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3/25/2019

A Discussion Of The Film If.... by Lindsay Anderson in my novel
DO NOT LAUGH AT THE NATIVES

Richard Livermore

On another occasion, however, I had no such engagement, so I was able to stay and listen to Hubert till the end. He had lent Jack a DVD of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film if…., which had only just come out in DVD format. When he came round a couple of days later and asked us what we thought, Jack told him that he thought the film was too class-specific to have anything universal to say. Jack, ever the Marxist, had a tendency to reduce things to class in this way! Hubert disagreed; he saw the film in terms of the ongoing conflict between the ‘primitive’ desire to live life to the full and ‘civilised’ repression and neurosis.
            “The first is exemplified by Travis,” he went on, “the second, above all, by Denson, who takes the values of the public school most to heart amongst the “whips” and the seniors. The confrontation over Travis’s necklace of teeth, in which Denson says “What in hell are those?” and Travis replies, “They’re my teeth, they’re my good luck.” and Denson goes on “They’ve got blood on them; they’re a breeding ground for bacteria. I’m confiscating them. You’re a degenerate, Travis.” is a case in point. In that confrontation, Denson personifies the whole sanitising neurosis of Western Civilisation? Denson, of course, is a repressed fag, always eying up the gay Bobby Philips, then upbraiding the other whips for their adolescent homosexual flirtatiousness with him. And I’m pretty sure repressed homosexuality lies at the heart of his constant petty victimisation of Travis. However, interesting as that may be in itself, it’s just incidental to the main theme of the movie.”
            “Which is what,” said Jack. “apart from a few public school-boys and a girl going on the rampage with guns and bombs at the end?”
            “Well, there’s a tragic conflict being worked out in the film, I believe.” Hubert continued. “Travis’s obvious identification with the ‘primitive’, exemplified by his necklace of teeth, his repeated playing of the Sanctus from Misa Luba, his identification with a tiger while making love in the Packhorse cafe, is tragic on account of his tendency to equate the ‘primitive’ with violence and his adolescent fascination with war and ‘revolution’, which, had they not inadvertantly found that cache of arms, he would probably have grown out of.”
            “So, you don’t think he was just a psycho, then?” Jack asked,.
            “Well, if he was,” said Hubert “he was an extremely sympathetic one, taken all in all. He never seems to participate in any of the ritualistic bullying that takes place in the school and he tells a senior in charge of him to watch it for making an anti-Semitic remark about another boy. He does, however, have a hatred of authority - and I don’t see anything particularly psycho about that. Travis is a natural - as opposed to intellectual - anarchist, a sort of instinctive rebel, but one who is as yet too immature to know what that means, and that is his tragedy. When you compare him with the “whips”, he is morally far superior to any of them. Not only that, but he has a lot more style than they do, and it’s one of the things they hate about him. His whole philosophy can be summed up by the question he asks Knightley, “When do we live?” That of the “whips”, on the other hand, can be summed up by their unthinking adherence to a system which suppresses all forms of individuality, including their own. Travis’s tragedy is that he discovers that cache of arms at the precise moment that he comes into maximum conflict with the system and his ideas are not fully formed. He is, “a young dog, a whelp, puppy”, who has been beaten and humiliated and whose desire for revenge has driven him temporarily mad. Nor should it be forgotten that the Sixties themselves had a very dark side to them, a love of gesture and rhetoric which is reflected in his obsession with violence. All this made the final explosion inevitable, with tragic consequences for everyone caught up in it, including Travis himself. The last scene, which shows Travis grimly firing away at his adversaries from the rooftop of the school, presents him as a hunted animal at bay. And how true the image is; because, in a way, Travis had been hunted all the way through the film, the way non-conformists are usually hunted down by conformists.”
            “So why do you think the others participated?” asked Jack. “Don’t you think that they were rather too easily led by the more charismatic Travis?”
            “Not at all.” said Hubert. “They all had their own reasons for going along with Travis. Take Wallace, for example. Wallace is the good-looking athlete who is obsessed with the thought of his own physical decline. He doesn’t want to grow old; in fact, he doesn’t even want to get older. His affair with the younger Bobby Philips, I think, expresses his obsession with youth. It’s easy to see why he went along with the orgy of violence at the end of the film. He wanted to die young. Knightley, for his part, went along with it because Travis was his best friend and he wouldn’t even think of not going along with him. That’s what friends do, after all. And the girl joined in partly because she was Travis’s girlfriend and partly because she was in a dead-end job and yearned for excitement. She was a “zek”, in other words, for whom life offered absolutely no prospects; so why not just pick up a gun and shoot your way out of it? Like Travis, she’d also asked “When do we live?” That leaves only Bobby Philips to account for, and I must confess his involvement is something of an enigma to me, which I’m not sure I’ve properly fathomed. Earlier, for example, he’d spoken of wanting to be a criminal lawyer in California, but maybe he was daunted by the fact that it would take 20 years to achieve his ambition. After all, life can only be really lived in the present. Why put it off till the future? Or perhaps he just wanted to be with his lover and his lover’s friends, who at least seem to have accepted him just as he was. When you think of the way he had been sexually harassed by the whips and taunted for being gay by some of the older boys in the school, his joining the futile and suicidal rebellion at the end of the film is more understandable.
            Of course, Bobby Philips’s involvement with the rebellion has another more symbolic significance, considering the fact that he is so obviously gay. It anticipates the time when gays and lesbians were to take to the streets themselves, which they hadn’t yet begun to do in 1968, the year the film was made, and also the year of the events on the streets of Paris and France. The symbolic dimension of the film is one we are often apt to forget when we present the rebellion simply as one that took place purely within the confines of an upper-class public school.”
            “But, getting back to Travis,” said Jack, “Don’t you think he is as much a product of his class as Rowntree or Denson? His very style exudes class. And he takes his punishment like a Trojan, as if he didn’t want to let the side down. Had he been working-class, he would have just told Rowntree to stuff it up his toffee-nosed arsehole and punched him in the mouth if he’d tried to beat him.”
            “Yes, it’s true.” said Hubert. “A working-class boy would have opposed his class-identity to theirs and already had a way out, but part of Travis’s tragedy is that he was not working-class and didn’t have that identity to fall back on. I suppose you could say he was classless, as he didn’t really belong to his own class either. That, in effect, makes him much more interesting and individuated than either Rowntree or a boy with a working-class identity would be. The ways people are individuated is always a more interesting theme in art than identity, be it class, ethnic, national, sexual or religious identity - though, in Travis’s case, individuation had a tragic twist in its tail.
            Of course, the trouble with the rebellion as it stood was that “the Crusaders” chose to fight the system with its own weapons. Travis has a wonderful negativity about him - what nowadays we would call “attitude” - a deep loathing and contempt for all the values which people like Rowntree and Denson personify. You can see that in the way he constantly looks at them. That negativity was absolutely essential to the process of finding himself as an individual in the teeth of what people like Rowntree and Denson represented. Ideally, however, it should have meant choosing his own ground to fight on, not theirs, his own weapons, not mortars and sten-guns; but he wasn’t given time for that; he was more or less hitting out with what came to hand in accordance with the tenets of his own immature belief in the cathartic virtues of violence and ‘revolution’. His being forced to act before he’d had time to grow out of that belief is what, in the end, makes him so tragic.”

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LEARNING CURVE

3/13/2017

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LEARNING CURVE

Tom Brown’s Schooldays is not a good novel. In fact, if a novel ever cried out for Occam’s Razor to be used on it, it is Thomas Hughes’ novel. It is an ungainly and diffuse mess, full of fascinating information about the times – such as the various references to the Chartist movement and the 1832 Reform Act suggesting it was written in a period of political turmoil - but it is a novel which allows historical and autobiographical details to swamp it entirely. The subject itself – English public schools, more specifically Rugby School at the time of the tenure of its reforming headmaster, Doctor Arnold - is potentially an interesting one, but it is a novel in which the opportunity to deal with that subject-matter effectively is lost thanks to the welter of other information the reader tends to get inundated with. Perhaps, the novel should have contained less autobiographical and historical material, for such things do tend to obscure any clear aesthetic purpose the novel might otherwise have had. And yet, there is a novel – play or film – within the novel which seems to have a great deal of potential.
            Many films have already been made of this novel, some of them adhering more faithfully to the story-line than others. One very recent film-version has, I believe, been largely successful, since those involved in the making of it were not afraid to apply Occam’s Razor to it in a fairly ruthless way. It doesn’t stick to the story in the novel, since it makes Flashman a much more central figure and has him ending up in a fight with Tom Brown, the eponymous ‘hero’ of the novel, in what amounts to a genuine climax. It is clear, well-structured and simplified in such a way that its force is not lost in a welter of irrelevances. Paradoxically, the film’s simplicity allows us to glimpse something of the complexity of Tom Brown’s own character and that, for a TV rendering of ‘a classic’ is very refreshing. It is not simply a panegyric to an ‘exemplary English schoolboy’ – which he is often portrayed as – but the story of a boy who is an embodiment of the way public schools socialise their pupils into adopting their own collective ethos and becoming one-sided in the process. The film is the 2005 BBC version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in which a very young Alex Pettyfer plays the part of Tom Brown and Stephen Fry Doctor Arnold.
            But before we start talking about the actual film, I think we ought to say something about the institution of the English Public School. I have often wondered why the English ruling-classes would send their children to such barbaric institutions where corporal punishment was rife and bullying rampant. After all, the only subject on the curriculum seemed to be Greek. Of course, it was a tradition, and the aim of that tradition was to turn boys into men and make them fit to be fully paid up members of a class which needed ruthless warriors, rather than 'milksops' and 'mummy's boys', to stay on top and hold down the local uppity ‘prols’, not to mention an empire. The ideal therefore was a Spartan one. Take children away from their parental homes and throw them together to learn the hard way about what it takes to be a ruler. Indeed, this aspect of the English public school is brought out fairly early on in the film when the new headmaster, Dr Arnold, is attempting to impress on the other senior masters of the school the need for reform. As one master puts it, public school “readies them (the boys) for the responsibilities of life, of Empire.” And another master says. “Have you actually ever met a schoolboy, headmaster? They are the riotous natives, we the occupying force.” This was during a discussion about whether the boys should be left to police themselves, as was traditional, or whether they should be policed by the masters in a ‘spirit of pastoral care’ and turned into Christian gentlemen, as Doctor Arnold thought should happen – at least in the film.
            As someone who went to a boarding-school himself (though by no means a public school), I think it is obvious why the boys were left to police themselves. It saved work for the masters. At my school, it was all done through a prefect-system whereby bigger and stronger boys were given the task of keeping us ‘riotous natives’ in order. Authority maintains itself through such forms of delegation. You couldn’t complain, because the prefect’s word was always the one that was believed by the masters, who, quite naturally, preferred the quiet life to investigating the cause of the complaints. This basically is what is being discussed in the film. Doctor Arnold wants to change things, and he is meeting up with resistance based on the quite natural desire of the masters not to add to their own workload. Human nature seems to have a decided bent towards inertia and keeping things as they are.
            This is basically the school which Tom Brown enters in the 1830s – a brutal place where bullying is rife, though it goes against the grain to report it. Apparently, the real Rugby School was a lot worse than any fictional representation has been, but the authorities ignored the abuses because of the unwritten rule against informing and running to masters “with your fingers in your eyes” among the boys. In the film, Tom meets with his nemesis, Flashman, fairly early on in a confrontation which says quite a lot about both. Tom is timid, but stands his ground, and this incenses Flashman, who develops a particular animus towards Brown because Brown does not automatically submit to him. He is therefore marked out as the “cockiest blackguard in the house” and an “uppity little cad”. That his refusal to submit is very timid to begin with is of no account. Flashman senses a certain resistance in Brown which he does not find pleasing and he therefore resolves to make life miserable for him.
            But Brown is not just interesting in terms of his confrontation with Flashman. He is interesting also because of the way he wants to fit in and be ‘a man’ among his fellow schoolmates - a necessary part of the whole socialising process. He comes to the school bringing all sorts of pious resolutions, including a determination to pray for his mother and father before he goes to bed every night, which he almost immediately abandons once he is called a milksop and mummy’s boy for doing so. What’s clear is that he has a strong need to belong to a peer-group and thereby succumbs to the pressure to conform to its requirements even if it means stealing chickens from local farmers, which was apparently a tradition in the school and, after he is caned for it by the headmaster, becoming a rebel, vociferous in his antagonism towards authority and instigating a riot which gets out of control. Obviously, his desire to conform, does not mean a desire to please the authorities of the school, only a desire to fit in with his schoolmates and not seem a 'mummy's boy'. If he began life at Rugby as a timid submissive boy, this doesn’t last very long. On top of this, his new truculent manner, antagonises Flashman who, after Brown has defied him once too often, has him roasted in front of an open fire and so badly burnt that he faints and needs treatment for burns. He becomes, as the headmaster, who basically likes him, says an agitator and thief, who is at the risk of being sent down or expelled from the school. Instead, he is sent back home to his father for a period of reflection with a letter explaining what has happened.
            Doctor Arnold, however, is not the ogre and tyrant he has come to appear in Tom Brown’s eyes. He wants to end the regime of bullying that takes place in the school, as well as some of the more enjoyable pastimes of the boys like gambling on horses, hunting with beagles, distilling and brewing spirits and beer, drinking and the ownership of guns. Dr Arnold wants to turn Rugby School into a school for Christian gentlemen and end some if its traditional practices, including the stealing of chickens from local farmers, which the boys do as a prank. His intentions are virtuous Christian ones, but of course, the boys do not see it like that and fall in behind Tom when he accuses Dr Arnold in front of the other boys and the school-captain Frobisher, of destroying the school with his reforms - which is what sets off the riot. It must not be assumed that Dr. Arnold is simply a killjoy. He can be magnanimous and generous when the occasion arises and even admit to being wrong, as he does after giving the young “Tadpole” a caning on the hand for apparently preparing the ‘wrong’ passage of Xenophon and ‘lying’ about it. He may be a little too eager to turn the boys into Christian gentlemen, but there is nothing vicious about him, as Tom later comes to realise. Furthermore, he has a lot more insight into the behaviour of Tom Brown than Tom Brown himself does, which is why he is reluctant to expel him. As he explains to Brown’s father in the letter Brown takes back to him, “I believe your son has all the potential qualities that a Rugby man should have. Great courage, decency of instinct, fairness, thoughtfulness. I sincerely hope you find it in your heart to send him back to us.” This assessment of his own character read to him by his own father is probably enough to make Brown rethink his opinion of Dr Arnold, though not necessarily to persuade him to knuckle under. But Dr Arnold is more of a psychologist than that. He does have an ace up his sleeve for reining Tom in, and it goes by the name of George Arthur.
            George Arthur is everything that Tom is not – at least on the surface. He is weak and sickly, while Tom is boisterous and physically robust. He is a ‘mummy’s boy’ and not ashamed of the fact. I suppose we might say nowadays that he was a sissy, He is also obviously a scholar rather than an athlete, and does not care what others think of him. He prays before he goes to bed and perseveres with it, while others throw slippers at him to get him to stop. He won’t conform and takes pride in being different. “It would be a dull old world if we all had to be the same, wouldn’t it Tom?” he tells Brown, who at first is not too pleased with being given job of looking after him, and tries to persuade him to be ‘more of a man’ and look after himself. “If a person hits you, hit him back.” He says. “I don’t believe in violence.” Arthur replies, to which Tom retorts, “Of course you believe in violence; you’re British.” I suspect Arthur is a bit of an embarrassment to Brown at first. Brown is a conformist; Arthur is not, and perhaps he also makes Tom a little guilty about being so. After all, Tom started out with the same kind of intentions, but Arthur has stuck with them, while he hasn’t. After a while, however, it is obvious that Tom starts to have more respect for Arthur’s idiosyncrasies and take his own assigned role as protector more seriously, even repeating Arthur’s dictum, “It would be a dull old world if we all had to be the same, wouldn’t it?” to his friend East, for whom Arthur is simply weird. In the book, Tom even becomes slightly jealous when Arthur begins to pay attention to someone else, but then we all know what boarding-schools are like, don’t we?
            It is obvious that Arthur would become a sitting target for someone like Flashman sooner or later, not only because he was weak and vulnerable, but because of his growing friendship with Brown, who Flashman hated as an impudent cad because he stood up to him. And the occasion comes when Flashman gets hold of a letter from Arthur to his mother praising Tom as the one shard of sunshine in the darkness of his present existence. This leads to Arthur being dunked in the school-well, an act which precipitates the fight between Tom Brown and Flashman, which ends in Brown’s defeat but only because Flashman had cheated and used a knuckle-duster after the smaller, but fitter Brown had completely outboxed him. Up to that point, it seems that everything that happens in the film happens because it must. It represents a very good climax, though what happens after is perhaps not so compelling.
            One important issue the film raises is that of class. Flashman clearly comes from an aristocratic background. His father is a rich benefactor of the school and that gives Flashman a bargaining counter in his dealings with the headmaster. Brown’s background, on the other hand, is that of the local squirarchy or small landed gentry, which means he would have been much more likely to mix with and also get involved in fights and wrestling matches with the neighbourhood farmhands and ‘country bumpkins’ in his own age-group – something brought out in the novel. When he goes off the rails it is in the direction of being an agitator spoiling for a fight against perceived injustices. When Flashman goes off the rails it is in defence of his own sense of class-entitlement against ‘uppity little cads’ like Brown. I suspect it was a fairly accurate portrayal of aspects of class-relations at the time Hughes was writing the novel.
            This is the 1830s and class then took on a different profile to the one it shows now. But of course it has not been left completely behind, as the phenomenon of the Bullingdon Club, to which our Tory rulers once belonged, suggests. Who else but a class of spoilt brats, used to taking their own privileges for granted, would smash up restaurants for the sake of a jolly night out, leaving others to clear up the mess? Who else in government would not see the suffering they caused to people of ‘the lower classes’ through their policies of austerity, the number of disabled people who have been driven to suicide because they have suddenly been deemed fit to work and had their benefits withdrawn. Only such a callous class is capable of this, a class that has no contact with the human beings whose lives they destroy. The same goes of course, for all the people made homeless. The Flashmans of this world are alive and kicking still, though the Tom Browns may have become extinct.
            The final question I want to ask is why we still allow it to persist. Perhaps the reason can be found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s book, The Ancien Regime And The French Revolution. “The reason why the English middle-class, far from being actively hostile to the aristocracy, inclined to fraternise with it was not so much that the aristocracy kept open house as that its barriers were ill-defined; not so much that entrance into it was easy, as that you never knew when you had got there. The result was that everyone who hovered on its outskirts nursed the agreeable illusion that he belonged to it and joined forces with it in the hope of acquiring prestige or some practical advantage under its aegis.” That is to say that it is a big imaginary club which still holds vast swathes of people in thrall to it by somehow persuading them that if they just voted Tory, they would belong to it. But what they get instead for their pains is roundly abused by the modern equivalents of Flashman.

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TADZIO'S SMILE

10/26/2014

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TADZIO'S SMILE

I have often been given to wonder about the meaning of time. Space too of course, but somehow less so, since I often see space as a cavity in which to put things, while all that happens happens in time and is subject to time. Of course, things happen in space too and a visual artist will find more meaning in spatial than temporal relations, but for me things unfold primarily in time and space is ‘simply’ the backdrop to this unfolding. Of course, things actually exist in space-time, which means that neither time nor space can be abstracted from one another and are intimately bound up with each other in the end. The gesture towards the end of Visconti’s film, Death in Venice, in which the young Tadzio raises his left arm in the air to salute the older Aschenbach is a spatial gesture which has a profound temporal significance that goes to the heart of the meaning of the film. It is a gesture of recognition; nevertheless, it is a gesture which takes place at a distance, against the background of the sea and the distant horizon; it is a gesture which, while establishing a relationship between Aschenbach and the boy, also establishes the limitations of their relationship, as if all that was possible between them was a gesture and nothing more. The older man will go his way towards death, and the young boy towards the threshold of a life which is beckoning him. And the distance between them is therefore a necessary one. But at the same time there is a pathos involved here, a pathos which arises out of the longing of the older man for the young boy, which, of course, can never find fulfilment, because, at heart, it is the longing of the older man for his own lost youth and the world of his youth which the young boy embodies. It is this almost Proustian theme of time lost which is the real subtext of Visconti’s film I believe.

In others ways too, the film is Proustian. The whole period-atmosphere it reproduces could almost have been lifted directly out the Combray episodes in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. The hotel scenes, the marvellous beach-scenes, orchestrated to reproduce the elegance of the era to such superb effect. One almost expects Monsieur de Charlus to suddenly appear hectoring Marcel about the ungrateful – or was it effeminate? - youth of the day. What is so satisfying about this film is the way that it is stripped down to pure gesture, with nothing superfluous about it. A director with less taste would, no doubt, have had Tadzio looking on quizzically while Aschenbach’s body was removed from the beach. But no, the last image we have of Tadzio is the last image Aschenbach has, the gesture of his raising his arm in the distance. Even the discussions which take place between Aschenbach and Alfred – who was, I believe, modelled on Schoenberg – about art and the physical v spiritual origin of beauty have their place in the economy of the film as a whole. Aschenbach, who is based on Mahler - hence the extensive use of the Adagietto of Mahler's 5th. Symphony in the film – has reached a creative crisis which also finds expression in physical illness. In other words, he has come to the point in his life which marks the transition between ‘youth’ and ‘age’ (psychologically, rather than physically speaking) which people often arrive at in middle-age and he has to liberate himself from some of the puritanical (and Platonic) illusions of his youth and embrace ‘the flesh’ if he is to progress further as an artist. He is at the cusp of this developmental trajectory at the beginning of the film and it is among the reasons why he has come to Venice to recuperate.

So far so good. But of course, what he finds is not recuperation, but rather an intensification of his crisis in the guise of a 14 year old Polish boy possessed of almost ethereal beauty. The ethereality of Tadzio’s beauty will trigger a conflict in Aschenbach in relation to his own Apollonian conception of art. Is it spiritual? Or is it physical? How does beauty first manifest itself? Is it created through work? Or does it just happen? It is through Tadzio that we encounter these unresolved issues in Aschenbach, because clearly Tadzio’s beauty is physical and has no spiritual source. Yet it remains ethereal and therefore ‘spiritual’. The ‘spiritual’ leading back to the physical, and the physical leading forward to the ‘spiritual’. It is through Tadzio that Aschenbach, a married man whose daughter has died, learns to confront the aridity of his life and art and embrace physical beauty in the form of a 14 year old boy who will always remain out of reach.

Aschenbach’s first reaction is to try to run away from his own inner turmoil and the temptation which first brought it on. He attempts to flee Venice but finds at the station that his luggage has been put on the wrong train. While at the station he also sees a man collapse from the Asiatic cholera which, at the end of the film, will also take Aschenbach. He resolves to return to the Lido in Venice and there is no doubt that Tadzio is the chief reason why. His inner conflict which had manifested itself in a desire to flee temptation now turns him in the opposite direction. It’s almost as if he just needs this excuse to stay. He has ‘tried’ to flee and failed and having ‘tried’, his conscience is clear and he now is free for Tadzio. Yet, they will only keep walking past one another, both looking at the other as they pass, each somehow fascinated by the other, without anyone saying a word or making a gesture of recognition. A slight smile will sometimes flicker on the edge of Tadzio’s lips, but nothing more will happen. He will stop to look back, but the idea of their cementing an actual relationship seems out of the question. At one point when Tadzio has passed Aschenbach and his smile has been especially enigmatic, Aschenbach will sit on a bench and say, “You must never smile like that. You must never smile like that at anyone.” And not long after will utter the words. “I love you.” Yet there is no possibility that this love will ever be consummated. If he was Tadzio’s age, perhaps, like Tadzio’s Polish playmate on the beach who pulls Tadzio to him and gives him a peck on the cheek, but he isn’t. Where can his love ever be consummated, except perhaps in some imaginary realm, the realm of the artist who must die to himself? This is the pathos of the longing Aschenbach feels and the impasse he has reached in himself as a result of it. And just as he became ill before due to a creative crisis, his catching cholera and dying from it seems to be a metaphor of the impasse he has reached in himself in relation to Tadzio. He will die on the beach, but the last image he will have will be of Tadzio ‘beckoning’ him, almost like an angelic presence who will accompany him in the realm of the dead.

The real question which interests me is why Aschenbach fell for Tadzio in the first place. Oh yes, I know all about the ‘dirty old paedophile’ syndrome, but something else is at stake in this film. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Aschenbach doesn’t know himself all that well, and is therefore unprepared psychologically for someone like Tadzio; he has led a sheltered bourgeois life in which he has simply done what was expected of him. He has been married, had a child, visited brothels and so on, none of which has really fulfilled him. In Thomas Mann’s novella of Death in Venice, which is the source of the film, Aschenbach is on the side of Apollo rather than Dionysus. He fears Dionysian excess. Dionysus leads to what Rimbaud called “the dissociation of the senses”. He is also sexually androgynous. According to Arthur Evans in The God Of Ecstasy, he was the only Greek god who enjoyed taking it up the backside. In other words, he epitomised what it means to really let go. What Tadzio brings out in Aschenbach’s highly repressed psyche is something close to complete abandonment of the values he has held dear – such as art as an Apollonian vocation. As a result of his prior repressions he is caught off-guard and goes overboard completely. Dirk Bogarde’s portrayal of his almost fatuous state of mind when he is thinking about Tadzio is perfectly rendered, I believe. Had he known himself better Aschenbach would have read the signs aright and nipped any feelings in the bud before they took possession of him. He’d have seen the impossible absurdity of loving a boy of 14 and the impasse it would lead to – especially a boy so firmly ensconsed in the ‘bosom’ of his family. In brief Freudian terms, his ego would have mastered his Id and he would just have admired Tadzio’s beauty from afar. But no, he fell head over heels into the abyss which being in love all too often opens up for the unwary. Knowing oneself, is knowing all about one’s own limitations. One can only go so far thinking of oneself as immortal. Sooner or later time catches up with you and you learn to make an adjustment. An older man loving a young boy in the way Aschenbach loves Tadzio can only be premised on the feeling that one doesn’t age, that one is still somehow ‘immortal’. And beyond middle-age that illusion becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.

One other fact to bear in mind about Apollo and Dionysus is that Apollo is a god whose youth and beauty is perpetuated through his drinking of nectar, which is the drink of immortality. He is an essentially static - and frigid - god who doesn't age. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a god of dissolution, consistently torn apart and dismembered - a much more dynamic god who seems to represent the very elemental processes involved in entropy. Ageing, of course, is due to those processes. The Apollonian - spiritual - art which Aschenbach favours in the film, is only one half of any artistic equation and it needs the Dionysian - i.e., the physical - to complete it. Nietzsche saw both gods as essential to artistic creation. Apollo was the god of illusion, the principle behind the aesthetic in the first place, while Dionysus is the god of dissolution and the breaking up of illusions which alone brings life into art. And until Aschenbach encounters the Dionysian within himself and his art, he will remain repressed and his art continue to be frigid and purely Apollonian. Vital art, after all, is all about taking Dionysian risks. But Dionysus is also the god of tragedy, and Aschenbach's predicament is of necessity a tragic one.

I am not the greatest fan of films adapted from novels. Visconti, however, has excelled in the genre for the very reason that he has departed from the original novel in quite a number of ways. Partly owing to this, Death in Venice is almost perfection. Why do I say almost? It IS perfection. There are some wonderful cameo-scenes in it which really do take it beyond perfection. The scene with the ladies suddenly passing the camera on the beach with their sunshades up, almost like a flotilla of boats drifting by. The conversations in different languages on the beach. The portrayal of the hotel manager. The extraordinary visual beauty of many of the scenes. And then of course, there is Mahler’s music. I can’t praise this film highly enough. But most of all, it is the extraordinary artistic vision which informs it which makes it, in my opinion, one of the finest films ever made.

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February 06th, 2013

2/6/2013

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BEYOND ENTROPY
Richard Livermore

Terence W Deacon in his book, Incomplete Nature, has one chapter called Homeodynamics - though don't ask me what that means.* It is a long and closely argued book on science and philosophy which I am only halfway through at the moment. Nevertheless, the chapter on homeodynamics raises some very interesting questions which do, I believe, have a great deal of relevance to creativity and the arts. In Homeodynamics, he draws a distinction in the field of Thermodynamics between Entropy and Complexity, which are characterised by what he calls Orthograde and Contragrade processes, the first of which tends towards thermodynamic equilibrium and the second towards thermodynamic disequilibrium.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics holds that ordered states of affairs have a natural tendency to become disordered - i.e., gas molecules placed in the corner of a container tend to spread out and become distributed across the volume of the container. This is because such molecules left to themselves incline towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Whatever tends towards this state is moving in what Deacon calls an orthograde direction and going with the flow of things, as it were, and finding its natural level. Entropy reflects what things will do when they are free to do it and have no constraints placed upon them. Thus tidy rooms become untidy over a period of time, corpses decompose in the ground, while a hot poker eventually cools to ambient temperatures. Contragrade processes move in the opposite direction, that is to say, they arrest orthograde processes and become more ordered, thus contravening the natural process of entropy, which leads to decay. In point of fact, Deacon says that there are no pure contragrade processes; rather there are two or more conflicting orthograde processes which resist and place constraints on each other in ways which cancel each other out. Organic life he sees as an example of these contragrade processes in action in nature. A slightly mechanistic point of view, I suspect, but it does have some explanatory power nonetheless.

Over the past few weeks I have been watching a number of YouTube films and documentaries on the composer Ludwig Van Beethoven. These include the BBC's Eroica, about the first rehearsal/performance of Beethoven's Third Symphony, Immortal Beloved and Copying Beethoven. For me, by far the most interesting of these is the last, because a) it deals almost exclusively with the late-period Beethoven and b) the philosophy of art and creativity expressed in it is much more interesting than it is in the others, which do tend to present a clichéd portrait of Beethoven. It achieves this I believe because it contains the least biographical material and therefore allows itself to wander more in the realm of cinematic 'fiction'. In other words, it is a meta-portrait of Beethoven rather than an actual portrait and this has the paradoxical virtue of laying bare the 'soul' of the artist much more convincingly. Whether that artist was Beethoven or not is, of course, another question entirely. Near the beginning of the film, Anna Holtz (Dianne Kruger) corrects "the Maestro's" own composition of the 9th. Symphony, and when Beethoven (Ed Harris) questions her about it, says simply that that's what he would have done had he had more time to think about it, a point Beethoven concedes. This is a very interesting slant on the creative process in that it suggests that there are right ways and wrong ways of doing things, and the process of emergence of a work of art involves an element of trial and error until the right way has been discovered. And sometimes it can be discovered by somebody else. Elsewhere, Beethoven talks about how music emerges not from the head or the heart, but from the gut. In other words, it is visceral. I think the same about poetry. In yet another part Anna Holtz points out the differences between Beethoven's earlier 'romantic' middle period works and the much more 'cacophonic' and difficult later works such as the Grosse Fugue. She complains, for instance, that the Opus 131 Quartet is not divided into movements like other quartets and Beethoven's reply as ever is highly illuminating. He says that it's because it is organic and metamorphoses from one 'movement' to the next like something actually growing. I cannot think of a better way of characterising that quartet. Beethoven's music is full of apparently seamless transitions from one phase to the next, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the Opus. 131 Quartet.

What the film brings out is that Beethoven's late-period music was in fact far less 'musical' than his music was in the preceding periods. The Grosse Fugue, for example, was almost guaranteed to empty concert-halls at the time. It was harsh and dissonant compared to the more romantic music of his middle-period such as the Moonlight Sonata or the Pastoral Symphony. I am not going to make an absolute distinction here - obviously, there are gradations - but I think I am justified in saying, using Deacon's thermodynamic terminology, that it is much more contragrade and therefore much more organic. The difference between the orthograde and the contragrade in music might be characterised as the difference between the harmonic and the dissonant, the first of which would run with the flow of the notes freely exploring the musical spaces they find, while the second runs against the natural flow of the notes, becoming harsh and dissonant, where conflict rather than conciliation is the order of the day. Yet, curiously enough, for all its dissonance, the Grosse Fugue does end in an intensely lyrical way, having resolved all its conflicts. What the film brings out so well is the extent to which Beethoven had left 'music' behind and was going where no composer before him had gone in dynamically - and organically - integrating all these contragrade elements, thereby anticipating later composers like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok and others. One could say almost that this was the period in which Beethoven was finally able to compose for himself rather than for a public and explore all the intimate highways and byways of his own musical psyche.

On a narrative level, the film concerns a young composer by the name of Anna Holtz who is sent to work as a copyist for Ludwig Van Beethoven, whom she reveres as a 'master'. However, he is not only a 'master', he is also a bit of a 'monster'. She is extremely attractive and there is an underlying sexual tension between them which, thankfully, is kept at a distance. At first Beethoven comes across as thoughtless and insensitive, rather a bear, who on many occasions alienates Anna, because he is forthright and seemingly boorish. Underneath the surface, however, he is as much feeling his own way into their relationship as she is and whenever he alienates her he comes to regret it and tries his best to make amends. It is in fact a much more intriguing portrait of Beethoven's 'social inadequacies' than the usual romantic one of the 'deaf, misunderstood genius'. By the end of the film they have developed a very intimate musical relationship which spills over onto a personal plane in which each has become necessary to the other. Of course, to achieve this, sometimes the film has to forget that Beethoven is deaf. But, as I have said, it is a metaportrait rather than a portrait as such.

Getting back to the interesting idea of orthograde and the contragrade processes and extending it beyond thermodynamics in general, it is possible to see how it may apply to fields like music or art. Take the case of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels. They are a good example of the orthograde principle in action, whereby everything falls into place, not only in the solving of crime, but the kind of society in which those crimes come to be solved and also in the casual prejudices she expresses. Here we are in mid-fifties rural England, where the classes are clearly divided one from the other and only the wealthy really exist. Others are either servants or 'rustics' - i.e., slightly thick policemen and other working-class denizens of villages like St. Mary's Mead. In fact, for the most part, they are not even interesting enough to plan and execute the crimes Miss Marple will solve. But actually, it is quite realistic and aesthetically justified. The rich are the only ones capable of exploring their various desires sufficiently to be interesting as subjects in her novels, so she is only being honest about this. The poor simply don't have the means to live interesting lives and therefore be interesting enough in themselves to be anything more than ciphers in her novels. Often, Agatha Christie's social comedy can be as good as it is because of this 'class-bias', much like Jane Austen's, in fact, although nowhere near as prickly. Agatha Christie's is an England in which everyone knows their place and, therefore, everything falls into place - much like the crimes Miss Marple will solve. It is the antithesis of the works of the late-period Beethoven, where the ultimate creative syntheses have to be struggled for because they go so much against the grain and therefore do not just 'fall into place'. Terence W Deacon is clearly onto something with his ideas about orthograde and contragrade processes and kudos to him for the way he helps us understand them in the realm of thermodynamics, because they aren't only relevant there.

* Reading on, I see that Homeodynamics is contrasted with Morphodynamics and Teleodynamics. Homeodynamics refers to processes where entropy works in an unimpeded way, Morphodynamics refers to processes where entropy is partially impeded and forms emerge - such as happens in various crystals. Teleodynamics goes one step further to the point where entropy is completely inhibited and what emerges is directed towards an end which determines the functionality of the parts necessary for keeping it in existence. This is where organic and mental life apparently come into the picture. Probably not a good explication on my part, that's how I understand the terms.

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2/10/2012

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VARIATION ON AN ALMOST ENDLESS THEME
Richard Livermore

This one was worked out on a computer, so don't blame me for it; after all, it is a bit algorithmic. It was meant to explain how, in the face of nature being 'red in tooth and claw' and all that, altruism could have emerged. "In the beginning there were two kinds of people. The nice people and the nasty people. The nice people were altruistic, the nasty people were selfish, so, of course, it was only a matter of time before the nasty people took over and began to take advantage of the nice people. However, they also mated with the nice people and that in the end was their undoing, because the offspring they produced were half-nice and half-nasty. And the reason why that was their undoing was that these half-nice and half-nasty offspring were nice to the nice people and nasty to the nasty people, and in time came to act as a buffer between the nice people and the nasty people, isolating the latter. Gradually, after a few generations, the nasty people declined in numbers and the nice - along with their nice-nasty protectors, of course - dominated the planet." Of course, I'm sure things were a bit more complicated than this, but, perhaps as some kind of foundational myth it may contain some element of the truth.

In fact, the film-genre known as the Western might be described is an exemplar of such myths working themselves out in 'reality'. The heroes of Westerns are not 100% nice people, nor are they 100% nasty people. Instead, they are usually half and half people, who are nice to the nice people and nasty to the nasty people. The hero of the typical Western is the decent man who stands his ground and knows how to be mean when he has to. But he is not basically mean, at least not to the nice people; he is only mean to those who are nasty. What the myth, repeated with variations through endless Westerns, tells us is that such people win in the end because they combine the attributes of both niceness and nastiness. In the process, the nice people lend them their support and nasty people find themselves isolated, even though they may rule the roost and have the law on their side.

The film, Open Range, is a film about a town which has come under the thumb of a ruthless rancher who has the marshal of the town on his payroll. The rancher's name is Denton Baxter ((Michael Gambon) and the marshal's name is Sheriff Poole (James Russo). These are the nasty guys and by nasty guys I mean nasty with no mixture of nice. The nice people, I suppose, you could say are the townspeople, unassuming mediocrities who up to now have let the nasty people have it all their own way. Among them are some who do fight back in the end, but only after a couple of nice/nasty outsiders have set them the right example. The nice/nasty outsiders are Boss Spearman (Robert Duvall) and Charlie Waite (Kevin Costner). These two free-grazing cowpokes resent being pushed around by the rancher and his henchmen and in their determination to stand their ground become catalysts of resistance for the rest of the town.

So far so Western. The film has been described as a nostalgic trip into a past where, in fact, things never turned out as they usually do in a movie, with our two victorious heroes riding off into the sunset, having settled their score with the villains. In the real historical past, it was the nasty ranchers who eventually won and drove the free-grazing cow-pokes off of the land. However, in this film - and in many another Western - we are in the realm of myth, rather than history, and such myths have a cyclical nature, which invariably sets them at odds with a linear account of history. This film was made in 2003, and has more relevance to our own era than it does to the past in which it is set. It is a film about how 'ordinary Joes', who say things like "It's a shame what this town has come to", but do nothing about it, rise up against ruthless usurpers once the seed of revolt has been sewn by outsiders. In other words it is a sort of morality-tale which has more contemporary than historical relevance, precisely because it is cast in the form of a myth rather than presented in a realistic way. It was directed by Kevin Costner, whose film, Dances with Wolves, seems to suggest that he's at the Howard Zinn end of the spectrum when it comes to interpreting American history. This film is set after the 'Indians' have been conquered—mention is made of that—but before the big ranchers and robber-barons have started to move in. Baxter is clearly a big rancher in the making.

The two characters around whom this film revolves are both as I've said, half and half types who are nice to nice people and nasty to nasty people. (No turning the cheek here; nor do either of them think much of God - that "son of a bitch" in the sky.) Of the two, Charlie Waite is the more morally ambiguous because he has a past as a ruthless killer which continues to haunt him. He has been a Civil War soldier and his behaviour while a soldier has been less than exemplary. In other words, he has done things which soldiers quite often do, though it is never admitted they do it. (Why do you think Bradley Manning is where he is right at the moment?) He is ashamed of his past and has a hard time living it down, but he is not able to do it without the help of Boss Spearman, who is, if you like, the moral heart of the film. Grizzled, gruff, yet easy-going and humorous, he can still be very stubborn and truculent when someone tries to push him around. He is outraged when one of his hands, Mose (Abraham Benrubi) is murdered by Baxter's henchmen and another, the 16 year old Button (Diego Luna) is shot and clubbed so badly he may not live. This sets the scene for a High Noon type showdown which will decide the fate of the participants in this drama and bring the film to its climax though unfortunately not to its close. They could have lopped off the last 15 or 20 minutes while Charlie Waite sorts out his feelings for the doc's sister, Sue Barlow (Annette Bening) and eventually decides that he loves her. Apart from this anticlimax, the film remains in the realm of myth in which the nasty guys get their come-uppance and the nice guys inherit the earth.

Perhaps the reason why the romantic episode is superfluous has something to do with the relationship between Boss Spearman and Charlie Waite, which the former jokes about in terms of their being like an old married couple. In many films the violently disposed man is saved by a woman and, if that had happened here, the romantic episode would have been necessary. But Charlie Waite, who still contains residues of his violent past, and on two occasions feels the impulse to enact it by killing defenceless people is saved from himself not by Sue Barlow, but by Boss Spearman, so that what happens after is more or less gilding the lily and contributes not one bit to the drama. Romantic episodes I feel are only justified if they contribute to whatever catharsis is brought about in the denouement. But this was a Hollywood movie, so one should not expect it to confine itself to a mythic format in such a bare and minimal way.

This defect aside, Open Range distils the mythic essence of every good Western, while at the same time making the myth relevant to ourselves in 2012. The 'ruthless ranchers' these days are called bankers and big corporations, while their 'marshals and deputies' are their bought and sold lawmen - and, of course, their smooth-talking politicians. This is how it all works, and why the western is such a good genre for certain kinds of myth to work themselves out in. A myth, to be truly cyclical, must have a strong element of abstraction about it such that it can be seen to be applicable to numerous historical contexts, including our own. This mythic current is what makes films like Open Range more relevant to the times they are made in than they could possibly be to those they are actually set in. And for that reason, they are more than just trips down Memory Lane.

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11/9/2011

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A PARABLE OF POWER

Sometimes a film comes along which depicts a world which seems like a microcosm of the larger world beyond it that we all have to inhabit. Such a film, in my opinion, is Fernado Meirelles City of God. It is a roller-coaster of a film of great panache, often beautifully choreographed, about gangs engaged in the business of selling drugs in the slums of Rio de Janiero during the 1970s. The character who tells the story of the rise and eventual fall of the most ruthless of the crime-bosses, Li'l Zé (Zé Pequeño), is Rocket (Buscapé), a budding photographer whose situation as a slum-dweller gives him privileged access to subjects which no outsider could ever have had. He doesn't know the psychopathic Li'l Zé very well, as is illustrated by the fact that nearly every time they meet, Li'l Zé has to ask him his name, but he's there, and, though being there involves certain risks, it is what gives him his opportunity to make a name for himself as a photographer and eventually emigrate out of the slums.

This then is Rocket, an attractive and personable young man whose one sortie into crime as more than just an observer ends up in failure because the people he and his friend, Stringy, choose to mug turn out to be 'too cool' for them to carry it out. Apart from hanging out with Stringy and a group of 'groovies' on the beach, smoking dope which he buys from a local drug-dealer called Carrot, his main interest during the film, aside, of course, from photography, is to lose his virginity. People like Rocket are made to record history, not to make it. History is made by much more psychopathic types like Li'l Zé, who have the ruthlessness required to pursue their agendas.

What Li'l Zé desires more than anything else in the world is power and, to get it, he is willing kill off all his competitors in the drug-business, so that he can take over their businesses and become the sole cock of the walk. If it wasn't for his side-kick, Benny, "The coolest hood in the City of God", he would have killed Carrot as well, and the fact that he doesn't is part of the cause of his eventual undoing.

Li'l Zé develops a taste for killing at a very young age. When he is only about 10 or 11, he massacres the guests and workers at a hotel which his older friends have just robbed and fled from in rather a hurry. He enjoys killing. What greater power-trip, after all, can there be than killing other human beings who are at your mercy? And it is power that Li'l Zé is after and is willing to do anything to acquire. He is not content to be one drug-dealer amongst many, each doing business in his own patch. No, he wants it all and is willing to do whatever it takes to become the top dog. What interests him above everything else is the power to strut his stuff in the City of God and always have his own way.

His 'nemesis' is a 'stand-up guy' called Knockout Ned, who, for some obscure reason seems to bring out something really malevolent in Li'l Zé. Every time he encounters Knockout, he tries to humiliate him in one way or other, even to the extent of forcing him to strip naked on the dance-floor in front of his girlfriend - who had earlier refused to dance with Li'l Zé. The problem is simple, as Rocket later explains, Li'l Zé is the ugly bad guy, while Knockout Ned is the handsome good guy who can get any girl. Li'l Zé has to pay for sex or use force, and the fact that Knockout is everything that he's not seems to rub him up the wrong way. Knockout Ned, by the way, is one of those Rocket and his friend, Stringy, contemplate robbing until they decide that they cannot go through with it because they find him too 'cool'.

The turning point in the film comes when, after Li'l Zé has raped his girlfriend in front of him and his gang has murdered his uncle and teenage brother, Knockout Ned joins Carrot's gang to get revenge on Li'l Zé. He has been an expert marksmen in the army, and his expertise is just what Carrot needs to defend himself against the expected onslaught from Li'l Zé and his "soldiers". On joining, however, he insists that no innocent people get killed and Carrot agrees. Nevertheless, as he gets drawn deeper and deeper into the activities of the gang, including its robberies to pay for the arms to fight Li'l Zé's gang, his scruples about killing innocent people go the way good intentions generally go. In short, he becomes as murderous as it takes and thinks nothing of killing an (albeit armed) guard whose young son is present at the time it occurs. This boy's name is Otto, and he later joins Carrot's gang in order to kill Knockout Ned in revenge.

But back to my original point that some films depict a world which is a microcosm of how the larger world functions. Before he gets himself killed by 'the runts' (But they are another story!), Li'l Zé's rise to prominence and its manner of accomplishment could be anyone's who has power as their main objective in life. Political power, economic power - the power of a Murdoch for instance - it makes little difference. To rise on that ladder requires certain psychological traits in a person, a certain ability to forget your humanity as soon as it gets in the way. Why does Li'l Zé keep forgetting Rocket's name when they meet? Because Rocket is just an ordinary person who serves no purpose in his scheme of things - until he wants his photograph taken so that he can become as famous as Knockout Ned when he is captured by the police and paraded in front of the media. Only when Rocket becomes useful to him, does he start to remember his name. That's how certain minds work and it's especially true of those who seek power.

There are, of course, people - Carrot seems to be one, Benny another - who just want to make a good living from drug-dealing. Benny even intends to retire to a farm with his girlfriend, smoke dope and listen to rock-music, because he's fed up with the life he is living. Carrot is willing to kill, because it's good for business at times. He kills Blacky, for instance, once he has heard how the latter has mistakenly killed Benny instead of Li'l Zé. Carrot knows that with Benny now dead, Li'l Zé will move in and kill him as well. Business is what interests him, selling drugs and making a living, not power. Carrot, though a criminal, is not a psychopath. Where his interests are not effected, he's an easy-going live and let live sort of person. Not so Li'l Zé, who enjoys killing because power over life and death gives him kicks which he wouldn't otherwise have.

One can imagine all the power-hungry tyrants and empire-builders in History being composed of basically the same material as Li'l Zé, and not only them. After all, does not the desire for power lie at the root of political ambition, whether or not it manifests itself in such extreme ways? It's largely kept in check in a 'democracy', except when it comes to finding excuses for war. Then the Thatchers, Bushes and Blairs of this world show what they're really made of. Li'l Zé at least doesn't have to conceal his psychopathic impulses behind a sanctimonious mask like political leaders in a 'democracy'. Even the 'good guys' who, in the spirit of Knockout Ned, might enter politics to right certain wrongs, find themselves conforming to its inhuman dictates. Li'l Zé rises because there is something missing in his psychology, something called empathy, which might allow him to see other people as people just like himself. Not so Knockout Ned, who nonetheless finds himself drawn into the spiral of killing because, well, that's what it takes to keep his head above water once he's committed. By the same token, no politician, no matter how good the cause he espouses, can claim to have completely clean hands. It is for this reason, in my opinion, that all politics is to be avoided, all attempts to acquire power over others through politics, whether 'democratic' or not, should be shunned and a different way has to be found. What this film shows is that in the end, there are no good guys and bad guys. Rocket for instance is neither a good guy nor bad guy, only someone getting on with his life. And his strength lies not in being good, like Knockout Ned, or bad, like Li'l Zé, but in the distance he keeps from the madness around him. It's not in itself enough, of course, but it's a beginning and we all have to start from somewhere.

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7/22/2011

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THE SECRET OF GREEN STREET?
Richard Livermore

When you think of football hooliganism, you don’t normally think of people in well-paid middle-class jobs, such as teachers or City workers. The class-preconceptions of our society predispose us to thinking in terms of working-class or unemployed ‘yobbos’. One of the interesting things about the film, Green Street, is that it doesn’t trade in such myths. None of the hooligans depicted in this film fits the stereotype. In fact, when they are not being hooligans and slaking their thirst for violence, they are perfectly normal, sociable people, like ‘you, m and everyone else’. They even give up their seats to women on the tube.

So what is the fix? Why is the violence so necessary to them? According to the film-maker, Lexi Alexander, it has something to do with fathers who don’t spend quality-time with their sons. As good an explanation as any, I guess. Perhaps Achilles’ addiction to violence - both before and after the death of Patroclus - had similar roots, what with his dad, Peleus, gallivanting off all over the place while Achilles was still a wee laddie. So perhaps there is something in the explanation, after all. But isn’t this also the Freudian explanation for homosexuality. That would certainly explain Achilles’ huge grief at the death of Patroclus. Distant dads take the fall for a lot of things, it would seem, so why not football hooligans and queers as well? Blame it all on the breakdown of the nuclear family; single mothers have so much to answer for. What we need is a ‘back to basics’ approach.

But what are the basics? If there is one thing football hooliganism expresses, it’s a resurgence of tribalism. And how much more ‘back to basics’ can you get than that? And tribal family relations are somewhat different to nuclear family relations. Paternity, for example, was often unknown. Yet the sons seemed perfectly integrated into the tribe and as a result weren’t much given to hooliganistic excess. Warfare, perhaps, but hooliganism, no. Presumably there were other familial ‘support-structures’ which made dads - distant or not - an irrelevance.

Warfare. Now that’s a connection we could pursue. Tribal societies engaged in warfare, but it was non-alienated warfare, not the alienated kind that so-called civilised people engage in. They didn’t go to war because they were told to; they were not coerced into fighting, nor did they have a chain of command to transmit orders from above and maintain discipline in the ranks. Like just about everything else, warfare in our society is alienated and it is just possible that football hooligans wish to short-circuit some of this alienation and engage in warfare of a non-alienated kind, just like their tribal ancestors. So there’s another possible connection with tribalism - the hooligans’ revolt against civilisation - at least in the matter of warfare, and a ‘back to basics’ approach to the matter of fighting.

Unlike football hooligans, however, many tribal peoples didn’t seem to have batted an eyelid at same-sex relations. No doubt all those absent fathers not spending ‘quality-time’ with their sons made it inevitable - if we are to take Freud as our yardstick. This is another interesting thing about Green Street. The background hum of homo-social relations. Don’t confuse this with homosexuality. At least, not yet. Same-sex relations are well off the gaydar screen in this film - at least at first glance. Achilles and Patroclus, perhaps, but let’s not forget that, in Homer at least, they slept with slave-girls rather than each other - which doesn’t mean, of course, that we have to turn Patroclus into Achilles’ cousin, as was done in the film, Troy, in which Brad Pitt played the part of Achilles.

It may only be in their predilection for non-alienated warfare that football hooligans resemble tribal people. And it is unlikely that tribal people had a predilection for warfare in any case. War was simply a necessity to them, a way of preserving their territory or hunting-grounds, a means of survival. In relation to other tribes they lived in a ‘state of nature’, which football hooligans do not. They fight for kicks; it’s an addiction with them, even taking punches brings on a ‘high’, according to Matt Buckner (Elijah Wood) in the film. Their values are by and large the values of the wider society. They are not generated by the tribe itself, or, rather, the “firm”, but by the society they live in. Listen to Pete Dunham (Charlie Hunnam of Queer as Folk fame) talking to Matt Buckner, not long after they have met for the first time. “I just don’t get it. What is it wiv you Americans? You start a fucking war, bottle it, then we ’av to come and save your arse again.” There is no question here of self-consciously challenging alienated war-fare. He clearly accepts it. If they are ‘rebels’, their rebellion is entirely unconscious. It’s the rebellion of an unknown primitive self against the alienation of civilised life. And we must assume that the wider society’s values are accepted not just in matters of warfare, but sexuality also.

As I have said, many tribal societies seem to have accepted same-sex relationships without batting an eyelid. They saw them as part of the fabric of life. If Green Street is anything to go by, this is certainly not the case with football hooligans. In that little matter, they mirror the wider society. Yet, if what we’ve said about absent or distant fathers applies to both hooligans and homosexuals, then football hooligans have more in common with homosexuals than either, perhaps, would like to admit. They have distant or absent fathers in common. What does this mean? First that the intense homo-social bonding required for football hooligan firms provides a source of temptation for homosexual expression which must be rigidly guarded against. The repression must be even more severe than it is in the wider society. I think this repression is very important in Green Street, in the world it depicts and the homo-social relationships it explores.

Green Street, is a film which, I must confess, I am not absolutely sure how to take. What I mean by this is that I don’t know if it is meant to be taken simply at face value as a work of entertainment which has only one level of meaning, namely that which is explicit in the narrative. Or are there other levels of meaning at work in it? I’ll give you an example. Matt and Pete are the two main protagonists. For most of the film they live together. They are both the younger brothers of Shannon and Steve respectively, who are married to each other. There is absolutely no indication on the narrative level that Matt and Pete are lovers, but do the parallels between Shannon & Steve and Matt & Pete have some kind of symbolic significance which works at a deeper level than that of the narrative? Again, when Pete first claps eyes on Matt, he gives him a long hard stare and then says, “Jesus Shannon, you look rough.”, to which Shannon, in another part of the room, replies, “You’re a funny guy, Pete.” Are we meant to see this just as an innocent quip or is something else being implied, an attraction Pete feels which he has turned into a joke in order to kick it into touch? Am I simply reading the latter into the former? Probably, but I must confess that it is questions like this which have me confused as to the intentions behind the film. Confused, but also intrigued. (Another possibility you might consider here is the casting of Charlie Hunnam for the role, who first came to attention as the 15 year old Nathan Maloney in Queer As Folk. Resonances there perhaps?)

Whether I think it is a film that works on more than one level or is something less interesting depends on what I believe to be its intentions. As I have said, I am not totally sure; but I am going to give it the benefit of the doubt. The Director/Co-writer, Lexi Alexander is, after all, a woman, and so I very much doubt that she takes the almost exclusively male world she depicts in the film completely at its own measure. She may have mixed with German hooligans when she was younger, been a world kickboxing champion twice in succession and been part of a firm, but she is still a woman, and the fact that she is must give her something of an outsider’s perspective. We can also assume that, as a woman, she is not over concerned with preserving a male self-image and is quite able to see through it in men. Could it just be that while making a film whose primary purpose is entertainment, she has tried to say other things through it, things which aren’t on the narrative surface? That is a possibility I’d like to explore.

Most reviewers gave Green Street two stars, though The Guardian did give it four, I believe. So you see, it is not a great film we are talking about. It’s interest for me lies in other directions, of which the director is perhaps even unconscious, though, giving her the benefit of the doubt, she probably wasn’t. The narrative begins with what seems like a rather blatant contrivance to appeal to the American market. There was no real need for Shannon and Matt to be Americans; however, Americans, it seems, can only relate to other Americans, and so, to appeal to the American market, you need an American star. Enter ex-hobbit, Elijah Wood, who, unlike Charlie Hunnam, especially in full skin-head mode, looks almost too cuddly to be at home in the role of a ‘thug’. He plays the part of Matt Buckner, a Harvard journalism student who, after taking the fall for his wealthy roommate, Jeremy Van Holden (Terence Jay) when drugs are found in their residence, is expelled and flies off to London to stay with his sister, Shannon (Claire Forlani). Shannon is married to an English ex-football hooligan by the name of Steve Dunham (Marc Warren). Within hours of landing in England, Matt meets Steve’s younger brother, Pete. Pete is the leader of a firm of West Ham football hooligans called the GSE (Green Street Elite). However, Pete is not your stereotypical thug, but an intelligent, engaging and somewhat charismatic young man with an aggressive edge and a certain addiction to violence. At first, the meeting is a little bit strained. Matt is a bit of a ‘wimp’, and is no doubt a little bemused by Pete’s underlying aggression, and also, by the looks of it, a little bit mesmerised - as a rabbit might be by a ferret. Pete has come to borrow money from Steve, which Steve offers only on condition that he takes Matt to a football match, since he has planned a ‘romantic evening’ with his wife, which, of course, excludes Matt. However, instead of giving the money to Pete, he gives it to Matt and tells him not to give any to Pete, but to buy all the drinks himself. Once Pete and Matt hit the street, Pete tries to extort half the money from Matt with threats which, if not exactly explicit are certainly very clearly implied. Matt responds by distracting Pete’s attention and trying to kick him in the crotch, a move which Pete easily counters. Matt soon finds himself lying on the pavement, with Pete standing over him saying, “Serves you right for fighting like a bleeding tart.” That is, if you like, the beginning of Matt and Pete’s real relationship. For no apparent reason, just when he should be pressing home his advantage, Pete relents in his threatening behaviour towards Matt and gives up the idea of trying to extort the money from him. Though still somewhat bossy, his attitude softens, and the two go off to the match together.

What has happened? On the one hand, it could be that Pete’s change of demeanour is due to the fact that he has suddenly come to respect Matt for ‘standing his ground’. It would certainly fit in with the ethos he lives by. But there is no respect in his voice when he barks at Matt “...and for fuck’s sake stop saying soccer.” or shouts back at him over his shoulder: “Come on, ’urry up.” After all, respect usually implies treating the person you have come to respect with respect, and there is little sign of that in Pete’s behaviour towards Matt. On the other hand, it could be that Matt’s having fought “...like a bleeding tart!” has brought something out in Pete, something possibly ‘sexual’ in nature. I say ‘sexual’, though it is deflected and channelled along non-sexual pathways. What seems to have happened is that Pete has suddenly become the dominant partner in a relationship in which Matt has, equally suddenly, become the submissive one. His threatening behaviour has given way to one that is domineering instead, to which Matt seems to respond quite willingly. A new dynamic is set up between them, and it is, I believe, a disguised sexual dynamic?

On the tube a conversation takes place as to the relative merits of baseball or football. It is only necessary here to say that it turns on whether baseball is a girl’s game or not. Pete says it is and Matt says it isn’t. This is not the first indication, of course, that male self-image is an issue in Green Street.

After getting off the train, Pete takes Matt to the pub where the GSE usually meet before going to matches and introduces him to his friends. However, just before they enter the pub, Pete warns Matt not to tell anyone that his father is a journalist. Once they are in the pub, everyone behaves in a friendly manner towards Matt except Bovver (Leo Gregory), who is, as Matt later describes him in his journal, “Pete’s thuggish right-hand man.” Bovver resents Matt from the outset. Matt is an outsider; and perhaps the fact that he is also likeable and attractive, while Bovver is neither, has something to do with it. Bovver, clearly has some kind of special relationship with Pete - even if it is only as his “thuggish right-hand man”. He makes his hostility to Matt known at every available opportunity - first in the pub’s toilet and then just about everywhere else. At one point, this conversation occurs between Bovver and Pete. “Jesus, you two joined at the fucking hip, or what?” Pete: “Leave it out Bov; it’s starting to get old.” Bovver: “No, I’m starting to wonder about you two; if I didn’t know you any better, I’d say you were a couple of gay boys.” Pete responds in a quiet but menacing way. (Hunnam’s delivery here is superb.) The situation is diffused by their friends. They are all ‘hetero’ of course. After all, this is a very improbable culture to be gay in.

During Matt’s first full-scale ‘rumble’, after being rescued and looked after by a rather solicitous Pete, while his friends hammered the Birmingham supporters who had ‘jumped’ him on the way back from the match, Matt’s first concern is to look around to see where Pete is and go to his rescue. What seems obvious is that, just as Pete has developed protective feelings towards Matt, Matt in turn has begun to develop protective feelings towards Pete, who, to echo his sister later, has begun to enter his system. When the fight is over, Pete and the others rib him a little. “That first punch you threw. A little bit on the feminine side.” one says “A bit gay.” Pete follows, “Larry Grayson,” another quips, mimicking Matt’s over-arm punches, while Bovver looks on in annoyance? The following morning, after Matt had spent the night on Pete’s couch, and then returned with Pete to his sister’s, an altercation occurs between Matt & Pete on the one hand and brother Steve on the other, a violent altercation in which Matt comes to Pete’s rescue and then Pete comes to Matt’s against Steve. All that needs to be said about this is that it is curious how Steve’s heterosexual marriage to Shannon hasn’t completely cured him of violence! As a result of this altercation, Matt and Pete start living together, although, as I‘ve said, there is no suggestion that they are sleeping together as well.

This is the whole point. You must not see these characters as in any way gay. “Gay” & “Straight” are determinate identities - and, I believe, very confining ones. What we have here are repressed and disguised homosexual feelings which have no way of expressing themselves except in terms of the ethos of the firm and the homo-social bonding it requires. Gays have not really liberated themselves; they have simply settled for a social space in which they might be more easily exploited. To liberate themselves they would have to liberate ‘straights’, like Matt, Pete and Bovver, and this they have singularly failed to do. Hence the contempt Bovver is able to take for granted without even emphasising it in “a couple of gay boys”. (Although the slightly camp voice in which he says it speaks volumes about him, I think.) Gays are no longer “queers” as they used to be, but “gay boys”. That’s the extent to which gays have been ‘liberated’. The ‘Gay Revolution’ is a revolution that has stopped half-way in the name a gay identity. A gay identity, after all, is easily catered for by both politicians and businessmen. Gays have become both a ‘constituency’ and a market. I suppose this is inevitable in a ‘democratic’ capitalist society like ours. Nevertheless, the repressed homosexuality which I think I see in this film has nothing to do with a gay identity and that is what makes it so much more interesting.

Two other episodes in the film are worth mentioning before we move on. First is that in which Tommy Hatcher (Geoff Bell) - the leader of the GSE’s main rival firm, Millwall - uses the term “she” of Pete when Bovver makes his first visit to Millwall. He says: “Where is your other little girl? ... Petey. She at home is she?” And also later, when Bovver is about to betray the GSE to Hatcher and Hatcher asks him if he’s had a lover’s tiff - presumably with Pete. Remarks like this make me think that the film-maker was more aware of what she was doing than may be immediately apparent, because, on one level, that’s just what Pete and Bovver have had. Moreover, it is just possible that Hatcher has seen something in Pete and Bovver which those too close to them have been unable to see - including Pete and Bovver themselves. Of course, it could just be an innocent remark, but then there are rather a lot of such ‘innocent’ remarks connected to homosexuality in this film. Too many, I think, to ignore.

The second is the episode in the pub in which Matt is accused of being an undercover journalist. (He has told Pete that he studied history not journalism at Harvard, because he knows how much Pete and the others hate ‘fucking journos’.) Pete’s feeling of anger at being ‘betrayed’ by Matt is entirely understandable. It explains his initial violence towards Matt. However, when Steve intervenes on Matt’s behalf, asking Pete if he’s sure of his facts, and Matt explains himself, doubts begin enter his mind. A conflict with Bovver emerges when Matt says to Pete, a propos his having been seen at The Times with a couple of ‘journos’: “That was my dad. He’s the journalist. You knew that.” Such a revelation can only enflame Bovver, who turns it into an issue of Pete’s leadership of the firm. And then, when Pete intervenes violently against him as he tries to kick Matt on the floor, Bovver finally flips. He first appeals to Steve as the ex-leader of the GSE, accusing Pete of being “too much of a bottlejob to lead us”, but Steve sides with Pete. That is when the thought of betrayal enters his mind, I believe. He finally realises the truth just at the time when he was hoping to finally ‘nail’ Matt, that Pete has put Matt before himself in this confrontation, and he reacts like a jilted lover. Not that he is in any literal sense a jilted lover, but his behaviour follows the same contours as that of a jilted lover and that, I think, is what is important. It is as if all these repressed feelings existed in some parallel universe influencing the course of what goes on in this one without in any way making their presence directly felt. After all, what is uppermost in all of their minds is Pete’s status as the leader of the GSE. Nothing more. Nothing less. Finally, after Bovver has gone off to betray the GSE to Tommy Hatcher, and thus set in motion a chain of events which will lead to Pete’s death, the dominance-submission element in Pete and Matt’s relationship resurfaces as Pete barks angrily at the bloodied Matt “Get yourself cleaned up”, which Matt dutifully does.

After this scene it is largely downhill. The film’s ending is a huge disappointment. Neither Matt nor Pete come to any recognition of what has been driving their relationship and also destroying the firm, but then, perhaps we shouldn’t have expected that. Pete is killed, sacrificing himself so that Matt and Shannon can get away from a fight that has taken a dangerous turn, and all that Matt seems to have learnt from his death is that he can now kick butt with the best of them and therefore no longer has to play the wimp with Jeremy Van Holden. It is his way of ‘honouring’ Pete. It is a huge anti-climax and a sop to conventional values. But it was a commercial film and commercial films very rarely confront their audiences explicitly with issues that they might not be comfortable with. To have confronted these issues head on would have required a different film entirely, I suspect. Nevertheless, it is a film which - in my own mind at least - raises important questions concerning the male culture of violence and repressed homosexuality, and this makes it somehow a lot more intriguing than many films which are very much better.

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5/10/2011

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THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WILLIAM BURROUGHS

by

EDDIE WOODS

Clearly I'm a Johnny-come-lately where the 1993 film The Junky's Christmas is concerned. As I'd already surmised before sending the YouTube links for it out to my literary mailing list, most (but not all, mind you) avid William Burroughs fans were long since familiar with this Francis Ford Coppola claymation production, even if many had not seen it in a while. Just as quite a few knew the original short story (from the 1989 Interzone collection) or had heard it on the CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales (released the same year as the film). But it was those others on my list (easily the majority) to whom I was mainly wanting to give this touching Yuletide present. And touch it certainly does, even if not pleasantly till towards the very end.

"How can you say that?" the Dutch writer Simon Vinkenoog screamed at me onstage, after I had publicly thanked William for participating in the reading event I'd been emceeing, and additionally for "the countless hours of reading pleasure" he'd afforded me over the years. "Pleasure?! He wants to stick a knife in your heart!"

Yes, well, we all get our kicks in different ways. And I seriously doubt I'm the only person in the world who 'enjoys' reading Bill Burroughs. Or, judging by the responses to my mailing, came away from watching The Junky's Christmas feeling spiritually uplifted. One lady actually wrote back saying, "That lovely film you sent brought tears to my eyes." Sweet of her, but it's not a 'lovely' film. (Unless you want to count the closing sequence, showing William and friends tucking in to a holiday feast, which is quaintly cozy but somewhat peripheral.) It's a mini cinematic masterpiece, brilliantly scripted and engagingly presented. Same as the story is a fictional portrayal of the core messages contained in the Sermon on the Mount. The Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus are likewise ultimately beatific, but still far from being in any way nice.

Here we have a necessarily twisted tale (narrated throughout by the classically gravel-voiced author) of a mild-mannered junky, Danny the Car Wiper, in search of a Christmas fix. The clay animation characters suit the desperate situation on a cold and bleak urban winter's day perfectly, occasionally with an aura of tenderness but for the most part horrific: huge bulging eyes, excruciatingly painful shivers, near-demonic grimaces. The two severed legs Danny finds in an abandoned suitcase merely accentuate the overall sense of despair.

"Holy Jesus!" he exclaimed. "The routines people put down these days. Legs! Well I got a case anyway."

Especially exquisite for us, is that there is nary a hint of what we are leading up to. When Danny does eventually cop (gratis, courtesy of an inebriated but nonetheless sharp-witted doctor) a quarter-grain tablet which he later prepares spoon and needle fashion for injecting, the form his badly-needed Christmas present will take seems a forgone conclusion. Until on the verge of shooting up, he hears a series of annoying groans emanating from the room next door. Oh hell, go have a look. It's a young man in the unbearable throes of a kidney stones attack. Without really thinking about it, and hesitating but momentarily, Danny forgoes alleviating his tortuous junk sickness and shoots the kid up rather than himself. Then, the sacrifice made, he returns to his own room resigned to suffer the bitter reward for his charitable act. Instead a warm flood suddenly pulses through his veins and breaks in his head "like a thousand golden speedballs."

"For Christ's sake," Danny thought. "I must have scored the immaculate fix!"

The vegetable serenity of junk settled in his tissues. His face went slack and peaceful, and his head fell forward.

Danny the Car Wiper was on the nod.

The short story was apparently penned around 1954. And is therefore representative of relatively early Burroughs. Yet it is also hauntingly reminiscent of that famous final entry in the Last Words journal of more than four decades hence, describing love as "the most natural painkiller what there is." Notwithstanding everything else at once complicated and straightforward that William S. Burroughs was about, both as a man and a writer, he was never a stranger to the essential ingredients of love, compassion, karma and mystical reality. If you are in any doubt of that and haven't yet done so, do yourself a favor and see The Junky's Christmas. I bet Charles Dickens would dig it, too!

The Junky's Christmas

Directors: Nick Donkin, Melodie McDaniel

Writers: William S. Burroughs (story), James Grauerholz (script)

Producer: Francis Ford Coppola

Running time: 21 minutes

Color: Black & White

DVD release: Koch Visions (2006)

Available at Amazon and elsewhere

This review first appeared in Beat Scene 64 (Coventry, England). http://www.beatscene.net/

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11/11/2010

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WHEN WE’D NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD

There are two narratives running concurrently through the film, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner - first that of Colin Smith, the undeniably lonely long-distance runner of the title and secondly that of the the middle-class institutions he finds himself at odds with. For Colin Smith, the point is exclusion. He doesn’t want to belong. For the middle-class institutions he finds himself at odds with, the point is inclusion. We’re one big happy family together and if you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you, and we can’t be fairer than that now, can we? Of course, there is one thing these middle-class institutions have overlooked and that is the very real fissure of class. This fissure runs all the way through the film and it seems that the only one who is aware of it is Colin himself. He really would like to put all those smug middle-class bastards up against a wall and shoot them, because he knows that, when push comes to shove, that’s what they’d do to people like him. However, for the time being, he’ll play the game by their rules and make them think they’ve got him house-trained.

Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner was always my favourite of those British New Wave social-realist films of the early 60s. I have often wondered why. I’m no great fan of social-realism, after all, and films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey just did not have the same impact on me. But it does transcend the genre on two counts at least. First, the running scenes are beautifully filmed and poetic, especially the early morning one. Secondly, the film had what we would now call attitude. It was a slap in the face of the bourgeois establishment of the time, which I suspect is one of the reasons it was panned by the critics. The British Board of Film Censors, as I believe it was called, even said it was communist propaganda.

Tom Courteney is perfect, I believe, as the alienated working-class boy who sees through the system and prefers a life of petty crime and borstal to working for bosses in the dump of his industrial town. He knows he’s fighting a one-man war against his ‘betters’, but he’s still not going to let them grind him down. I suppose he could have done something more ‘constructive’, like join a left-wing political party and get stuck into the bosses that way, but I suspect he wanted more immediate gratification than that. If Colin is some kind of working-class hero, he’s not a Marxist, but an existentialist one. In the end, he’ll spit in their bourgeois faces, but he’ll do so his way and nobody else’s. Existentialism is premised on the belief that it is better to be a star in your own movie than an extra in somebody else’s. It was never going to produce a revolution, but it wasn’t a time for revolution anyway. (The early 60s were very much a continuation of the 50s from that point of view.)

The chief metaphor running through the film is, I think, the sports-field where we can all be equals together, engaging in the healthy competition - and may the best man win, and all that. This was a metaphor of life in Britain at the time where everybody stuck to the rules and, the working-class no less than the middle, played the game as they should. Those who dissented were thought to have no real cause for complaint. I remember it well. “You won’t get very far with an attitude like that, lad.” was an expression even older working-class people would use against younger ones who they thought had a chip on their shoulder. In the film, however, it is the political classes - as exemplified by the man on TV - or those who control things and make sure they run smoothly - like the borstal-governor (played by Michael Redgrave) - who say things like this. But as I remember it, the working-class were happy to play the game by the rules as long as their standard of living was rising and they were able to buy washing-machines and television-sets to watch the programmes their ‘betters’ were making available to them. It was only later on in the 60s that the consensus began to break up and middle-class hegemony was called into question. However, at the time, it seemed that only people like Colin ‘with a chip on their shoulder’ were calling it all into question and recognising that under the middle-class hype of “You’ve never had it so good” things were pretty much as they’d always been - at least for people like him and his family, living their prefab. second-class lives. Colin’s attitude might have been ‘existentialist’, but, given the supine state of the working-class at the time, this was hardly surprising.

Of course, the irony of it all is that towards the end of the film, Colin himself has begun to succumb to temptation, taken in by the blandishments of the borstal-governor who has been telling him that he might have a great future ahead of him as an athlete if he sticks to it. He may even represent Britain in the Olympics and in the process make a career for himself. He is not just making them think they’ve got him house-trained, perhaps he is actually becoming house-trained, as his best-friend, Mick, suggests when he asks “Whose bloody side are you on all of a sudden?” - which in this (existentialist) context means “Are you being true to yourself? Are you being authentic?” And it gives pause to think. While he is running his final race - the one he throws - he has flashbacks to his mother and, her ‘fancy-man’, his dying and dead father, his girlfriend, the coppers, the politician on the box, the bosses, the borstal-governor, the boy who was beaten up by the screws and so on and so forth - in fact the whole tenor of his working-class life, as well as the middle-class institutions he is at odds with, and during these flashbacks, he is reminded whose bloody side he is on all of a sudden. It’s a great moment - at least, I thought so when I first saw it - a moment when he puts two fingers up to all the middle-class people who have him under their thumb and refuses to play the game by their rules.

Of course, things are no longer what they were in the early 60s, when “we’d never had it so good”. In fact, they started to go awry not so long after. Now things are a lot more desperate and no-one is taken in by this idea of continuous capitalist progress any more. Colin’s ‘existentialist’ rebellion was probably the only one available at a time when the consensus was all for the status-quo and middle-class hegemony prevailed. Now that that hegemony no longer exists, it’s become a lot more difficult to believe in Colin’s individual rebellion than it was in the 50s and 60s, when alienation had not reached the collective pitch it presently has. Nowadays, it might seem a little bit pointless. But it did have a certain resonance then, and perhaps even now we could do with more of his negative attitude towards the people in power.

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9/8/2010

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                    THE BLACK VALET

I don’t normally like what I call secondary films, that is to say films based on novels, plays, operas or biographies. I prefer the film to be a product of the film-maker’s own imagination, a film in which the conception and execution of the film have emerged together and not as an adaptation from some other medium. However, I do make exceptions - for instance, Visconti’s film of Thomas Mann’s Death In Venice, which I think is cinematically wonderful,  and Joseph Losey’s film of Mozart’s Don Giovanni which, now that it has been digitally remastered and remixed, is really quite extraordinary. Like Death In Venice, one could almost call it “total film” in the way one might speak of “total theatre”. This is not only due to the music by Mozart, the libretto by Da Ponte, the quality of production, singing and acting, the Palladio settings, the emphasis on style and ritual as opposed to realism in the performance, but also somehow the almost eerie impression created by the Black Valet whose role, although he doesn’t utter a word, is clearly crucial to what Losey wants to say in this film. The Black Valet is like a sardonically silent master of ceremonies hovering in the background at all the film’s crucial moments. He doesn’t sing; he doesn’t speak. He is just there as a kind of beautiful and stylish androgynous comment on what’s going on. Ruggero Raimondi, as Don Giovanni, creates an almost vampiric impression at times, and his Dracula-like presence seems to be reinforced whenever his emotionless, black-clad valet (played by Eric Adjani) appears on screen to assist him.

Mozart’s opera is one of those rare works of art which seem to appear at turning points in the history of a civilisation. It was written just before the French Revolution. I do not see it in the simple moralistic terms of an aristocratic libertine receiving his come-uppance and being dragged down to Hell for his crimes. It is also an allegory of the fate of a class that seemed to have no future left and was therefore going to make the best of the rest of its time while it could. Losey’s interpretation of this aspect of Don Giovanni is a Marxist one. Indeed, before the the Overture begins, the film is prefaced by a quote from Gramsci: “The old dies and the new cannot manage to see day. In the interim, a large diversity of morbid symptoms surges forth.” This was a mistake, I believe. Gramsci may well be right, but in relation to Don Giovanni himself, the quote is a touch moralistic. The production is also Marxist in the way it foregrounds the peasantry in a threatening way in some of the scenes, the same peasantry who, with the sans-culottes in the towns, would be the leading force in the revolution to come. It’s as if Losey was saying, “These are the people who will eventually bring you and your class down, Don Giovanni.” And, of course, in this he was right.

One must also not forget the Freudian interpretation of the Son’s Oedipal rebellion against the Father - Il Commendatore - and the ensuing guilt-complex which culminates in Don Giovanni’s being dragged down to Hell. From a Freudian point of view, revolutions are fuelled by such complexes. However, it is hard to see Don Giovanni as a revolutionary. More like a reactionary who recalls his class to its true nature, which it seems to have abandoned to accommodate itself to the bourgeois mores of the age. I disagree with those who say that Don Giovanni was rebelling against the mores of his own class. Superficially, that may appear to be so. But from a metahistorical perspective, that is far from what’s going on. Indeed, what Don Giovanni really seems to be rebelling against are the mores of a class which had sold out and adopted alien mores. His own class was a fundamentally predatory, not to say misogynistic, one, and Don Giovanni himself was an atavistic throwback to the true barbarous nature of that class, as opposed to its more decadent contemporary variant, represented by Don Attavio. You hear a lot of talk about the bourgeoisification of the proletariat these days, but the aristocracy got there first. They became bourgeois the moment they opted to become respectable in their behaviour and choose accomodation with their bourgeois rivals, who were now in the ascendancy.

Don Giovanni is a predator, just like his remotest ancestors, and what he preys upon is women. And he doesn’t seem to want them for themselves so much as the fact that each one of them adds to the tally of his conquests, which, according to the list enumerated by his servant Leporello to one of his victims, Donna Elvira, seems to run into the thousands. In Spain alone, there are “mil e tre”. He seems to collect these ‘conquests’ in the way ‘Injuns’ in a wild west movie collect scalps as proof of their prowess as warriors. He undoubtedly takes pride in this list. It doesn’t matter if the conquest is beautiful or ugly, fat or slender, old or young, plebian or aristocratic. The important thing is that they are his conquests and therefore redound to his glory.

To understand this aspect of his behaviour, we need to go back a few millenia, to the misty ‘dawn of Civilisation’, that is to say the first wave of barbarian invasions. Imagine yourself at this time as a peasant, someone who lives and works in the country. You work your land communally with other peasants; you live with them in a village and are probably related to them, though you also might trade and be on good terms with other villages. You have no government, no state to regulate your life, but you do have elders or chiefs who meet regularly in council and keep your collective life ticking over. Women play a central and honoured part in your lives and you probably worship the Great Mother Goddess as a symbol of the fertility of the land. You may very well have a militia to protect you from thieves and marauders bent on stealing some of the products of your labour, but you don’t have standing armies and militarism is not a way of life with you. You are peaceful, mind your own business and want others to leave you alone so that you can provide for yourself and those who depend on you. This is your life. Not very exciting but you know how to live it up during your many bacchanalian festivals and rites. You are not living in the mythical Golden Age, but you are perhaps living in the Silver Age, and I think you are largely content with your lot.

One day, however, something cataclysmic happens. You find yourself overpowered by another who leaves you standing when it comes to cultivating the warrior-virtues. You have no answer to his aggressive, dominating behaviour towards you; you just have to submit to his ferocity and prowess. He has been schooled in completely different conditions to yourself and this shows in his tough, aggressive demeanour towards you. He despises you for your ‘feminine’ relationship with the soil, as he also despises manual work, which he believes should only be done by women and slaves. He has been a nomadic herder and warrior who has developed his militarily capabilities on the hoof, as it were, probably by raiding the cattle and horses of other tribes just like his own and having to defend his own lifestock from similar attacks. He is male in the extreme, because that is what his warrior-culture has made him and his women are 100% under his thumb, his property to dispose of just as he chooses. He practices female circumcision, infibulation and suttee just to keep them in line and he worships male sky-gods with warrior-profiles. He is the polar opposite of yourself and vastly superior from a military point of view. And he will not only conquer you and make you work the land for him, he will do what he wants with your women. Like you, he has no government or state, but his society is nevertheless very hierarchical; and he tends to make slaves of those he has conquered.

However, he is not going to make you his slave. He knows he’s on to a good thing by letting you work the land for yourself and providing him with part of what you produce for ‘protection’ against predators just like himself. He will live off the fat of the land, while you will sweat and groan under his ‘protective’ yoke. If you do not comply, he’ll just plunder and loot what he can, rape your women and move on, so you don’t have much of a choice. In time, he will become a member of a warrior-aristocracy and you will provide him with the means of doing so. He will lord it over ‘his’ peasants while assuming seignorial rights over their daughters and wives. Don Giovanni is a throwback to this ‘gentleman’ and therefore the only true aristocrat in the whole of the opera, that is to say, the only barbarian.

The point I am trying to make here is that the aristocracy is not in essence the class of effete snobs it is often portrayed as. It is rather a class of macho conquerers who take pride in their warrior-status and prowess. Where it has degenerated from this, it is only due to the fact that it has become decadent over the millenia. It it has either become soft from easy living or has assimilated some of the values of those it once conquered which, once the dust of conquest has settled, will begin to reassert themselves. During Don Giovanni’s time this will include the values of the rising bourgeoisie, especially the values of respectability and sexual restraint.  In both cases, a loss of vitality has been the result. In both cases also there has been a certain feminisation. In Don Giovanni, it is the rather sappy Don Ottavio who represents the respectable feminised aristocrat, ruled by the wishes of his female other half, Donna Anna, who herself undoubtedly finds the sexual vitality of Don Giovanni - despite all her protestations to the contrary - much more arousing than the love and respect offered by her ‘legitimate’ spouse. Don Giovanni is much more possessed by the true spirit of his class, which, as I have said, is a macho and predatory one, and this is what makes him attractive to women. As for Donna Elvira, her situation is genuinely poignant, because she is truly in love with Don Giovanni and as a consequence, pities him and wants to save him from himself and the fate she seems to intuit. Her love, however, is tragically doomed to remain unrequited because Don Giovanni will always disdain genuine love. As a throwback to the time when his class could take women completely for granted, he is not into women as they are, only into what they represent for his masculine ego. He is too one-sidedly male to allow himself to submit in that way.

Yet this one-sided macho development is achieved and maintained at the price of a great deal of repressed femininity and homosexuality. And this is where the androgynous Black Valet comes into the picture. The second to last scene in which Don Giovanni is shown eating and drinking and generally living it up before he is dragged down into Hell, is presented by Losey as a ‘gay’ orgy, with men - one of whom is in drag - lounging around together, erotically disposed towards one another. (Look closely and you will see that the 'lady' sports a 5 o'clock shadow!) Don Giovanni himself doesn’t engage in the activities of the orgiasts - though one is free to imagine what he does with the Black Valet behind closed doors. At one point during the revel a female version of the Black Valet appears and stands the opposite sideof the Black Valet while Don Giovanni is eating. But she very soon departs from the scene. The ambiguous silent presence of the Black Valet lends the scene a disturbing homoerotic interest which is never brought out and therefore remains just the under the surface as a suggestion, the merest hint of what Don Giovanni’s fixation on womanising and conquests is really about. Losey, of course, will not be the first to make this connection between the Don Juan type and repressed homosexuality, but the way he makes it is something only an artist of the highest calibre could so successfully accomplish.

In Losey’s film, The Servant, the relationship between master and servant has definite homoerotic undertones, but on the surface heterosexuality rules as part of the power-play between the two male characters. Heterosexuality is the rule in Don Giovanni as well. But Losey has his own agenda and the way that agenda is established clearly shows him to be an absolute master of cinematic innuendo. The scene which leads up to Don Giovanni’s descent into Hell is one of the most intense and ambiguous scenes I think I have ever seen on film.

What I’m doing, of course, is reading between the lines and looking at the film as a ‘metahistorical document’. The narrative itself is fairly banal. And its message is a moral one in which Don Giovanni gets his ‘just desserts’ as a fornicating libertine. The very last scene makes this quite obvious. I don’t know to what extent either Da Ponte or Mozart subscribed to such a message. Somehow, I don’t think that, as serious artists, they could have. They were just writing within the conventions of a certain genre. But that hardly matters. What matters is what is simmering under the surface. And in terms of this particular production, what also matters is Losey’s masterful display of cinematic innuendo, using the Black Valet to add his own perspective to the original in a way that is completely transcendent.

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Richard Livermore is a poet. He is also the Editor of Ol' Chanty. He says: "I sometimes write about films which raise certain questions in my mind while watching them. They do not have to be good films or 'art-films', just as long as they seem to me to have a 'subtext' which stimulates me to say something about them. Needless to say that the 'subtext' may simply be one that I have read into it. " Anyone, however, is welcome to contribute to this page.

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A Discussion Of The Film If.... by Lindsay Anderson in my novel
DO NOT LAUGH AT THE NATIVES

Richard Livermore

BEYOND ENTROPY
Richard Livermore