yes, and he is one of those sensitive souls who seems to have a larger-picture in his head, even in the midst of the day-to-day reality he is in. He sees the slaughter. He feels the tragedy of it. His main burst of creativity was from August 1917 to September 1918.
He was not patriotic, or at least, his poems are not. One of his poems was addressed to Jessie Pope, a poet who wrote motivational patriotic poems urging young men to enlist. Owen criticized that attitude. His poems are Romantic, certainly, full of loss and grief at the waste. He references Shakespeare, Shelley, the Bible, Keats - maybe not explicitly but in the sounds and rhythms he chooses. He self-consciously writes in these older forms, which is one of the reasons why his poems are so startling. World War I was, in a way, even more shattering, psychologically, than World War II, due to the newness of that kind of technologically advanced warfare. How would mankind go on, knowing what we can do? How on earth will anything ever be rebuilt? This was one of the driving forces of Modernism, as we know it, with poets like Ezra Pound and TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens and Yeats struggling to find language that would be able to HANDLE this new universe. It was a deeply destabilizing time. But Owen is not a modernist, although his poems are always included in those anthologies. His forms are even archaic, which gives them almost a feeling of elegy, all in all. By that I mean: by choosing to write about World War I using OLD forms, rather than trying to "make it new" (a la Ezra Pound's advice to poets) - Owen is mourning a world that is passing away forever, right before his eyes. It's one of the reasons why the poems are so strong.
Owen was probably gay, some of his earlier poems deal with having sensual urges towards other men, and it's hard to say what would have happened to him should he have survived World War I. His journey towards poetry is really interesting. Here is my impression of it (and I say that, knowing only the bare bones of the story):
He grew up in a small town in England (near the border with Wales). He kind of drifted a bit, in terms of his schooling, due to financial constraints. He considered becoming a priest. But he had disturbing feelings about God's inability to deal with human problems. He was a tutor for a while. When World War I broke out, he enlisted. In January, 1917, he was sent to the front. He found war glorious and exciting, similar to George Washington's famous remark to his brother after his first experience with a battle in the French and Indian War: "I heard the bullets whistle, and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound."
Wilfred Owen wrote home to his parents early on:
This morning I was hit! We were bombing and a fragment from somewhere hit my thumb knuckle. I coaxed out 1 drop of blood. Alas! No more!
The bloom soon was off the rose, and that following June, he was moved to a hospital because he suffered from shell-shock. (His heartwrenching poem "Mental Cases" is about what shell-shock is like). He was transported back to England and then Edinburgh. He was a mess. It was in the hospital in Edinburgh that he met Siegfried Sassoon - and this would be the event that would change his short life. Sassoon was a captain in the army and a poet, well-known. They aren't really similar in style, but Sassoon obviously encouraged Owen - I so wonder about their conversations.
Owen wrote to Sassoon in November 1917:
I was always a mad comet; but you have fixed me.
Thus began his crazy output of poetry. Owen returned to the war in France in August 1918. He would be dead by November.
Sassoon published all of Owen's poems posthumously, in 1920.
Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother on December 31, 1917:
I go out of this year a poet, my dear mother, as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet's poet. I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.
Owen said, in regards to his war poems:
"These elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful."
It seems to me that his lack of interest in consoling his own generation is one of the reasons why his poems have lasted, and are anthologized - because they do rise up out of their own time. They cease to be local.
Here are some of Wilfred Owen's poems.
Anthem for Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
The End
After the blast of lightning from the east,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot Throne;
After the drums of time have rolled and ceased,
And by the bronze west long retreat is blown,
Shall Life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will he annul, all tears assuage?-
Or fill these void veins full again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, Age?
When I do ask white Age he saith not so:
'My head hangs weighed with snow.'
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
'My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the seas, be dried.'
On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought into Action
Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!
Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
Spend our resentment, cannon,--yea, disburse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.
Yet, for men's sakes whom thy vast malison
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdrawn, dark arm, thy spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!
Futility
Move him into the sun--
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,--
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved-- still warm,-- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
Mental Cases
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish?
- These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished.
Memory fingers in their hair of murders,
Multitudinous murders they once witnessed.
Wading sloughs of flesh these helpless wander,
Treading blood from lungs that had loved laughter.
Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men's extrication.
Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains, because on their sense
Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
- Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.
- Thus their hands are plucking at each other;
Picking at the rope-knouts of their scourging;
Snatching after us who smote them, brother,
Pawing us who dealt them war and madness.
March 17, 2010
"Falling as in the silence falleth now / Dusk from the air."
James Joyce's poem "Tutto è Sciolto" appeared in the May, 1917 issue of Poetry.
Beautiful. That line I excerpted calls to mind the final four paragraphs of The Dead.
Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
The word "falling" appears 7 times there. On the face of it, it seems like that would be WAY too much. It breaks all the rules. But that's why it is so brilliant.
And there it is again in the poem. Falling. Falleth.
