Azure Stomach Turns: A Conversation About “Blue Valentine” (2010)

Greetings!

Here’s a transcript of a recent email exchange (between myself, Jamie Popowich and Angela Szczepaniak) concerning Derek Cianfrance’s much-hyped Blue Valentine–starring Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling and the demented gender dynamics of our society.

Comments and retorts would be much appreciated!

=====Jamie (in response to a link I put up on Facebook to the film’s  theme song–”You and Me” (by Penny and the Quarters)

Dave-O,

I was sent a rumour that you enjoyed this vile piece of saddo. Please tell it not be true. This is the anti-Minnie et Moskowitz. Valentine is a heavy handed, Hollywood version of what popcorn eaters believe a failed relationship should look like. I did laugh loudly at two scenes 1) when the wrestler puts Michelle Williams in a Boston crab after sexual completion and 2) when the dad says “Did you lock the door. Dean, let me in. I don’t have my oxygen tank.”

Please, for the corpse of Cassavetes, look into your soul and realize that every moment of happiness is shattered by Thor’s mighty hammer in this movie. Relationships are hard, getting old is difficult, but you know what, in the middle of all that is happiness and jokes, and some satisfaction with the struggles. Peter Falk running after his children on the beach in Women Under the Influence, Moskowitz cutting his beard, we all have moments that let us rise above our present circumstances. Blue wants you to believe all is shit or will be shit or is in the midst of shit.

Ask yourself, when the only understanding people in a movie are an abortionist and his nurse is there any truth here, or any enjoyment or are we witness to a director’s “serious” turn, with raw, pure emotions, a director who should be taken seriously because he’s willing to film sex as it should really be! No, we are in for an after school special for adults, with some shots of tits.

Fight the injustice!

======Dave

ah yes!

I agree that this isn’t on the Cassavetes level! On the other hand–in some ways, I think this film does a braver thing by giving us two utter saps as protagonists (and by refusing to give us that comforting sense that there is something at all “right” about the Cassavetian craziness transacted between them). I agree that this is not how my relationships have failed. However, I think there are a lot marriages like this. Most people live in a far bleaker world than we do, and the film captured that (and the double-edged romanticism they use to get by in it) in a way that I didn’t expect it to!

=====Angela

what i find so awful about the film is the film itself–i don’t even think it’s worth debating what the film argues and how successful or interesting it is at achieving those aims…. it’s about on the level of a first-year creative writing workshop script–one of those students who strives to “be real” and “tell it like it is” and “gives it his all.” oh, and to “write what he knows.”

=====Dave

oh for sure! but I think that’s what people are responding to in it–it is defiantly amateurish, employing stock scenarios, characters and dialog all the way through… but that kind of works to its advantage, ’cause it frees the film from even trying to account for the psychological processes underlying these attitudes… Ultimately, I think it was the internet comments that sold me on it (the response critic hangover is hard to shake!)… there are hundreds of people out there who believe this is a true account of their romantic fortunes, and there’s something about that collective earnestness that appeals to me!

=====Angela

it does not work to its advantage! just because people are saps… well, that’s no excuse for tolerating (worse, celebrating) bad art. so-called “psychological depth” would be just as awful, and not what i would substitute. invention and intelligence in writing isn’t the same as the pretense to depth. i see no difference between this film’s cliches and the ones in “the time traveler’s wife” or “speed” or “speed 2,” etc.

=====Dave

ah but I’ve got a much softer spot for the saps I think… there’s something quite disturbingly affecting about them embracing a film which tells them that their sentimental attachment to gender roles makes them utterly unfit to even participate in a relationship!

(the preceding sentiments have been brought to you by deep immersion in Paradise Reaganed)

=====Angela

oh and didn’t the film attempt to provide psychological depth? michelle williams never learned to have a good relationship because her parents had a bad relationship…. wasn’t that the psychological explanation to account for her inability to connect, etc? isn’t that what all the shoulder hunching over meatloaf was about?

=====Dave:

re: meatloaf–you’re right, I guess that’s what that was for, but it’s so rote that I think it just passes for stock environment! Or take the scene with the mover and the old man and his fuckin’ military accoutrements, for example–that is prime cinematic “art naif”

=====Angela:

the thing is, it’s not supposed to pass for stock. i’d love it if i believed i wasn’t being condescended to by a director/writer who wasn’t trying to psychoanalyse relationships because the average sap isn’t able to.

=====Dave:

oh sure–but that’s where my disbelief in the auteurial personae saves me… you can’t be condescended to by an epiphenomenon of the film industry!

=====Angela:

that’s an excuse for forgiving a piece of shit, davo!
you can find similar arguments you see and love in this film in far better work, where you don’t have to rely on seeing the sapline as the excuse for turning its faults to triumphs.
“peepshow” uses all the same cliches, but with astuteness that actually gives those arguments legs.

======Dave:

I wouldn’t dispute that–but the problem with astuteness in this case is that it short circuits the audience identification process that this kind of film invites! Blue Valentine, as a text, gets by because it actually believes that these shallow characters (and their misguided emotions) are important… in that way, it’s the equivalent of all of the sad, fucked up doo wop tunes that appeal to me (and of its gut-wrenching theme tune)… Armed only with cliche + inarticulate anguish, Blue Valentine says some crucial things about our society, and the way most people within it relate to other!of course, if the question is whether I wish I’d written (or created) something of this nature–the answer is a resounding no! 

=====Angela:

just like westerns, which i also have no time for. is it significant that people identify with those myths of settlement and nation building and celebrating individualism… probably.
it’s just as impossible to learn something from westerns if you identify with their ethos, as it is with something like blue valentine. i guess where you find it intriguing that it hits all the right sapchords, i find it a little frightening…. and a lot tiresome. it’s the “true grit” of relationship movies.

=====Dave:

yes! (re: the “True Grit” of relationship movies)

oh–one last thing, in case this stimulates response–I think the movie is best understood as an attempt at contemporary Sirk, rather than contemporary Cassavetes (precisely because it lacks any of the joy that Jamo finds wanting in it)… Sirk films have enjoyed fascinating double lives as stock (and very pop) melodramas in their own time/scathing satires for subsequent generations of viewers–and I think that may be B.V.’s destiny!

=====Jamie:

I’m not sure I like Davo calling them saps. I think that that’s condescending and entirely not the director’s point. To call them saps then you have to acknowledge that the actors, the director, don’t really care for these people but there’s no way you can believe that the film crew see them as (Slang) a gullible or foolish person — that totally disqualifies the financial problems and the slight attacks on education that the movie is trying to make. Truly we are to see these as victims unable to express themselves. Really though, they are: “What do you want me to say?” “I don’t know.” “Baby, tell me how you want me to be and I’ll be it.” “Baby, I don’t know what I want you to be.” OH, would you both please shut up.Also, how can you justify such a garbage film when every single character is so distasteful. Real life is tough isn’t going to cut it here. The husband is a self-pitying drunk, the wife is a manipulative shrew, the doctor is a seedy lothario, the wife’s father is an abusive asshole, the wife’s mother is a damaged bad cook, the wrestler is a tightwad dick who can’t even bring sorry flowers without exploding into “Bitch” — and on a dime! I’m sorry but no movie is worth anything if no one has one redeeming quality and to boot are all in a foolish script. We weren’t even allowed pity because they were all so nauseating. 

The argument, ‘well the movie must have something if it’s started this much discussion’ won’t fly either. Blue Valentine is the epitome of poor Hollywood trash. Showgirls had some humour, and a tough cookies protagonist. What’d this have? A few people bitterly caught in ‘life is shit’ without any sense of breath.

=====Dave:

I agree it doesn’t have the punch that Showgirls has, of course!  [For me on Showgirls, see HERE]

=====Jamie:

it has no punch, end of.if I can stop people from seeing this movie I will be very happy. watch switchblade sisters, see woman under the influence, call me and laugh. If your life is miserable, this movie will only make things worse. 

=====Angela:

i agree with the sense of people talking about the movie, identifying with it, being excited to see themselves in, etc, it isn’t enough to make it even vaguely passable. by that logic, wouldn’t we also have to spend our reverence tokens on “two and a half men”; “the big bang theory”; anything spielberg….?

=====Dave:

I see your point re: Spielberg et al–but I do think it’s significant that people are so eager to see themselves in such a downbeat, happiness-withholding film!

=====Angela:

really? seems pretty typical to me. isn’t that what people do in earnest amateur theatre productions and creative writing workshops?

======Dave:

they do, for sure! but those fora don’t usually attract huge audiences!

=====Angela:

not en masse for each individual piece, true. but isn’t this just that same story everyone tells in those venues, just in a more available medium? i don’t see how that represents any kind of significant change in cultural consciousness if everyone’s been doing it forever anyway. it makes no real difference if it’s michelle williams spouting those lines or the guy from my undergrad theatre classes who one-man-showed us all how to whine through our doomed “relationship journeys.”

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Please do keep the conversation going in the comments section!

Thanks!

Dave

Hoke Gets In Your Eyes (one more ghost of blogs past)

Consider this one my contribution to the get-David-Cairns-to-do-a-Dieterle-Week fund:

In 1933, as it must to all directors (well, maybe not all),  the Foreign Legion film came to William Dieterle. Like Six Hours To Live, The Devil’s in Love was made at Fox, rather than at the director’s 1930s home studio, Warner Brothers, where, I must agree with Andrew Sarris, he sometimes came across as a second-string Michael Curtiz (although, even during that period, he did manage to slip in a few wonderfully distinctive pieces-i.e. The Last Flight, Jewel Robbery, Scarlet Dawn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Great O’Malley, Another Dawn, Juarez … Fog Over Frisco, on the other hand, while justly celebrated for its technical bravura, does seem like ersatz Curtiz–although I’ve only seen it once… I’ll post on it when I revisit it)

Anyway–the Fox Dieterles provide about as clear a forecast of the brilliant period that stretches from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) to The Turning Point (1952) as any aficionado could want! Devil, in fact, plays like a trial run for 1937′s Another Dawn–a pretty amazing snatch of “orientalist” romance starring Kay Francis and Errol Flynn (among other things, the two films share a no-win love triangle between three very likable characters, a European imperialist millieu AND Herbert Mundin in pretty much exactly the same role–scoundrel/affectionate sidekick).

The story is completely wack, but it is perfectly concocted to liberate the director’s expressionistic genie. To wit: have you ever seen an image that more perfectly evokes a court-martial death sentence than the above shot?

Forget “love”–Victor Jory is in trouble! Framed for murder by one of J. Carrol Naish’s patented weakling/bastards (although a much more sympathetic specimen of the type than he often played):

As always in a Dieterle film, arbitrary authority is the only “evil.” In this case, the real devil of the piece (although he shows no signs of being in love) is a sadistic base commander who treats his servant (Naish) so badly that you are cheering for the guy, until you realize that the craven fellow plans to exact his revenge by pinning the justifiable homicide upon the outpost’s resident humanist, doctor Victor Jory–who is basically the liberal saint of Dieterle’s Muni/Kay Francis (as Florence Nightingale)/Robinson biopic cycle, transplanted from the history books into the more wonderfully manured garden of melodrama.

All of this happens within a few minutes of the title credits! Before you’re two sips into your coffee (you all drink coffee with your avi files, don’t you?), prosecutor Bela Lugosi is bearing down upon our noble protagonist with the irrefutable evidence that the doctor and the sadistic major were sworn enemies (with diametrically opposed views of the West’s proper role in Africa).

Luckily, Jory’s best friend, played by apparent Dieterle favourite David Manners (who has been steadily rising in my estimation for years–to the point where I actually love his jokey scenes with the amazing Helen Chandler in Browning’s Dracula) is a captain who knows when to subvert military discipline, and he quickly engineers the doctor’s escape.

After that, we get about 40 minutes of Jory hiding in plain sight in a city close to the base, where he becomes known as the “Consul of the Damned,” thanks to his untiring medical efforts on behalf of the region’s sickly underclass. Along the way, he meets two women, both of whom prove to be wonderful human beings… One of them, a fellow crusader at the local Christian mission, captures Jory’s heart (but when does he become a devil, the viewer wonders?). This comes as no surprise, since she is played by the eye-poppingly young Loretta Young.

But of course there are problems. She’s engaged. To Manners. It was inevitable. But it’s great! And, as always with Dieterle, the film doesn’t just tell you the characters are in love–it makes you believe it, and even need it. Only Borzage does this as well.

I won’t say any more, except that, of course, events do conspire to bring all of the principals into close proximity–and Jory does get pretty scarily demonic in this scene (when he confronts Naish with his suspicions about the latter’s role in the opening shenanigans):

Amazing stuff!

Bonjour les amis!

Dave

The My Noirity Report (a ghost entry from blogs past–more King Vidor soon)

Why So Crawfordian?

I finally sat down with Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon this weekend–and man, was it good! I don’t know why I was surprised–none of the director’s Fox noir stuff has ever failed to thrill me–but, somehow, I had low expectations for this one. Part of it, undoubtedly, was caused by the lingering effects of overexposure to Leslie Halliwell‘s obtuse worldview as a child (stay tuned for a weekly-series type thing: The Halliwell Hate-on! You can play too!). But an even more nagging doubt was rooted in the fear that Joan Crawford and Otto Preminger might do grievous harm to one another…

The region 1 DVD contains some excellent supplementary materials, including a commentary track by Foster Hirsch that addresses exactly this concern. The genial scholar takes pains to point out the ways in which the director works to keep Joan’s very un-Premingerian emotionalism under wraps (notably by giving her lots of bits of physical business to tie her to his meticulously blocked scenes and keep her fury from taking flight), and there’s definitely some merit in these observations. Of course, the question then becomes, why cast Joan Crawford if you want a “cooler” star? (like Preminger perennial Gene Tierney) The answer, of course, is that Daisy Kenyon wouldn’t work with Gene Tierney. Not, at least, as well as the film that we do have.

Ya see, the (to quote Jimmy Stewart in The Philadelphia Story) blank unholy surprise about DK is that, while Preminger does get a tremendously civilized performance out of Crawford for most of the film’s running time, he also lets her go nova at exactly the right time. Look at that image above. Is Norma Shearer in her headlights? Baby Jane? An alien invasion force?

Nah…

She’s just… “clearing her head.” (with a little help from a quasi-intentional “death-roll” right off the interstate)

And it’s so right–a fitting climax to a genuinely nerve-wracking tale of emotional undecidability (the Bermuda of romantic triangles!) Hirsch–who wrote a biography of Preminger–disagrees here, arguing that the scene’s not quite the tour-de-force that it needs to be, precisely because this kind of grand gesture sticks in the director’s craw(ford)

In a sense, he’s absolutely right–this is not the canonical Preminger’s cup of tea. On the other hand, I don’t see any evidence of that on the screen. As far as I’m concerned, the sequence works amazingly well. This may be one of those instances in which the psychological pieties of auteurist interpretation have played havoc with a critic’s perceptions. Then again, perhaps my determination NOT to toe the auteurist line is leading me down the garden path (and right into a ditch)?

You be the judge, dear reader/viewer!

But enough of that! The main thing I wanted to examine here is the age old question of “what’s in a noir”? (this would have provided the material for Juliet’s next set of musings, if Romeo–never much of cinephile–hadn’t interrupted her)

Here again, Daisy Kenyon now seems invaluable–if only because Fox slipped it into their Fox Noir series of DVDs.

Of course the noiristas on the IMDB (and, I’m certain, elsewhere) are out for blood! The studios are polluting the pure black stream of cinspiration with their endless attempts to capitalize on bleak nostalgia. Is every shadowy film of the late 1940s a noir?

No. Of course not. Or, then again, just maybe: “yes.”

It seems to me that some of these people are getting a little more caught up in the details of the plot than is good for them. As we know, “noir” is not a genre (genres are consciously produced by studios–while “film noir” is a concept imposed retroactively by scholars), and thus has no business being defined that way. Or anyway, that’s how I feel about it. Noir, to me, is pretty much all cinematography. A way of looking at filmed events that took a firm grip on many Hollywood filmmakers during an extremely horrifying time in human history (all times are horrifying, of course, but some of them are more self-consciously so than others)

To wit–noir is this:

Isn’t it?

Look at those faces (I dare ya! You can’t SEE them!) Look at that mailbox–or is it a coffin?

That’s a noir scene.

And then again–it’s just a run-of-the-mill date between two bewildered people. (there are hundreds of sequences like this–set in cities and small towns that all have exactly the same ratio of bricks to leaves to desperation–in the movies of the 1940s… one of my favourites is in Dieterle’s I’ll Be Seeing You–which I’m due to re-watch very soon) But isn’t that the point of noir? It’s not that crime and vice are rampant–that’s not a new thing in films in the 1940s–it’s that life has become perilously close to meaningless for a larger number of Americans than it ever had been before (AND that, in true existentialist–or should I say Transcendentalist, which is sort of the same thing–fashion, Hollywood quickly found its way to the beauty in that meaninglessness…)

Anyway, given that (possibly idiosyncratic) construction of film noir, Daisy Kenyon qualifies as a paragon of the style. This is a story of almost exclusively “nice people,” desperate to live well and treat each other properly, who nevertheless fail to reap the expected rewards of such behaviour. (i.e. the amazing scene in which the newly coupled Fonda and Crawford admit that they are using each other–mutuality is the one thing that no one has a prayer of achieving in this film) Some of the scenes in the script–especially the many three-way chats between the principles–might “read-through” like Noel Coward set pieces; but the characters, despite the Cowardlike (Cowardly?) situations–are, I repeat, genuinely admirable–not formula philanderers/madcaps disconnected from the plebes.

Yes, Dana Andrews is playing a rich adulterer, but he’s an intelligent, friendly, idealistic (fighting for the rights of a California Nisei dispossessed of his farm during the War) and loving (with his kids–who are being abused behind his back by his wife) adulterer…The actor is a revelation here. I mean, he’s always good, but he didn’t usually get a chance to spread out emotionally this way–and he nails every single opportunity that he’s given in this one. Fonda is a (slightly) less hysterical version of his The Long Night self here (although, if you, like me–and, undoubtedly, many moviegoers in 1947–watch DK with the Litvak film in your memory banks, you can’t help expecting him to go off any minute, especially once he starts doing things like following her to movie theatres and waking up in crazed, nightmarish cold sweats–and it seems to me that Preminger makes perfect use of that metatextual element to sustain tension). But he’s also fun and quite charming at times–there’s a (still shadow-laden–about 90% of the movie takes place in the dark) moment at a nightclub when he tells Crawford “I think I’ll kiss your neck” that’s really quite disarming. Meanwhile, Joan anchors the film with her determinedly sensible performance, serving, strangely enough, as the audience surrogate as she takes the measure of these complex men. Hirsch is right when he argues that they have by far the more interesting roles–although I think he underestimates the value of Crawford’s car ride, the existence of which trumps all of the “civilized” stuff that has preceded it (and that will follow). In going off the road, besieged by the imagined sound of would-be lovers on the telephone, she conveys the real psychological cost of the loss of faith in the possibility that any of the choices we have to make here on earth (symbolized by the various romantic configurations offered by the plot) can really take us anywhere we want to go.

good night friends!

Dave

Acid-Free Flashbacks: Strange Adventures #180 (Sept 1965)

So I’ve been listening to a lot of comics podcasts lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve been working on a novel set within the comics fan/creator vortex… maybe it’s just because these microphone-slingers are having so much damned fun with the material… whatever the reason, I could use some of what they’re having!

For the record, here are some of the people I’m talking about. Go and listen to them right now!

Tom Vs the Flash (covering Barry Allen’s Fast Times in Central City)

Super Future Friends (a chronological look at the Legion, beginning with Adventure #247)

From Crisis to Crisis (Superman from 1986 to 2006)

Amazing Spider-Man Classics (from the bite until they bite the bullet)

Tales of the Justice Society of America (they’re into All-Star Squadron–a lifelong favourite of mine)

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll ever be a podcaster. Lord knows I love to talk–but recording and editing? There’s no way. Also, I hear it costs money. I don’t have money. Do you have money? Can I have some of it?

So I think I’ll do the next best thing. Grab a fistful of half-assedly preserved newsprint (with any luck, an entertaining one) whenever the mood strikes and make with the fun!

We’ll call it prosecasting.

This is where it starts–Strange Adventures #180 [Origin & 1st app. Animal Man]!

If you’ve read my scribblings elsewhere, you’ll know that I have a long history with this character… but…

We’ll see…

We begin with the essentials

Title: “I Was the Man With the Animal Powers”

Script: Dave Wood (who?)

Pencils: Anagramsci favourite Carmine Infantino

Inker: George Roussos

Colors: No Man Can Say

Letters: Stan Starkman

Query: Can gorillas actually do this?

The cover says yes. My gut says no.

Clearly, however, a “gorilla sock” is doing something to this amazing Infantinophant on the splash page!

Who is this man? How did he wind up in this predicament? What ails this poor elephant’s mind?

All I know is, I hope it ends in a hug…

Page 2: The man’s name is Buddy Baker. He’s just your basic guy who can’t quite work up the nerve to propose to his girlfriend (Ellen), and takes out his frustrations on our friends the animals (with a gun and bro named Roger). One day, while out scouring for things to kill, Buddy is laid low by an origin blast! We are now 4 panels into the story! On the 5th panel, a tiger slinks toward the poor defenseless man.

Miraculously, he finds that he’s more than up to the challenge of defending himself. In fact, he’s THE MAN WHO APPROPRIATES ANIMAL POWERS!

Buddy adjusts to his new condition as only a silver age hero can! Get in the ring motherfuckers!

He gives the animal kingdom a taste of its own medicine:

The Tiger!

The Gorilla!

That elephant (named “Bimbo”, apparently)!

A child-eating fuckin’ Sea Lion!

Bobby’s fine, don’t worry…

Buddy Baker mans up to this menagerie of evil (actually just a group of frightened zoo animals, freed when their train went off the rails)

But he’s not done!

Apparently there’s a weird “Hulk” on the loose, a Xemnu-the-Titan-looking-guy who ALSO got animal powers from the blast. This is my favourite part of the story. Who the fuck is this creature? An alien? A mutated animal? No explanation is offered. Apparently, he’s just your basic heartland yeti, crazed by animal powers. Perhaps he too has been working up the nerve to propose to his hulk-mate?

Buddy can’t overpower him, because the “hulk” absorbed more radiation (making him the Man-or-whatever With MORE Animal Powers). Luckily, our hero has it all over the hulk in the brains department. Having reasoned things out with the remarkable, some might say pathological, lucidity of an anthology freak, he knows what his next move must be! The man who had begun his tale by worrying about his rodent-like romantic powers saves the day by scaring the hulk off a cliff with “mouse fear powers”!

You don’t have to take my word for it–here’s the proof:

Oh good job, Buddy–you fucking maniac. I’m glad I met Grant Morrison’s version of you first. Oh yeah, then he proposes to Ellen (we 1980s kids know THAT)–and faints!

But there’s more to this issue!

Palisades Park!

Environmentalism!

The goddamned “G.I. Joe Club”!

Don’t join!

A “Kat” who wants you to build cars (and get “cooled”? that doesn’t sound healthy)

And there was even more for your 12 cents that fine September!

A text page detailing the “Strange But True” saga of a six-schooner pile-up which occurred off the coast of Australia in 1829. Apparently, every crew member and passenger aboard these ships survived and the entire group was rescued within a few days. The affair reaches a satisfactorily “strange” conclusion when it is discovered that a sailor from Yorkshire and his long-lost old mother are huddled together amongst the survivors. Had fate engineered this oddly beneficent multiple disaster solely to unite their little family?

I guess so.

And then there’s the “back-up story”–”One Monster, Coming Up” (penciled and inked, apparently, by George Roussos). This one tells the tale of a bunch of “wildcatters” who get way more than they bargained for when they try drilling for oil on consecrated “Injun” ground… Disgraceful… I can summarize this one in one crazed cross-sectional panel:

Awesome.

After a lot of rampaging, they finally get the thing under control (with the help of some fancy magic relics–and a lot of golden “Indian treasure”).

Do these fuckers learn their lesson?

In a wink: No.

good night friends!

see you next time (probably with more King Vidor posts… but I’m also hoping to do some posting on the immortal 1973 Super Friends! series… I’m talking about the one with Wendy, Marvin and Wonder Dog. Accept no pointy-eared substitutes!)

Dave

Tragic Muse-conceptions

All of King Vidor’s films deal with artists (people who transmute the materials furnished by life into something far more personal than life, properly speaking, ever is), but La Boheme is the first one to be set in the artistic milieu–and the director doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Oh there’s plenty of charming bonhomie and aestheticized “suffering for art” on display–but Vidor pulls out all of the stops to show us exactly what this “boy’s own adventure” into “poverty” is founded upon–i.e. genuine (and inevitable) female pain. Implicit in all of this is a potent critique of the Artist/Muse trope.

We begin with a familiar scene from “Bohemia”–artists sketching a model–interrupted by a visit from the landlord:

The film sticks to this whimsical tone whenever it deals with the never-too-serious plight of its core brothers-in-arts (led by John Gilbert–and featuring Anagramsci fave Edward Everett Horton in a fairly early role). I mean, really, how serious can life get for these guys?

The very bearable lightness of their being is driven home by these little sing-along intertitles:

No, they don’t get paid much… Luckily, they always find some monkey to do the tough work for them:

And when their stomachs rumble, there’s always a banquet to be had, in the pit of the building (a classic sequence):

Lady Bountiful is Musette (art bro Marcel’s girlfriend), played by Big Parade alum Renee Adoree. We’ll get back to her–and the source of her bounty–later.

Poverty is quite a different thing for seamstress Mimi–both more exhausting:

and more abject:

The actress charged with walking these diverse and difficult roads? Lilian Gish, of course:

She enters the art-boys’ world in pretty standard melodrama fashion–they extend the dubious benefits of their “protection” to the hard-up woman of virtue (who steadfastly refuses to pay the landlord with her body). Unfortunately for Mimi, she looks so fetching as she warms herself at the heater that she is pretty much doomed to become muse-fuel for playwright John Gilbert’s fire:

From there, it doesn’t take us long to get here:

And after that, you know her fate is sealed.

However, the interesting thing–as I have been stressing in this series of posts–is the way Vidor finds a route to modern psychology and radical social critique within this  rather old-fashioned narrative framework. From the moment Mimi (Gish) confesses her love to Rodolphe (Gilbert)–and their powerful romantic scene IS fueled by her confession of love, rather than by his inevitable attraction to her–the film shifts drastically in tone, becoming a scathing analysis of what it really means to be (in the hackneyed terminology of yesteryear) the “great woman behind the great man”.

Yes, when Gish kisses Gilbert (becoming his muse), she accepts full responsibility for making a “great artist” of him. “So what?” you might ask. Isn’t that a passive, reactionary position for a female subject? Well, I would answer–”yes and no”.  Reactionary? Definitely. Passive. Anything but. It’s hard to remain muse-ical. In fact, as Vidor’s film shows us, Mimi works much harder–and produces a far more powerful dramatic construct (although only we and possibly one other person are privy to this fact)–than the nominal “artist” of the piece.

How does Gilbert reach his apotheosis? He sits around, jots down notes, takes money (which he thinks he is earning) and looks up (or through the window) at Mimi, whenever he loses his fix on “beauty”.

Meanwhile, Gish fights a war on more fronts than you can shake a phallus at.

She must remain “pure” (i.e. available–in body and mind–only to Gilbert).

She must remain “beautiful” (i.e. well-rested, well-nourished, well-dressed).

She must resist every offer of “assistance” that patriarchal society makes (and she gets quite a few–especially from that damned landlord and this syphilitic count):

In the end, Gish finds it impossible to satisfy all of these imperatives. [Vidor's greatest films generally give us protagonists--particularly female protagonists--who find imaginative (and by that, I mean aesthetic) solutions to "no-win" situations]. She discovers, very early in the relationship, that Gilbert’s sinecure at a Dog and Cat Fancier’s magazine has dissolved (due entirely to his negligence)–and she elects to fill the financial void herself (by seamstressing herself to the breaking point, working round the clock to earn the money Gilbert thinks he is getting for the little pet articles he tosses off, whenever he can tear himself away from his supposedly magnificent play). By eschewing sleep, Gish courts disaster in a number of ways. For one thing, she contracts tuberculosis. Worse (in her mind), she’s looking more haggard than a “muse” ought to (a female friend lays this out for us–”if you lose your looks, he’ll stop loving you). Things get so bad that she clutches wildly for a shortcut to the success she desires for her artist–agreeing to go on a double date with the Count (who says he “knows a producer”), Musette, and some other rich guy (presumably the one who pays for the banquets she lays out, beneath that hole in the garret floor). When she returns, all hell breaks loose–as Gilbert has discovered that he’s been unemployed for five weeks, and assumes that she’s been playing hooker on him.

What follows is a monstrous scene of masculine egotism unleashed. We are forced to watch our likable small fry artist transform into a dick of unparalleled dimensions–berating Mimi for finding a way to keep him in food while he “creates”, and assuming that she’s done it by allowing others to ravish her body, rather than by submitting that very same frail form to the ravages of insane overwork. Only the long-overdue realization of her consumptive condition puts an end to his petulant (and physically abusive) tirade–at which point the repentant Gilbert puts Gish to bed and runs off to summon a doctor.

Of course, in order to remain true to her muse-conception, Gish must take her tortured body and run, thus saving Gilbert from wasting his chi powers on a lot of unplaywrightlike nursemaiding. In the bargain (the intertitles tell us), Gilbert’s remorse over his insane treatment of this extraordinary woman actually inspires him to create a “producible” drama! Vidor doesn’t waste much time telling that story. His camera makes a beeline for the true passion narrative of La Boheme–Mimi’s sufferings as muse-in-exile. Gish and Vidor go all-out in these sequences, and here I have to allow the film to speak for itself:

banned from the Big Parade to "Art"

It’s a litany of martyrdom with a radical message–the reverse of Gibsonian torture porn. Vidor traces the development of a gendered idea of muse-as-martyr in Gish’s mind, and then follows through as she makes all of her nightmarish dreams come true. A world that offers women nothing but this vast wasteland of stations of the cross needs a whole new slate of channels in a hurry. I would argue that you could interpret much of the director’s subsequent oeuvre as a series of pilots for a new model of female subjectivity…

Finally, Gilbert’s play (who knows or cares what it’s about?) opens–and what a triumph it is! (Actually, it is–but Vidor’s camera says otherwise)

And, as luck (and ill-health) will have it, Gish finds her way back to her lover, just in time to congratulate him (the film, of course, congratulates her) on his success–and die, knowing that the tableau in his mind, at the climactic moment of the narrative, is not his worldly success, but HER declaration of love for him, at the midpoint of the film (and here we get another Vidor flashback–every Vidor silent seems to have ‘em!–to the sun-drenched kiss scene). The overall effect of Vidor’s subjective reorchestration (which stresses the fatal demands of the muse/artist structure over the traditionally aestheticized function of the “tragic muse”) punctures Puccini’s platitudes and weaponizes the weepiness of the finale.

We fade out on this brilliant sequence with Adoree and Gish (who else but Musette could understand the true nature–and terrible necessity–of Mimi’s trajectory?)

next time: Bardelys the Magnificent!

Liberty Waving Goodbye to the People

The Big Parade (1925)

Okay, so maybe it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but I think there’s a lot to be gleaned from the juxtaposition of Renée Adorée (as The Big Parade‘s Melissande) and Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty” (“Leading the People”)

I’ve been calling King Vidor a “Romantic” and a “Transcendentalist”–and this exercise might help to clarify what I mean by those terms. The Delacroix painting, of course, is one of the quintessential products of European Romanticism–a multifarious movement which exalted human “spirit” (and/or “Nature”) over the dead letter of conformity, legalism and (in its extreme form) “culture”. Perhaps the most important corollary of Romanticism’s quarrel with the school of thought that had preceded it upon the intellectual stage was a tendency to celebrate “the particular” at the expense of that sine qua non of Enlightenment Rationalism–”the universal”.  I’m sure that sounds quite radical, and in a few cases (Shelley, Victor Hugo) it actually was–however, as the 19th century progressed, mainline Romanticism definitely hardened into the aesthetic fist of  Old World reactionary politics (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Chateaubriand, Hegel and derivatives–except for Marx, of course). This occurred because the particular “particular” that most of these folks latched onto was a Frankenstein Monster of “national character” defined by language, scientistic theories about “blood” and pre-Enlightenment Myth. And so in the above painting, “Liberty” rises from the collective breast of the “people” and spurs them to some triumphant realization of the ideal French state.

There was no shortage of this type of Romantic in the “New World” either–especially in the South, where people like William Gilmore Simms hearkened back to a fantasy of Medieval Order that they believed had been “perfected” by that region’s “peculiar institution”. Proslavery romanticism invented a nation (of “whiteness”) within the nation, and gloried in its unique destiny. The really interesting thing, though, is that (with the disturbing exception of Edgar Allan Poe–an anti-democratic departure unto himself) the most vital products of American Romanticism depart markedly from the European pattern. My undergraduate thesis (written more than 10 years ago now!) speculated upon the sources of this divergence. The short answer? If you want to celebrate the distinctiveness of a nation that was brought into being by Enlightenment theory, you wind up clinging to a belief in universal human rights AS the leading “characteristic” of your “particular” heritage. Hence the paradoxical title of the piece: “Enlightened Romantics”. So what are you saying Fiore? America=”good”; Europe=”bad”. Certainly not! However, I do think it’s important to acknowledge this divergence–and to take its implications as seriously as possible. Each intellectual tradition offers its own strikingly different network of roads to (imagined) Utopia and (very real) Hell (and to a whole lot of places in between). As a weird latter-day Gramscian (hence the goofy non-anagrammatic title of my blog), I believe that leftist thinkers who cherish any minuscule hope of steering the ship in the direction of social justice must engage popular culture head on (Adorno is my bête noire; well, Adorno and Ronald McDonald).

Enter King Vidor (and his version of “liberty”–who must remain on the sidelines, while “the people”–exemplified by an American doughboy–clash senselessly). The King is dead (and therefore not making movies any more)–but I would argue that his oeuvre embodies the paradoxical Hollywood/Transcendental zeitgeist (which lives on–for good or for ill) better than anyone else’s. Moreover, his career stretches across such a wildly oscillating chunk of the 20th century–and was thus susceptible to such an extreme range of societal influences–that his auteur‘s progress toward the blinkered paradise that is Truth and Illusion provides a unique laboratory for the student of American cultural history.

I’m bringing this stuff into play with The Big Parade because this where the King ascended to the vacant throne of D.W. Griffith and assumed the mantle of “America’s Auteur” (long before the term was invented, of course). By 1925, Vidor was tired of making movies that played one week stands and disappeared forever (until the advent of TCM, that is) and he made this fact known to his new boss (MGM’s Irving Thalberg). As most of you reading this will know, The Big Parade changed all of that, becoming the biggest moneymaker of the 1920s, creating the template for every anti-war film that followed it (without ever being explicitly “anti-war” in the way that, say, Milestone’s All Quiet is), initiating the meteoric rise and fall of star John Gilbert and giving Vidor the “prestige capital” to get away with making the inherently unprofitable The Crowd 3 years later.

It’s a major leap from the chamber melodramatics of Wild Oranges (which had 5 cast members) to BP”s grand canvas–and there are casualties along the way to the battlefield. Stylistically, this is pure Vidor–except for the numerous digressions into knockabout “comedy” that came from the Laurence Stallings original. However, thematically, The Big Parade is a real oddity among Vidor’s films–giving us a protagonist who generally seems content to be carried along by the whims of fate (having no vision of his own to oppose to the reality in which he finds himself). Actually, James Apperson (Gilbert’s character) reminds me a great deal of our old pal Reggie, from Bud’s Recruit:

Remember me?

and that’s pretty strange, because Reggie was NOT the protagonist of Bud’s Recruit.

With the exception of The Crowd, I’m more interested in Vidor’s “minor” films–but that’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to talk about in The Big Parade. For one thing, there’s the title itself, which sounds festive, but which is actually synonymous with these funeral processions:

Talk about marching to the beat of the same ol’ drummer! Henry David Thoreau would be appalled! And, so, clearly, is Vidor. If The Big Parade is an anti-war film, it’s not because it’s a pacifist film, it’s because, in good Transcendentalist fashion, it deplores the regimentation of army life. Sure, there’s brutality galore on the screen, but the extended battle sequence actually hinges upon Gilbert’s trenchbound interrogative epiphany: “Orders? Who’s fighting this war? Men or Orders?” The film is pretty clear about the answer–”Orders” all the way. As soon as the people we’ve spent the first hour with leave their camp, they almost cease to be “men” at all–they become merely the undead agents of the inscrutable metronome of “foreign policy”. (And you’ll notice that we never, ever get a sense that anyone knows WHY they are fighting in France… no “make the world safe for democracy” nonsense in this script! These people are there to march at machine guns and hope–not even TRY–to survive. That’s it.) Vidor is the great prophet of subjectivity in the cinema–and the film’s most carefully planned out scenes give us hundreds/thousands of human beings drained of every trace of that quality; the reified elements of a Busby Berkeley spectacle:

None of this would have anything like the impact that it does if we hadn’t just spent a reel or two watching Gilbert (literally) barrel into something like a sense of self, thanks to this encounter French peasant girl Adorée:

After this bizarre first meeting, she (significantly) recognizes him by a ratty tassel around his right leg (the one he does not lose in the battle):

Their courtship begins as something that is played for laughs, but gradually progresses into an almost-Borzagean fortress against the cosmos. Gilbert’s romance-awakened personhood becomes synonymous with the candle that Adorée holds in the fourth still below (and which Slim extinguishes with spit, when the troops are sent to participate in the big show-stopper on the front):

After the call-up, Adorée becomes the sole keeper of this flame of subjectivity. The “only light in the world”, as the American exceptionalists used to like to say, during the darkest days of the next World War. If you accept this interpretation, then nothing which happens in Belleau Wood actually matters. All of that celebrated battle footage–the reach for the flower (a jauntier precursor of the reach for the buttlerfly in All Quiet)–the deaths of Slim and Bull–the scene in the trench with the dying German (which also has its analogue in Milestone’s film)–Gilbert’s pointless act of  ”heroism” (which is presented as pure vengeance)–and even the nonsense with Gilbert’s “cheering family” and the New York end of another (equally dead) “big parade”–ALL of it is just a subjective flatline between this goodbye:

And this hello…. “Liberty reunited with the (man of the) people”… And not “leading” him anywhere but to bed, if my guess is correct!

Here again, this actually seems more like Borzage than Vidor, with two strong visionaries bringing an improbable dream to life by catching reality in a passionate crossfire. (Generally, in Vidor, you only get ONE visionary–often paired with an unworthy romantic partner who becomes aligned with a fate that must be resisted at all costs). All in all, I find The Big Parade less compelling–as an example of what this director is all about–than something like Beyond the Forest or Ruby Gentry…but we’ll get to them, in due course…

As Charles Silver notes:

For Marxist critics, The Big Parade was anathema, since Vidor “centered his comment upon the war in an absurd love affair between a French peasant girl and an American doughboy while men were being blown to bits.” What this writer for Experimental Cinema didn’t seem to realize was that war for Vidor, as for most human beings, is precisely about love affairs and their impossibility under conditions of combat. The tragedy of war is the interruption not of dialectic, but of love and of life.

Absolutely. That’s the director’s position here. Implicit in that position is a characteristic horror of any kind of collective undertaking (which the huge number of Americans who keep voting against health care will certainly understand). This is something that will come up quite a lot (as you might expect from the director of The Fountainhead!) However, it is worth noting that, somewhere between this film and the Rand adaptation, Vidor will also give us perhaps the most astonishing example of subjectivized spectacle ever filmed–in Our Daily Bread. The Vidor oeuvre–and the principles of transcendental melodrama which animate it–contains…well, if not multitudes, then, at least, an unexpected range of attitudes toward the relationship between the radical subject, shared “reality” and the possibility of justice.

That’s why I can’t stop thinking about it.

Young Wine in Old Battles

Wine of Youth (1924)

King Vidor’s first film for the newly created Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Wine of Youth lulls the viewer into a comfortable  rhythm with its Jazz Age jocularity–and then rips the skin off its “comedy of manners” facade to expose the capillaries of a culture in (perennial) crisis. Perry Miller famously described Transcendentalism as “the first of a succession of revolts by the youth of America against American Philistinism.” Wine of Youth tracks yet another of those tidal movements within the sea of sea-changes that is the American social scene.

The “Wine of Youth” in question is pressed from the soul of our protagonist by the impossibly conflicting demands of “authenticity” and “self-authorization” (call it “will”, if you will). It’s an intoxicating (that means “poisonous”, y’know!) paradox–we equate “freedom” with “choice”, when, in fact, every choice is the abrogation of freedom. Vidor’s film follows one “flaming youth’s” flickering awareness of this phenomenological fact. The person in question–the amazing Eleanor Boardman (in the first of a string of King films–culminating with The Crowd):

The film introduces us to a series of three Marys (each of whom, we are asked to believe, represents the “typical” young woman of her generation). Mary I (destined to become “Granny” in the present-day portion of the film) is shown careening toward marriage to the tune of a polka, sometime during the 1870s. Twenty years later, Mary II (aka “Mom”) waltzes to a similar fate–although not before she voices a few concerns about the ersatz quality of love that is “merely declared.” These quibbles come to naught when Mary II’s beau puts his lips to more convincing use, causing her to exclaim “ours is the greatest love the world has ever known!” These events lead directly to the creation of Mary III–who enters the story with some very definite ideas about indefiniteness:

Will our protagonist emerge from the film with her protean agon intact? Well, as you might expect, no. However, her journey toward the terminus is handled in such a way that we cannot but assume that the terminal case made by “THE END” will inevitably be reopened at some future date–and that Mary IV, whomever she proves to be, can expect a subpoena circa 1945.

Mary III (we’ll just call her “Mary” from now on, since she’s the one in the spotlight) has 2 suitors (“and she ain’t ashamed”)–Ben Lyon (Mr. Serious) and William Haines (Mr. Callow). Boardman’s knowing performance communicates the fact Mary is aware that this specious “choice” is no choice at all. What she really wants is the freedom to throw herself into the social whirl without being courted all of the time. Unfortunately (for her!), her sultry skepticism pokes an eye in even the most powerful storm, creating a pocket of pure pensiveness in the midst of these Fitzgeraldian frolics:

Mary knows that “flapping” isn’t freedom–but she longs to take flight. After a lot of tame bourgeois shenanigans, she hits upon a plan–she and her 2 guys will take a “trial honeymoon” (free of societal pressure and matrimonial maneuvering), in order to forge a more “authentic” understanding of each other. Natually, this shocks Mary I

and amuses Mary II (who understands her daughter’s urge without condoning it–or believing that the gambit has any chance of clarifying matters):

Once Mary III (I guess we need the numbers back after all) leaves the stage, her two elders have it out in an exchange which culminates (after Granny claims that Boardman is “in danger”)  in these very Thoreauvian echoes of Walden‘s “lives of quiet desperation”:

“Danger” is the Vidorian (not to mention Emersonian, Melvillian, Hawthornian, Fullerian, etc) status quo–the inevitability that must be avoided at all costs.

But how?

Certainly NOT by making a chastely illicit run up to the country, no matter what illusions those gusts of open road might conjure up:

The film quickly disabuses its heroine and its viewers of the notion that freedom is so easily won. Soon after the group hits the beach, Lyon gets sulky and Haines gets pervy, leaving Mary in a state of, uh, consternation?

She quickly realizes that the dread “society” cannot be escaped–it can only be confronted… and not head-on either, but rather “aversively” (as Emerson and Stanley Cavell would say). Turn your back on “society” and it’ll assault you in your tent (as Haines attempts to do!) Try to “face” it and all you’ll get is Harpo Marx playing “mirror”. The best we can do is fight our way unclear to a vantage upon the world informed by equal parts Rapid Eye Movement and sidelong glance.

So Mary fakes an attack of appendicitis and goes home–and this is where Wine of Youth gets really interesting. Discovering that everyone is out looking for her, Mary is amused until she hears the angry rumble of the family’s return. She hides in a closet and grabs a ringside seat (alongside the viewer) at one of the most upsetting conjugal disputes this side of Alice Adams, It’s a Wonderful Life or Woman Under the Influence. Mary’s delinquency provides the spark which ignites a very desiccated marriage. During the next few minutes, this goofy lark of a film turns deadly serious, with Mom (played by the intense Eulalie Jensen) unleashing every poisonous postscript she’d been withholding since the day she made her own “choice”. Near the end of the battle, which simply must be seen to be understood, Mom tells Dad that she’d like to kill him with her bare hands. The pantomime might look a tad silly in a still–however, in motion, it scorches “abject despair” into the sign lexicon.

When Mary emerges from her cache to fling the enormity of her parents’ lifelong deception into their faces, they make a valiant effort to rewrite the story by contorting themselves into a warped imposture of “family feeling”:

Of course, in Mary II’s own long-ago words–”love” cannot be called into being by fiat. This declaration of dependence upon one another–an act of willful reinvention that makes a mockery of any and all notions of “authenticity”–fails to convince Mary III

But the crazy thing is that–after a melodramatic McGuffin involving a bottle of poison that never quite gets swallowed–Mary II and Dad actually discover that they HAVE talked themselves into something like a state of passion for one another. Their tale concludes in a manner that, in many ways, anticipates Stanley Cavell’s “comedy of remarriage” genre! Meanwhile, a strangely dutiful Mary III (inspired by a willful urge to rewrite her parents’ story by claiming it as her own–and attempting to call the placid relationship she had dreamed of rebelling against into “genuine” being? With no coherent “American Dream” to dream against–the revolt against philistinism collapses?) trudges back to the suitor who didn’t try to attack her on the honeymoon and, pretty much by default, throws herself “completely” into the throes of a purely rhetorical “grand passion” that builds the bourgeois sepulcher she grew up wanting to tear down (if she could only fix its position). Her (and the film’s) final words?

Even better than the real thing?

next time–The Big Parade!

good night friends!

Dave