Crusoe in England

Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets, not least because she chose to write about exile so much. Loss was a constant in her life. She turned to the subject of "Crusoe in England" late in her life, and so much of her longing for a lost paradise echoes throughout the poem. I once felt like Crusoe, far from the places that still glowed, ineradicably, in my memory. But now that I am back here, in that very green and glowing place, I know too well the truth behind Orwell's remark that, if Defoe had been living on such an island, he would never had written Robinson Crusoe. Like Defoe, and Orwell, but probably unlike Elizabeth Bishop, I am writing to someone.


Crusoe in England

A new volcano has erupted,
the papers say, and last week I was reading
where some ship saw an island being born:
at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;
and then a black fleck - basalt probably -
rose in the mate's binoculars
and caught on the horizon like a fly.
They named it. But my poor old island's still
un-rediscovered, un-renamable.
None of the books has ever got it right.

Well, I had fifty-two
miserable, small volanoes I could climb
with a few slithery strides -
volcanoes dead as ash heaps.
I used to sit on the edge of the highest one
and count the others standing up,
naked and leaden, with their heads blown off.
I'd think that if they were the size
I thought volcanoes should be, then I had
become a giant;
and if I had become a giant
I couldn't bear to think what size
the goats and turtles were,
or the gulls, or the overlapping rollers
- a glittering hexagon of rollers
closing and closing in, but never quite,
glittering and glittering, though the sky
was mostly overcast.

My island seemed to be
a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere's
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craters - their parched throats
were hot to touch.
Was that why it rained so much?
And why sometimes the whole place hissed?
The turtles lumbered by, high-domed,
hissing like teakettles.
(And I'd have given years, or taken a few,
for any sort of kettle, of course.)
The folds of lava, running out to sea,
would hiss. I'd turn. And then they'd prove
to be more turtles.
The beaches were all lava, variegated,
black red, and white, and gray;
the marbled colors made a fine display.
And I had waterspouts. Oh,
half a dozen at a time, far out,
they'd come and go, advancing and retreating,
their heads in cloud, their feet in moving patches
of scuffed-up white.
Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
sacerdotal beings of glass...I watched
the water spiral up in them like smoke.
Beautiful, yes, but not much company.

I often gave way to self-pity.
"Do I deserve this? I suppose I must.
I wouldn't be here otherwise. Was there
a moment when I actually chose this?
I don't remember, but there could have been."
What's wrong about self-pity, anyway?
With my legs dangling down familiarly
over a crater's edge, I told myself
"Pity should begin at home." So the more
pity I felt the more I felt at home.

The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun
rose from the sea,
and there was one of it and one of me.
The island had one kind of everything:
one treesnail, a bright violet-blue
with a thin shell, crept over everything,
over the one variety of tree,
a sooty, scrub affair.
Snail shells lay under these in drifts
and, at a distance,
you'd swear that they were beds of irises.
There was one kind of berry, a dark red.
I tried it, one by one, and hours apart.
Sub-acid, and not bad, no ill effects;
and so I made home-brew. I'd drink
the awful fizzy, stinging stuff
that went straight to my head
and play my home-made flute
(I think it had the weirdest scale on earth)
and, dizzy, whoop and dance among the goats.
Home-made, home-made! But aren't we all?
I felt a deep affection for
the smallest of my island industries.
No, not exactly, since the smallest was
a miserable philosophy.

Because I didn't know enough.
Why didn't I know enough of something?
Greek drama or astronomy? The books
I'd read were full of blanks;
the poems--well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
"They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss..." The bliss of what?
One of the first things that I did
when I got back was look it up.

The island smelled of goat and guano.
The goats were white, so were the gulls,
and both too tame, or else they thought
I was a goat, too, or a gull.
Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek,
baa...shriek...baa... I still can't shake
them from my ears; they're hurting now.
The questioning shrieks, the equivocal replies
over a ground of hissing rain
and hissing, ambulating turtles
got on my nerves.
When all the gulls flew up at once, they sounded
like a big tree in a strong wind, its leaves.
I'd shut my eyes and think about a tree,
an oak, say, with real shade, somewhere.
I'd heard of cattle getting island-sick.
I thought the goats were.
One billy-goat would stand on the volcano
I'd christened Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair
(I'd time enough to play with names),
and bleat and bleat, and sniff the air.
I'd grab his beard and look at him.
His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up
and expressed nothing, or a little malice.
I got so tired of the very colors!
One day I dyed a baby goat bright red
with my red berries, just to see
something a little different.
And then his mother wouldn't recognize him.

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food
and love, but they were pleasant rather
than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things
like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it
for a baby goat. I'd have
nightmares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live
on each and every one, eventually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.

Just when I thought I couldn't stand it
another minute longer, Friday came.
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them, or carry one around.
- Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

And then one day they came and took us off.

Now I live here, another island,
that doesn't seem like one, but who decides?
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I'm old.
I'm bored too, drinking my real tea,
surrounded by uninteresting lumber.
The knife there on the shelf
- it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain in the handle...
Now it won't look at me at all.
The living soul has dribbled away.
My eyes rest on it and pass on.

The local museum's asked me to
leave everything to them:
the flute, the knife, the shrivelled shoes,
my shedding goatskin trousers
(moths have got in the fur),
the parasol that took me such a time
remembering the way the ribs should go.
It still will work but, folded up
looks like a plucked and skinny fowl.
How can anyone want such things?
- And Friday, my dear Friday, died of measles
seventeen years ago come March.

The Unquiet Grave of The Quiet American

I do not like being moved; for the will is excited, and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We're so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty. -- A. H. Clough





Graham Greene has not been well served by his film adaptations. Neil Jordan included a scene in his adaptation of The End of the Affair (1999) in which Maurice (Ralph Fiennes) takes Sarah (Julianne Moore) to see a movie based on one of his novels. As they watch, Fiennes whispers to Moore, "not in my book." The scene occurs in Greene's novel, and Jordan's inclusion of it is a rather backhanded tribute to Greene, since Jordan's film takes liberties of its own with Greene's book, like completely eliminating the miracle of the birthmark's disappearance.

Propaganda may not have been foremost in the mind of Graham Greene when he wrote The Quiet American, but events certainly made the novel seem much more anti-American than perhaps he intended. The tale of a British correspondent's encounter with an American intelligence agent, disguising himself and his actions with platitudes about goodwill and finding a "third force" among the Vietnamese to satisfy both sides has come to seem prophetic, given the course of events. When it was published in 1955, Vietnam was still making up its own mind about how to govern itself - but self-government was the ultimate goal.

The novel is by no means up to Greene's former standards (The Power and the Glory, 1940), but it is an excellent divertissement, whatever its political insights. Greene, the traveling trouble-sniffer, warned against the perils of taking action and how political motives can sometimes be a disguise for less noble ones. Its setting is 1952, when the French were still fighting Ho Chih Minh's Communist forces (the so-called Viet-Minh) in the North. the French quit Vietnam for good in 1954, and an uneasy division of the country along the 17th Parallel was enforced, with Ho Chih Minh agreeing to honor the sovereignty of a foreign-funded government in the South. Since the Communists were unacceptable to the U.S. and the "elected" government in Saigon was unacceptable to most Vietnamese, a "third force" was sought that might make everyone happy. One such force were the Caodaists. It was during this relatively peaceful ceasefire that Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted The Quiet American to film. And a more thorough hatchet job of the novel and of Greene could not have been devised.

In the opening credits, Mankiewicz's film is based "upon a novel by Graham Greene," and makes so many alterations that it hardly resembles the novel of the same name. Mankiewicz makes Pyle the hero and Fowler the unwitting dupe of Communist agents.(1) In the novel, Vigot, the French police inspector, is portrayed as calmly incompetent, and merely reports the death of Pyle to Fowler, mentions his suspicions to him but does not pursue them. He puts one in mind, as Greene intended, of how the French lost Indochina. In the Mankiewicz film, the role is expanded considerably. He is played by Claude Dauphin, and he becomes Fowler's vicar as he turns up at the oddest moments to badger him into believing in Pyle's innocence. Pyle is played by Audie Murphy, who was a bonafide American war hero, but a big zero as a film actor. The only time he managed to suggest more than two dimensions was in John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951), in which he played, of all things, a war deserter. In The Quiet American, he utters his homespun pieties, as expected, with a complete lack of conviction.

But Murphy is not, alas, the worst actor in the Mankiewicz film. Aside from location photography in Vietnam (by the great Robert Krasker[2]), Mankiewicz utilized Cinecittà in Rome for his interior scenes. I cannot think of any other reasons why he cast the Italian actress, Giorgia Moll, as Phuong, Fowler's Vietnamese mistress. Her preposterous presence, big-boned and round-eyed, is, to put it mildly, more than a little disorienting. At least the Algerian actress, Kerima, who plays Phuong's sister and who was so unforgettable in Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1952), is comfortable in her exotic surroundings. When Michael Caine, who plays Fowler in the 2001 version of The Quiet American, says that losing Phuong, played by the beautiful (and Vietnamese) Do Thi Hai Yen, would be "the beginning of death," I can understand his feeling. When Michael Redgrave expresses the same sentiment for Giorgia Moll in Mankiewicz's version, all I can feel is puzzlement or pity.

The only even remotely real person in the Mankiewicz film is Redgrave as Fowler. In a later interview (3) he regretted his involvement with the film, for obvious reasons. But he is splendid. He seems to be the only actor onscreen who did not have to learn his lines. Redgrave lives them. And by taking such apparent pleasure in destroying him, Mankiewicz merely makes himself look ridiculous. All objections aside, the film has been buried by history. The year after its release, North Vietnam declared war on South Vietnam to unite the two countries - an outcome that was finally realized sixteen years later. But only after some of the most inhuman carnage ever inflicted by one people on another. If history has proven Graham Greene right, he cannot have taken much satisfaction from it. As if to emphasize the film's mistake, a title appears over the final shot that reads, "To the people of the Republic of Vietnam - to their chosen president and administrators our appreciation for their help and kindness."

Before any other consideration, the Philip Noyce adaptation of The Quiet American is a necessary corrective to the Mankiewicz film. Full advantage was taken of the perspective of forty years and the frankness that was denied Mankiewicz in 1958. But in one significant detour from the original story, the new film betrays Greene almost as completely as the old one did.

Michael Caine is made up to look at least twenty years younger to play Fowler, and, miraculously, he pulls it off. The only time I nearly cringed was in the physical scenes of his escape from the tower that is attacked by communist "guerrillas," and in the love scenes with Do Thi Hai Yen.(4) Such relationships as that of Fowler and Phuong are prevalent in southeast Asia. On a physical level it is somewhat understandable: a girl that young and a man that old are about equally far from their sexual peaks. In the contribution to the DVD commentary for the film, Caine spoke of these relationships, saying it is a pity that the men do not seek women closer to their own level of maturity. Coming from a man whose wife is fourteen years younger than he (a difference that was more apparent when they were married), his comment suggests that Caine may believe he is quite a bit younger than his years.

The other characters are nicely observed in the Noyce film, with one glaring exception. The film does long overdue justice to the two principal Vietnamese characters, Phuong and Heng, Fowler's assistant at the Saigon Times office. Do Thi Hai Yen is almost too beautiful, but who could possibly take exception to such an advantage? The camera gets close enough to her, the one bedroom scene, to reveal a blemish or two to her otherwise flawless face.

But the one instance of miscasting perpetrated in the film is Brendan Fraser as Pyle. Though the role is restored to its original ambiguity, Fraser is hopeless both as the goofy innocent he pretends to be at first and as the cocksure agent of covert American military aid to the Caodaists. The scene when he confirms Fowler in his suspicions is powerful only because we cannot wait to see Fraser dispatched. What would have made Pyle immeasurably more sinister (though Audie Murphy is spooky enough) would have been to present him exactly as Green did, as a complete innocent who really believes in what he is saying and doing. His attraction to Phuong would have been easier to understand if we see it as Pyle's sincere attempt to redeem her from the life that Fowler, for all his genuine feelings for her, had condemned her. When Pyle is surrounded by the girls at the brothel, the look of helplessness on his face, as described by Greene, and his muttering the words, "they're all so beautiful" is where both films should have taken their cue.

But the way that the new film closes is a betrayal of Greene and gives Noyce an excuse to rub American noses in their own shit. Greene gave Fowler a happy ending - his wife grants him a divorce so that he can at last marry Phuong and take her to London. The very thought of Greene's Fowler even wanting to remain in Vietnam a moment longer than he has to is absurd. Instead of marrying Phuong, he keeps her as his mistress indefinitely.(5) Noyce makes them stay in Saigon throughout the war, sending dispatches to the Times about the war's escalation, all the way up to the height of American military involvement.

Both films flub Fowler's shattering last line: "I wish someone existed to whom I could say I was sorry." In the Noyce version, Fowler speaks them, slightly altered, to Phuong, who could not possibly understand him. But it is an immeasurable improvement over Mankiewicz's staging, in which poor Michael Redgrave speaks the exact words to Vigot, and then disappears into a crowd of revellers.

Certain bad ideas should not be permitted to die gracefully. That Communism should never prevail in Vietnam is such an idea. To this day, there are American conservatives who persist in believing that we lost the war in Vietnam because "we didn't go in there and do it right". (6) The United States failed in Vietnam not because of its enormous strategic blunders or because the manner of warfare had changed, but because we had no business being there in the first place. More than 50,000 Americans died for a cause that was doomed at its inception. And instead of entering at the war's conclusion a long and difficult period of questioning and self-examination, to at least determine how and why such a disaster could have befallen the world's pre-eminent military power, Americans by and large tried to pretend that it never happened. An entire generation of war veterans were forgotten. As Auden wrote of another war:

History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.(7)



(1) In the place of Pyle, who becomes the victim of Fowler's jealousy and hatred for Americans, Mankiewicz created "Dominguez," a rather oily character who is otherwise a replacement for Fowler's Vietnamese assistant, Heng.

(2) The interview is included in the special features of the Criterion edition of The Browning Version.

(3) The scene at the Caodaist sanctuary in the heart of the Vietnamese countryside is extraordinary, and emphasizes the extreme silliness of its philosophy.

(4) Bravely, Noyce includes a scene in which Phuong helps Fowler with his opium pipe. He excluded, however, Fowler's inability to fall asleep without his hand between Phuong's thighs.

(5) Though the scene in which he wins her back in the L'arc en ciel, buying a ticket so he can dance with her and explain their new "arrangement," is beautifully sad, what with Phuong's hapless sister hanging her head when she watches them embrace, knowing there is no longer any hope of making a respectable woman of Phuong.

(6) I heard the late William F. Buckley speak those very words in a debate with Ronald Reagan over the fate of the Panama Canal.

(7) W.H. Auden, "Spain, 1937."

Sight Unsound

In 1962 , Dwight Macdonald - political radical and cultural conservative - was asked to contribute to a poll being conducted by Sight & Sound for, to use their own words, the ten "best films of all time." Macdonald duly submitted his list (1) with the following comment, "What no Chaplin, no Stroheim, no Dovchenko, no Pudovkin, no Clair, no Pabst, no Murnau, no De Sica, no Rossellini, no Visconti, no Fellini, no Ford, no Wellman, no Flaherty? Well, it's your idea." He then wrote a piece for Esquire about the poll, comparing the previous list from 1952 to the results of the 1962 poll (2).

Since I like exercise for its own sake, and since there have been four more Sight & Sound Critics' Polls since Macdonald compared the first two, I will try to bring Macdonald, who has been dead - and sorely missed - since 1982, up to date by examining the polls, their consistencies and inconsistencies. I have expressed my own opinion of such polls elsewhere (3), but there is a mania for them among critics and filmgoers, which is a direct reflection of the absense of serious thinking and discussion about films.

The point of conducting the critics' poll only every ten years is, I suppose, meant to bestow on it some sense of historicality. But by waiting so long between polls, during which time a new generation of critics has appeared with their own pet peeves and axes to grind, not to mention a new generation of filmmakers that has its own ideas about what a film should be, the very notion of consensus is challenged. I am, for one, rather glad that there were no pollsters in the 1940s, '30s and '20s to remind us what a wilderness the film world was before De Sica and Kurosawa, Renoir and Carné, or even before sound was added to sight. Trying to imagine what a 1932 Critics' Poll would have looked like (4), with its purists hanging on tenaciously to the lost art of the silent film, while newcomers dismissed them as prehistoric, is proof of how far film has come in a relatively brief period of time. But even such attempts at comprehensiveness have not prevented the poll from being topical.

In the 1972 poll only five titles survived from the '62 poll: Citizen Kane (#1), Ugetsu (#10), La Regle du Jeu [why the pretense of titles in French but not in Russian or Swedish or Italian?] (#2), Battleship Potemkin (#3) and L'avventura (#5). The rising and falling fortunes of old artists was more to blame than the introduction of new talent. The rest of the list shows the extent to which the reputations of two filmmakers dominated critical thinking then: Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (in the shattered edit, tied for #8) and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (tied for #5) and Wild Strawberries (tied for #10). The dropouts were Greed, Bicycle Thieves, Ivan the Terrible, La terra trema and L'Atalante. (5)

The disappearance of Greed from the poll was encouraging. Stroheim's star would never rise again, not even after the 1999 "restored" version was released to some acclaim. Nor would Visconti's, whose La terra trema was a rather unsettling combination of neo-realism and homoeroticism (Visconti had a predilection for casting catamites in all his films). Ivan the Terrible seems almost sclerotic today. L'Atalante is utterly charming and would reappear in the 1992 poll at #5. Periodically, certain films are re-discovered when restored prints are made available, as with L'Atalante, The Rules of the Game, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vertigo, Sunrise, etc.

Of the new additions in the '72 poll, the most pleasant surprise is Keaton's The General (tied for #8). the realization of Keaton's superiority to Chaplin, even if it does not lessen Chaplin's genius, was one of the most heartening mutations in cinematic taste of the past fifty years. What puzzles me is the rather back-handed tribute paid Ingmar Bergman, whose Wild Strawberries and Persona are considerably overrated. The biggest movement on the '72 poll was the appearance, at #4, of Fellini's 8 1/2.

Not surprisingly, then, by the time the '82 poll appeared, both Bergman films had dropped out, along with Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, although it would reappear in '92 tied for #10. Welles still clung to the cat-bird's seat with his Kane and Ambersons. Between '72 and '82 an unprecedented seven films clung to a place in the polls: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), 8 1/2 (#5), Potemkin (#6), L'avventura and Ambersons (tied for #7) and The General (tied for #10). Three new titles on the '82 poll show the direct impact of the auteur theory: Singin' in the Rain (tied for #3), Vertigo (tied for #7) and The Searchers (tied for #10). That all three are American genre films did not seem to faze the critics who voted for them. The happiest addition was Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (tied, unbelievably, with Singin' in the Rain). None of the films on the list happened to have been made during the intervening ten years, which is a trend that continued through the present 2002 poll.

Five titles survived the next decade for the '92 poll: Kane (#1), Rules (#2), Vertigo (#4), The Searchers (#5) and Potemkin (in a four-way tie for #6). Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc reappeared in the tie for #6, along with L'Atalante, which makes me wonder if the critics were beginning to keep tabs on the old polls. Kurosawa, #3 in '82, is replaced by Ozu's Tokyo Story. Though magnificent, it seems to be the token Japanese title of the decade. The victims of the interim decade were Singin' in the Rain, 8 1/2, L'avventura, Ambersons, and The General. Two new titles to the poll were Ray's Pather Panchali (#6) and Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (#10). The Kubrick film that belongs on the poll is, of course, Dr. Strangelove. But the pseudo-intellectuality of 2001 made the critics seem smarter than they are. The Ray film is obvious lip service, since he died in April of that year.

Having lived with the choices for the latest poll, published in 2002, for seven years, I am as astonished at the persisting critical reason represented by Kane (#1, as usual), Rules (#3), Tokyo Story (#5), Potemkin (tied for #7), and 8 1/2 (tied for #9) as I am at the growing critical aneurism that put Vertigo at #2, The Godfather(s) at #4, 2001 at # 6, and Singin' in the Rain at #9. But where discrimination is most needed, and most to be expected, as when a person involved in the life of international film who has some knowledge of its history and the ability to distinguish between the films that conform to his subjective tastes (gustibus) and those that take powerful exception to them, is called on to submit his list of the Top Ten Films, it is sorely lacking in at least half of those critics consulted by the British Film Institute. But like all the other arts, the talent necessary to make a great film, and to a lesser extent the faculty needed to recognize it, is a matter of only a few. The size of an audience for, say, The Passion of Joan of Arc is miniscule compared to the number of viewers who flock (which best describes it) to see the latest X-Men or Tarantinto film. In fact, to adapt the Matthew Arnold maxim, you can clear a crowd faster with the word "Ozu" than with a firehose. But many critics like to pretend that there is a middle ground on which a popular film can also be deemed art, and that this extremely narrow ground is as broad as the Susquehanna River Valley.

No music critic who is worth reading would argue that Beyoncé is a good singer. No decent food critic would state that pizza is good food. No theater critic worth a damn would claim that Spamalot is a good play. And yet film critics routinely hand out praise for trash like Inglorious Basterds (or is it Basturds?) and The Dark Knight.

While I understand that such things as the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll is compiled from extremely divergent sources, and that de gustibus non est disputandum, I believe there is good reason to question the sanity of a critic who thinks that Touch of Evil and L'Avventura can be mentioned in the same breath. Placing a film like Vertigo or The Searchers alongside The Rules of the Game and Tokyo Story is tantamount to saying that Patricia Highsmith is the equal of William Faulkner or a Japanese manga is comparable to Kawabata.

Singin' in the Rain is a good musical, but it belongs to a genre and is subject to a specialized set of standards that Citizen Kane, obviously, is not. No one would think of judging Seven Samurai according to the quality of its songs or its choreography. And no one would argue, who has any reason at all to argue, that Silk Stockings is a poor musical because its characters and its situations are unbelievable.

So when Sight & Sound persists, as it has for the past sixty years, in proudly publishing the results of its Critics' Poll, with films like 8 1/2 and The Passion of Joan of Arc sticking out between recognizable rubbish like The Godfather(s) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the significance of the poll is seriously compromised, if not nullified.



(1) Macdonald's list: 1. The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith) 2. Intolerance (D.W. Griffith) 3. October (Sergei Eisenstein) 4. Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5. The Gorky Trilogy (Mark Donskoy) 6. The Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) 7. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles) 8. Les Enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné) 9. Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais) 10. L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni. (see http://jdcopp.blogspot.com/2007/12/sight-and-sound-ten-best-films-in.html)
(2) The polls can be viewed here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/.
(3) See http://tangodelviudo.blogspot.com/2008/12/critical-cretinisms-top-tens.html.
(4) If I had been around in '32, and lived in Paris, my list would look like this (in no order): The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), M (Lang), I Was Born, But... (Ozu), The Gold Rush (Chaplin), Potemkin (Eisenstein), L'Age d'Or (Buñuel), Sherlock Jr. (Keaton), The Blue Angel (Sternberg), Le Million (Clair), The Phantom Carriage (Sjöström).
(5) A conspicuous lacuna: from 1952 to 2002, there has never been a film from the French New Wave anywhere near the top ten.

To Put One Brick Upon Another

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.
But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do
Leaves no doubt of it at all.

Philip Larkin, 1951?

Milk

Ever since the release of Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), a biopic has been in the works. At one point, in 1991, Gus Van Sant was set to direct Robin Williams. The project fell through, but the fact that one proposed project after another had fallen through in all the years since is ample evidence of Hollywood's smell for a sure-fire hit as well as its cowardice. Finally, with an air of inevitability, Gus Van Sant's film, Milk (2008), with a new script and star, was released just in time for the California vote on Proposition 8, a California state constitution amendment which reads: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." The release's timing was, however, off. 52.24% of California voters said yes to the proposition, paving the way for future rallies and protests which led all the way up to Oscar Eve, when Sean Penn won for Best Actor.(1) I could see Penn's acceptance speech coming from 6,000 miles away.

The Times of Harvey Milk was an extraordinary documentary that encapsulated a story that might easily have been overlooked by anyone not involved in San Francisco's political scene. Harvey Milk was a gay man who moved to San Francisco from New York to escape a life of constant subterfuge - the life of every gay man living outside a major city. (2) Even in San Francisco, however, gays were subject to harassment from police and straight men, and many of them took to carrying whistles to alert others when they were under attack. Milk managed to organize the residents of the Castro district, where he and other gays were able to live openly. Milk's would have been just another San Francisco anecdote if Dan White, a fellow city supervisor, had not murdered him and the mayor in November 1978 for what appeared to be political reasons, although there were rumors, which will only ever be rumors, that White was in denial of his own gayness.

On his election to City Supervisor in 1977, Milk was quickly pushed into a leading role in the California vote on Proposition 6 which sought to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools. It was part of a broader, national movement, Save Our Children, whose figurehead was Anita Bryant. The proposition was defeated, and it was seen as a victory for Milk and a mandate for further gay rights legislation. Dan White supported Milk in the proposition's defeat, reportedly as a deal that would oblige Milk to support one of White's initiatives to block the moving of a mental hospital into his district. When Milk reneged on his promise, White was outraged, and submitted his resignation to the mayor. When White changed his mind and asked the mayor to return his resignation, the mayor, with Milk's encouragement, refused.

Van Sant gives ample credit to Rob Epstein's documentary in the end credits for Milk. A gay man himself, and a filmmaker who seems to invite controversy, Van Sant was probably attracted as much to Milk's violent death as to his strident sexuality. Milk's sexuality is depicted in the film quite naturally, which is remarkable for a mainstream film. Lately, the presence of straight men in gay roles is a commonplace. Aside from providing producers and audiences with the assurance that there is no untoward gratification going on, the phenomenon has a fetishistic feel to it, providing gay titillation watching them pretend to love men. It is comparable to the titillation some straight men claim to derive from watching women kissing. It would have been far braver, if less titillating, of Van Sant to cast a gay man in the role of Harvey Milk.

One critic, John Podhoretz of the Weekly Standard, complained that the film failed to mention Milk's "polyamorous" affairs in order to placate the same-sex marriage crowd. Some opponents of gay marriage are convinced that, since the male libido is controlled by testosterone,(3) gay men are far more sexually active simply because their partners are under the influence of the same hormone. The "bath houses" where gay men go for gratification, which Milk mentions in the film, have been the subject of heterosexual curiosity, if only because there is no such counterpart in the straight world.

Sean Penn is utterly convincing as Milk, and could, I suppose, be commended for so fearlessly impersonating a gay man, if one believed it requires courage for a straight man to continually kiss someone of the same sex. Evidently, the Academy Awards thought so, in awarding Penn Best Actor. The only other commendable element of the film is its equally fearless re-creation of 1970s America. For quite a few other unsightly reasons, the '70s was a profoundly ugly decade. The clothes, the cars, the hair were merely an outward manifestation of an inward ugliness. Van Sant and his production and costume designers, Bill Groom and Danny Glicker, got it all frighteningly right.

Gay and straight people have always seemed to be living in parallel worlds. Of course, this is only because, heretofore, straight society insisted that it be so. Long before the American military adopted the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, it was an unwritten law for everyone else. By telling the straight world that they exist, gays have always risked backlashes from threatened straights, in defense of such shibboleths as "family values." Over the decades, propositions both for and against co-existence - the simple acceptance of gays living in the same world - come and go. That homosexuals have rights at all is thanks to people like Harvey Milk.

(1) Dustin Lance Black also won for Best Original Screenplay.

(2) In Milk, we first meet Harvey in medias res, picking up a cute man on the stairs of a New York subway.

(3) An average man has forty to sixty times the Testosterone levels of an average woman.

Gerry

Gus Van Sant has always seemed to me a filmmaker who refuses to be taken seriously. His films have either been unbearably pixilated, blatantly commercial or portentously obvious. Gerry (2002), however, is formally exceptional, even if it, too, is ultimately disappointing.

Assuming that they started with a premise, perhaps nothing more than the misadventure of David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian in Rattlesnake Canyon, New Mexico in 1999 (1), Van Sant, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who are credited with the "screenplay", took a camera and crew to Death Valley and Utah (along with a sojourn in Argentina, thanks to a threatened SAG strike, which never materialized) and shot enough footage to illustrate the experience of two men who park their car and go for a hike in street clothes and without provisions (water, a map, a compass, a cellphone) on a "wilderness trail". After a remarkably short period of walking, and after nonchalantly departing from the otherwise well-marked trail, they find that they cannot find their way back to their car. What follows, though predictable (else why come this far?), is curiously absorbing, thanks to Harris Savides' camerawork, partaking of the ordeal like a participant, and because of Van Sant's refusal to indulge in any kind of dramatic emphasis, so that scenes, if one can call them that, occur without any sense of causation or connection.

Van Sant was probably just trying to demonstrate how the dialogue would probably have sounded between the two friends, without trying to use it as a means of our getting closer to them. The result is dire for the film, however. The problem with Gerry is that the characters are not delineated in any way. There is not even an attempt to give them names. Van Sant stated in an interview (2) that either character, or both, could be "Gerry" and that a working title for the film was The Actual Gerry. But to make a strained point, it would have taken very little to give these two men sufficient identity to make them resemble real people. It would also have helped if Damon and Affleck had tried to keep straight faces while delivering some of their purposely nonsensical and bootless dialogue.

Gerry reminded me of the Australian film, Japanese Story (2003), in which two people - a man and a woman - find themselves stuck (literally at one point) together in the Outback. One of them dies, by accident, and the other has to explain how it happened, first to the police, then to the man's bereft family. Whatever the shortcomings of that film, it at least invested the two people with identities, personalities, histories.

Van Sant, who remade Hitchcock's Psycho shot for shot, clearly believes (as Hitchcock himself believed) that as long as a film has formal integrity, other elements like story and character (i.e., "content") are unimportant. (3) The film is certainly formally interesting. It takes liberties with duration that remind me, irresistibly, of Antonioni. In a small way, Gerry could have been the film that Antonioni had made in America, if only the wrong people had not met him at the airport in 1968. (4) There were moments, watching Damon and Affleck walking in or out of the frame of such desolate beauty, that it seemed like glimpsing them on the surface of Mars. (5) Shot in three separate geographical locations, Savides works wonders bringing it all into a harmonious whole. Though time-lapse shots are used too much, who can object to so much throwaway beauty as the frame captures? There is a spectacular shot just after the murder when we see clouds racing away from us with the white ground alternating in shadow and light. The shot is a powerful metaphor of the ordeal that had just ended for one of the men and is just about to end for the other.

In the last scene of the film, Gerry (Matt Damon) is sitting in the back seat of another car, his face showing few traces of his perilous hike but a sunburn and a look of tired shock. He looks around him inside the car and sees a small boy beside him and a man driving the car. The man glances at Gerry in the rear-view mirror - and us, now looking from Gerry's perspective. I felt just like that man, wondering who on earth this Gerry in the back seat could be, no closer to understanding him at the end of the film than I was at the beginning.

(Here is something to ponder: what if neither Gerry was a smoker? What would they have used to make fire?)



(1) The NY Times review of a chronicle of the ordeal can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/07/books/two-went-out-one-came-back.html
(2) The interview: http://splicedwire.com/03features/gvansant.html
(3) The choice of Psycho was not, of course, a coincidence. Hitchcock made it in a hurry and it exposed the ugliness of much of his thinking about people - particularly women.
(4) I mean, of course, the Peploes.
(5) Roger Ebert wrote, with my, for once, full agreement: "We have lost the original eight hours of Greed (1925), Erich von Stroheim's film that ends with its heroes lost in Death Valley, but after seeing Gerry, I think we can call off the search for the missing footage."

Never Trust a Foreigner

A few weeks ago I was in a nearby port city here on my Philippine island, and I was approached by another foreigner, another American in fact, who introduced himself and then set about telling me all the reasons why this country is "crazy". I just stood there and let him have his say, and when he was done, or realized that I had heard enough, he invited me to a local expat hangout where I could regain my sanity and catch up on the generally scabrous adventures of the tiny expat community.


Needless to say, but I didn't take him up on his invitation. Whenever I encounter an expat who insists on pointing out to me how this country cannot get anything right or that it doesn't make any sense, I remind myself of the lines from two American films (both of which were directed by foreigners). The first line is from The Falcon and the Snowman, and is spoken by a Mexican policeman to Sean Penn (as the "Snowman" Daulton Lee) after Penn tells him angrily, upon being interrogated for days and made to wear only his underwear, "You can't do this to me! I'm an American!" To which the Mexican replies dryly, "This is not America." It is a warning not to expect anyone to give a damn what nationality you are.

The second line is from Chinatown, and is spoken to Jack Nicholson (as Jake Gittes) by his partner at the very end of the film when Jake turns to utter some choice words to a corrupt cop: "Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown." It is a reminder to keep one's counsel and to observe the proverb, "a soft answer turneth away wrath".* Or, better still, no answer at all.


*Proberbs, 15:1

Department of Corrections: I was contacted recently by someone eager to point out to me that the titles of two of my posts are inaccurate. "Shouldn't it be three cheers for democracy and three cheers for the Nobel Prize?" he asked ingenuously. It should indeed be three. Except that, in both bases, my subjects were deserving of only two. Thanks, Mr. Helper.