A child is born into a world of phenomena, all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes over the whole, uncountable range. Suddenly, one strikes. Then another. Then another. Why? Moments snap together, like magnets forging a chain of shackles. Why?” -- Equus (1977) United Artists
Equus is art that manages to be about violence without adding to the culture of violence. Neither the Peter Shaffer play nor the 1977 film adaptation by Sidney Lumet are likely to provoke copycats to act out the violence that is the subject of their art. Alan Strang, the boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike, doesn't inspire admiration or contempt, only pity. His cruel attack on demigods of his own creation is a desperate act, performed in the midst of despair and excruciating mental pain.
Alan Strang's parents are unable to explain their son's madness and they're not willing to shoulder any responsibility for Strang. While Shaffer hints at the roles Strang's mother's religiosity and repressed sexuality and his father's hypocrisy may have played in Alan's descent into a secret world, ruled by improbable gods, ultimately, Shaffer lets the parents and society off the hook. The connections are just too complex.
Self-flagellation. Equus (1977) United Artists Peter Firth as Alan Strang
One of the reasons Equus works is that it grounds itself in antiquity and refers to fundamentally important things like the struggle between reason and emotion, the Appollonian versus the Dyonesian in culture. The role of psychiatry in Shaffer's Equus is to civilize the child, to bend the individual's will, even his grasp of reality, to the demands of society, even if the unique and creative individual is destroyed in the process.
Equus distances us from the violence it portrays by beginning and ending with: "Why?"
As a play, Equus naturally involves the viewer as spectator more than participant. And, being a British play by a British playwright, it lacks the cultural references to the Westward Expansion that are so readily available to American artists. But even the film version by American director Sidney Lumet, though it occasionally adopts a subjective point of view and graphically depicts the blinding of the horses, manages balance. It doesn't just dramatize the struggle between nature and civilization -- between what Levi-Strauss called the raw and the cooked -- it honestly wrestles with the dilemma and achieves, if not a solution, at least a resolution to the conflict between freedom and conformity. It wraps the action of the film up in literate and reasonable discourse about a difficult subject. For better or for worse, it is a cerebral film. And it's an honest one, because the author doesn't pretend to answer the unanswerable. He -- and we -- must settle for stasis -- as painful as that may be.
Richard Burton as Martin Dysart Equus (1977) United Artists
Ultimately, of course, it is not Alan Strang but Martin Dysart, the child psychiatrist appointed by a British court to ease Alan's pain -- and the one person in the film who has a moral dilemma -- who ends up in chains.
Account for me, Equus demands.
Dysart can no more account for Equus than I can rule out the possibility that some word of mine, some thought, floating loose in the blogosphere where everything is connected to everything else, will forge the last link in a lethal chain some sad day.
The tide of popular culture turns amazingly fast. The rise of one myth flows in over the ebb of another, wiping out all traces of the receding myth, until that myth returns to lap even farther up the beach than before. So it goes with pop culture versions of the fall of man. They keep coming back.
In the Fifties, the French writer Romain Gary raised the issue of mankind's survival in The Roots of Heaven. Gary's protagonist is Morel, an ordinary French dentist who goes over to the elephants in French Equatorial Africa. Morel is a misanthrope, but Gary, it turns out, is not. The ending of the novel is a tribute to the human spirit. The Fifties were the time of the beat generation, of cool, of jazz, grass, the Korean War, the rise and fall of McCarthy, the presidency of Eisenhower, the post-war boom, the poetry of Patchen and Ginsberg, the death of Robert Capa, the fall of Dien Bien Phu and Brown v. Board of Education.
Just seven years later, Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, Planet of the Apes, contemplated the extinction of mankind and the rise of the ape as the torchbearer of civilization throughout the universe. The Sixties were the time of the hippies, the Cold War ascendent, the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies, the Civil Rights movement, acid and acid rock, the Vietnam War, the fall of Lyndon Johnson and the rise of Nixon. Alan Ginsberg lived to see Chicago cops riot against the sons and daughters of America's middle class who had tuned in, turned on, dropped out and come back swinging against the war and the draft. I was just back from Germany where I had put in my two years as a medic at an Army hospital, getting high and shooting up Thorazine to improve my tan, so I passed on Chicago myself, but I did show my younger brother how to curl up into a ball to protect his nuts when the cops started beating him. I sent him off to Chicago with a bright red bandana to cover his nose and mouth when the tear gas began to fly.
Boulle's Planet of the Apes didn't speculate about the causes of the rise of the apes as the dominant species in the far reaches of the galaxy, or about the extinction of man and the rise of the apes on our own planet. Boulle simply presented the success of ape culture and the failure of mankind as a fact. For some unknown reason, man was just not good enough.
When Twentieth Century Fox produced the film version of Boulle's book, they apparently thought they owed the viewer an explanation. The plot of Planet of the Apes (1968) hangs on a malfunctioning starship that plunges back to Earth instead of landing on a planet at the far end of the galaxy, and on a nuclear war that wipes out the human race, letting apes take over the planet while the starship and its astronauts are gone.
In Fox's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), the human race is wiped out -- probably -- by a virus. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, nobody takes seriously the idea that man will be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. And we're not worried about rogue computers turning on the human race anymore. The peril now is biological. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a virus that makes apes smart enough to talk and to break out of an ape jail in San Francisco is deadly to humans and highly contagious to boot. Good thing for the apes, of course, since, without the intervention of the virus they would have had one good day of beating up on the cops before the bombs started to fall.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 20th Century Fox
The idea that apes can beat up cops is as silly as the notion that hippies can beat up cops. It's just more Hollywood eyewash in the style of the Na'vi beating down the guns and machines of corporate America to liberate Pandora in Fox's Avatar (2009). But there is a strong odor of misanthropy and self-hatred about the idea that resonates with establishment critics like David Denby of The New Yorker.
Here's Denby, waxing poetic over scenes of apes, invading a research facility. "When the apes, like water bursting through a dam, pour through the building's glass walls at different levels," Denby exults, "the image is a pop epiphany of freedom."
Something like ice breaking up and cascading down a raging river as a metaphor for revolution I suppose.
The high water mark is definitely creeping up the sand.
Apparently, somebody convinced Suzanne Collins that the narrative of The Hunger Games, her teeny-bopper dystopian novel, needed some "fixing" for the film version of the book. So Collins, whose millions of avid readers turned out for the opening of TheHunger Games(2012) last weekend, tinkered with the story to explain why the "game maker" -- the fellow charged with making the gladiatorial Hunger Games of a future, Fascist America entertaining and instructive for the survivors of a failed rebellion -- would change the games' rules of engagement on the fly. And she destroyed the focus that was crucial to the success of her novel.
Why Collins would agree to fix something that wasn't broken is a mystery to me. I'm guessing some of the money men and women behind the film were too dull to understand the overarching importance of young love, star-crossed lovers and love triangles to Collins' readers. That a cynical game maker would play up the love angle for a sappy and spoiled audience and then sadistically pull the rug out from under the lovers didn't require any explanation at all. Neither did the fact that the idea of the lovers committing suicide -- the ultimate symbol of rebellion against a dystopia -- would panic the game maker.
Certainly, there is no reason why a film should conform slavishly to the novel it's based on. The novel is one thing and the film quite another. But these are not trivial changes. They go beyond "tweaks." They are irritating shifts in the narrative that complicate rather than clarify the story. They distort the story's point of view and diminish the story's heroine, young Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence.
And Jennifer Lawrence is exactly what The Hunger Games (2012) has going for it. She is immensely likable; someone an audience can care about. She moves well, and her face is large enough and smooth enough for the camera to linger on, to turn into the kind of landscape that's missing from most of the film. Simply put, The Hunger Games doesn't need a single scene that doesn't have Jennifer Lawrence in it.
Jennifer Lawrence, The Hunger Games (2012)
If anybody deserves a poison berry for the The Hunger Games (2012), it's Gary Ross. His direction was even worse than the script. He never found the right mix of action and contemplation to make his film work. Ross never catches the power of nature, violence and unreason that drives the book. What master made the lash, Yeats asked.
Whence had they come, The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
Gary Ross doesn't have a clue.
It's hard to get from a first-person novel to a third-person film. That may explain why the producers of The Hunger Games(2012) ended up with a second-rate director. Maybe the good directors shied away from the script. What Katniss is thinking dominates the book, and, when you take that away, an enormous weight is placed on Lawrence's delivery and body language to communicate what's going on in her mind. In the novel, Katniss Everdeen makes a dangerous passage from a young girl to a woman, from a huntress to a warrior, and, at the end, back to a teenage girl. If The Hunger Games team had pulled that off, they would have had a great movie. All of that teenage energy, confusion and drama, dropped into the middle of gladiatorial training and combat. My god!
It turns out, of course, that a PG-13 rating was more important. The bad news is the team planning the sequel may be just as inept. The producers couldn't get Tony Scott, whose Man On Fire (2004) had exactly what The Hunger Games films so badly need. The buzz is they'll soon sign music video director Francis Lawrence who made I Am Legend (2007), a boring remake of The Omega Man (1971). The one ray of hope is that someone on the project has signaled by dumping Ross that they think there is more at stake here than a massive boxoffice that's already a dead hog cinch. There are moments in popular culture when great myths finally crystalize. Maybe somebody understands that The Hunger Games novels and films could be that kind of moment. It's a damn shame if they're not holding out for a director and writers who are equal to the task.
A long time ago, I figured out the only reason to create anything is that no one else has. The books I want to write are the books I want to read, but nobody has written them yet. The films I want to make are the films I want to see, but nobody has made them yet.
My wife used to drive me crazy by starting to fix films the minute we left the theater. I don't think we've seen more than one or two films over the years she didn't have ideas about ways to make them better. I wrote it off to her politics. Well, hell, I'd say. Go make your own film if you don't like that one. Go make a film that fits your politics or your aesthetics or whatever.
Lately, I've come around to her way of thinking. Why not fix broken films? Why not start with the idea that what's missing in the world is a better version of a film somebody made or a book somebody wrote? Where does it say you have to start from scratch?
Now you take Passion Play (2010), a first film by screenwriter Mitch Glazer, for example. That's a gorgeous little film that never comes together. It has two pretty people: Mickey Rourke all broken down and Megan Fox just coming into womanhood. It has Bill Murray, reprising the gangster he created for Mad Dog and Glory (1993), jazz, the desert, a freak show, LA, a woman with wings. What's not to like? The realization of the script for one thing. And, ironically, the script itself for another.
Rent the movie and come back. We're going to make it clear that for most of the movie Mickey is dying or dead, and that the entire film, from the moment that Mickey is improbably rescued by Native American sharpshooters, takes place on the plane between life and death.
As a comedy writer, Glazer has never had to trouble himself with thoughts about what is real and what is not. In fact, the unexpected is an essential element of comedy. But in a movie that mixes comedy with surrealism, allegory and film noir, keeping things orderly--keeping images, characters and events on their proper plane--is what distinguishes the work of filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman from gutsy but unfinished efforts like Passion Play. The problem with Passion Play is that everything exists on the same plane. The viewer is forced to process everything in the movie--winged women who learn to fly, broken down musicians, miraculous rescues by Native American warriors, ironic dialogue, cool humor, incongruous locations--all on a plane that represents a gritty, slightly droll reality, in spite of the fact that the beat up, beat down, booze and drug-whacked brain of the Mickey Rourke anti-hero who rescues the winged girl and, in turn, is rescued himself, though not redeemed, seems perfect for processing alternate realities.
At the end of the film, Rourke is being transported in the arms of an angel. He looks down and, in a wide shot, sees his dead body, lying in a ravine and his murderer driving away. Glazer intends for us to realize at that moment that the film has been Rourke's experience of his transition from life to death, a dying hallucination that calls to mind the last scenes of Terry Gilliam's brilliant Brazil (1985). What I need right then is a close shot of Rourke's body as he leaves it behind to nail that moment of realization down in memory.
Passion Play (2010), Annapurna Productions and Rebecca Wang Entertainment
Glazer doesn't get close enough to Rourke's dead body to make that scene work. I need to see Rourke's dead face. And it would help to fade out on the Native Americans and fade in on Rourke, walking in the desert, to mark the transition to the dying hallucination earlier in the movie, too. I'd cut the rest of the film in half. (The arbitrary length of "feature" films has done in more than one first film.) I'd get Fox past the idea that she won't be taken seriously as an actress if she does nude scenes. I'm dying and I imagine Fox with her clothes on? Please.
That's the quick fix. A complete makeover of Glazer's beautiful but personal film would require too much work. The problem is that Rourke dies so early in the film that the revelation at the end of the film that the action has taken place on some spiritual plane feels like a clever gimmick. Frankly, I'm not sure I care enough about the Rourke character for it to make a difference to me whether he's dead or not. And does it really matter if the film is taken literally or not? Would anyone care if Glazer left out the shot of Rourke's dead body altogether? Is Passion Play some kind of filmic Book Of The Dead, full of hidden images and code words scholars could spend years discovering?
It could be that the best news about Passion Play is that a film as personal and esoteric as Passion Play can even get produced.
Or maybe it's that Megan Fox can act. I have to wonder how smart Spielberg and Bay feel after seeing Fox in this little film.
The 83rd Academy Award nominations for documentary film were announced last week. Collectively, this year's nominees documented the global financial meltdown, fracking for natural gas, edgy street art, dumpster diving on a massive scale, and war on the ground in Afghanistan.
More than other genres, documentary films tend to be political and, sometimes, combative. It's hard, if not impossible, to separate the importance of what they document from the skill with which they document it. One suspects that Restrepo, an important film that's not particularly well made, is the odds on favorite this year, especially because the first living GI to win the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War fought in the combat operation Restrepo documents. (I jotted down some thoughts about Restrepo earlier this year.) But it's entirely possible that the Academy will decide that the global financial crisis or what natural gas producers are doing to the environment outweighs the war in Afghanistan, or even that the artistry of Waste Land or Exit Through The Gift Shop deserves the Best Documentary award. The Academy often surprises me. Last year, when I commented on Hollywood's Real Glass Ceiling, I was convinced the Academy would hand Kathryn Bigelow the Best Director Oscar, but wouldn't -- couldn't afford to, really -- give the Best Picture award to The Hurt Locker in the face of Avatar's overwhelming box office and the massive build-out in 3D venues that was going on all over the world. The Academy proved me wrong. They showed me they did "have the heart to take on the real world." (Unless, of course, it was those pesky Palestinians who did Avatar in by painting themselves blue in Bil'in -- a case of bad timing for James Cameron.)
Documentary films about current events and living people are very much about timing. In the Sixties, Fred W. Friendly and Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame ran an hour and was considered gutsy journalism. Fifty years later, a CBS follow-up on migrant farm workers merited only 5 minutes of air time.
The September Issue (2009), directed by R.J. Cutler and filmed by Robert Richman, is a documentary film that illustrates the importance of -- and the surreal nature of -- timing. The film is a portrait of Anna Wintour, Vogue's U.S. editor-in-chief, and Grace Coddington, her creative director, shot in the context of the roll-out of Vogue's colossal September 2007 Fall fashion issue.
Vogue Cover, September 2007
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The September Issue is an examination of power and manipulation, and, especially, of power in the hands of a competent and confident woman. Most film portraits of women executives show embattled women, under fire and hanging on by their fingernails. In 2007, Anna Wintour was firmly entrenched and riding the wave of a booming economy and fashion industry. The sub-text of The September Issue is an examination of a successful collaboration, of the way editors and artists work in the real world, and of the way auteurs like Wintour and Coddington make signature art out of the work of creative people. And it is, finally, a comment on relevance, satisfaction, and the underlying insecurity that saps joy from even the most successful celebrities.
Not surprisingly, the live action scenes tell us more about Anna Wintour than she tells us about herself. Her center stage seat at shows and the nervous fawning of the designers she visits deliver a convincing picture of her position atop the world of design in 2007, just before the beginning of the global financial meltdown and the Great Recession.
If the world's business cycle were depicted as a giant rollercoaster, the lift sweeping up to dizzying heights, the first drop plunging down at the steepest angle the human body can tolerate without blacking out, Anna Wintour and Vogue were, in September of 2007, poised on the brink of the fall. The September issue of Vogue, essentially an extravagantly produced catalog of designer clothes and accessories, ran 840 pages. The issue has become a collector's item, selling on ebay for as much as $500 a copy. In 2007, it was a celebration of the fashion industry, a self-congratulatory revel in wealth reminiscent of Versailles with one important difference: the world of fashion and the incomes that sustain it have barely taken a hit from what has been, for the ordinary men and women who used to pick up Vogue on their way out of the supermarket, a devastating recession. To be sure, Vogue's advertising revenues are down from 2007, when one of Vogue's advertisers, Burton Tansky of Neiman Marcus implored Anna Wintour to pressure the designers she had under her thumb to deliver their creations faster. But the drop in ad revenue may be more a reflection of a general feeling of discontent in an industry whose players were personally bilked by money managers than a reflection of specific worries about the global demand for designer clothes or the bang for the buck of advertising dollars. After all, weren't most of those ads in the September issue a display of plumage, a demonstration of the wealth and importance of the advertiser?
Last night, ploughing through a copy of Vogue's September issue I brought home from my public library, I was struck by the fact that I had to wade through 313 pages of ads before I encountered the first snippet of text pretending not to be advertising.
Then, in a typical pop culture collision, I found a Rebecca Johnson profile of Michelle Obama, complete with gorgeous photographs by Annie Leibovitz, sandwiched between a Grace Coddington fashion spread and a charming essay about life at the top of the New York scene in a Greenwich Village townhouse whose decor, according to the article, was inspired by the Barbara Streisand remake of A Star Is Born.
Vogue September 2007, pp 774,775
Photograph: Michelle Obama by Annie Liebovitz
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Was Hillary Clinton not fashionable enough for her party's elite? Is Michelle Obama as perfect as the Vogue interview and Liebovitz photographs make her seem? Or were the images of Michelle Obama manipulated like the images of the models in the Coddington photoshoots with their interchangeable heads, bodies and air-brushed skin, photoshopped to perfection? Did Vogue prepare the small town Iowa battleground for an Obama victory? Did a media empire help bring down Hillary Clinton because she was no longer chic, no longer the face of the future toward which fashion -- at least in the mind of Anna Wintour -- must incline. I suppose that's a stretch, more the stuff of fiction than of some documentary that might have been made. But I think it's self-evident that the Obamas' style is rather neatly tuned to the style of Conde Naste publications like Vogue, The New Yorker and Wired.
Of course, there are no scenes of the Michelle Obama interview in Cutler and Richman's documentary film. Successful politicians learned as far back as the Kennedy era to keep documentary film makers at a distance.
The people who get scrutinized in The September Issue are Wintour and Coddington, and the element of suspense that holds the film together -- even documentaries require some kind of glue -- is Grace Coddington's struggle to get her art, intact, into the issue, even though it is often at odds with Wintour's vision. In the end, Grace gets most of her work in -- at one point she observes that she nearly has the entire issue to herself -- because she can do what artists do: synthesize experience. Everything is grist for Coddington's mill and her imagination, even the documentary film makers themselves. Before the film is over, she has Richman jumping -- if not through hoops -- at least up and down.
Coddington may be the resident genius at Vogue, but she doesn't get the cover. For that job, Wintour brings in Italian photographer Mario Testino. And, to my eye, it is Testino, not Coddington, who, in homage to Fellini, manages to produce the only images that are distinguishable from and rise above the pages and pages of ads.
Vogue September 2007 Photograph by Mario Testino
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The real winner in The September Issue is, of course, Anna Wintour. After living for four years with the rumor -- or the fact -- that she was the inspiration for the The Devil Wears Prada, The September Issue gave Wintour an opportunity of create her own image. She comes across as determined and opinionated, without seeming abusive, a far cry from the editor in The Devil Wears Prada. If anything, Wintour manages, as improbable as it seems, to portray herself as quite vulnerable. She appears to have gotten what she wanted from the film.
The September Issue A&E IndieFilms and Actual Reality Pictures
Not that I'm completely surprised.
Maybe it was the faint scent of expensive perfume still lingering on the pages of my library copy of Vogue or maybe I overdosed on the images of beautiful women, but, watching The September Issue and Anna Wintour, I suddenly remembered filming an interview with Lady Bird Johnson -- a woman I had not thought of as particularly attractive -- at her television station in Austin. After the interview, I rode down in an elevator with her, and I was shocked to find myself suddenly overwhelmed by her perfume, her dark red lipstick, perfect make-up and luxuriant fur coat, her obvious wealth and power. Maybe it was pheromones. I could barely breathe, and, when we got off of the elevator, my hands were shaking and I was feeling weak in the knees.
The September Issue is available from Amazon and Netflix.
