The Boys in the Barn
Despite prefatory titles describing the event that inspired Robinson Devore's Zoo, this murky, muddled effort to spin a documentary from it is so clumsily contrived that it would be surprising if it hadn't gotten into the Sundance Film Festival. In July 2005, a man was "dropped off" at a hospital in Enumclaw, Washington with a perforated sigmoid colon, from which he bled to death. The "friend" who deposited him there had reasons not to stick around.
Subsequent investigation uncovered frequent gatherings at the home of James Tait, a man who owned horses. Tait's immediate neighbors, who also owned horses, were often away, and sometimes boarded their horses in his stable, or Tait would look after the animals in theirs.
These get-togethers of mostly middle-aged men, as re-enacted--much of Zoo consists of "reenactments," in various places weirdly intercut with "real" documentary footage--appear to have been hearty evenings of food (bring a covered dish!), beer, board games, and slushy margaritas: nothing especially kicky, until some or all of the partygoers, equipped with videocameras, imbibed enough slushies to trot the party down to the barn, or the neighbors's barn, or, perhaps, on a busy night, both barns.
Members of Tait's circle had a powerful shared interest, and, thanks to the Internet, had emerged from their lonely isolation and flocked to Washington State to participate in Tait's soirées. They were all just plain horse crazy, to put it bluntly.
If you have ever wished to see a man getting ass-fucked by an Arabian stallion, Zoo won't satisfy your curiosity, though the hundreds of videotapes Tait and his friends shot of each other enjoying this very act are probably circulating all over the world.
Most of the horse molesters chose not to appear on camera, so Devore threads their tape-recorded voices through sequences leading nowhere: shots of empty stables, chiaroscuro clouds in the soggy Northwestern sky, mountains, horses gamboling in fields, the festive party sequence with its colorful blendor churning up green margaritas. Zoo does provide a few scraps of actual documentary information, but Devore sacrifices intelligibility to "atmosphere." It would be hard to characterize this atmosphere. Plangent? Sinister? Elegaic? Idiotically inappropriate?
Sometimes a name, or nickname, appears in the lower right screen against a black frame, ostensibly identifying the voice-over's owner. But the images that follow have no particular relationship to what's being said. One voice segues into a different one without any inserted ID of the new speaker; the general drift of every "real" zoophile's reflections on what is invariably euphemized as "the death" seems to be, We had a sweet thing going up there in Enumclaw until this had to happen.
The Boeing engineer who died from internal injuries inflicted by a horse's penis was known as "Mr. Hands." Like others roped into Tait's circle, "Mr. Hands" was cautiously screened before being admitted, but some claim there was something off about him, something odd. The man who videotaped his fatal equine fling had just finished getting sodomized by the same horse with no injuries or pain, so you just have to wonder if there wasn't something peculiar about "Mr. Hands."
There might just be something equally peculiar about videotaping the agonized-sounding noises "Mr. Hands" makes while getting it up the can from an animal weighing several tons and assuming these are moans of ecstasy, but who can really say? Maybe he liked it "rough": supposedly Catherine the Great did. Different strokes for different folks.
The utterly poisonous folly of this film is its apparent intention to "understand" this surpassingly dreary circus of psychopaths, and its total failure to do so. The only person who voices a sane utterance is, I think, the sister of the incarcerated Tait, though she may be the sister of the man who died, or an animal rescuer--this film is too crapulous to run through it again to see if it even settles that confusion--who found herself legally responsible for two horses quartered in Tait's stable. She was terrified to go into the stable and her husband didn't want to get out of the car. When she encountered Tait's housemate, she says, she immediately felt he had some affect missing, that "he was like a child molester or something." As they were leaving, she saw a young colt amble up to a stallion and commence giving it a blowjob.
Unlike Adi Sideman's superb 1994 documentary Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys, Robinson Devore's insensible collage never scratches the surface of the zoophiles's mentality. They emit the occasional burst of psychobabble, in voices gravid with self-pity, and in one case someone waxes sarcastic about constitutional rights being trampled.
Sideman got the real pedophiles to show themselves, the suburban NAMBLA types inured against shame by decades of polemical rationalization. Rigorously neutral, he simply ran the camera and let them show off their worm-eaten psyches, for example in a scene where two 13-year-olds accept a lift to the local mall from a dumpy middle-aged freako, who later expresses his certainty that one of the boys "was definitely interested".
One early review of Zoo hilariously referred to Devore's "poetic lyricism," which I took to mean that his ostensible subject is so repulsive, moreover something he has so little worth telling us about it, that he's scrambled it into aleatory sequences, cutting away at poetically lyrical interludes to that big wet pretty sky and shots of bucolic scenery to beef up the lugubrious, often ominous background music, and to craft this 75 ¾ minute farrago of horseshit into a creepy sham of profundity.
Devore is inept enough to show us a group of older people, including one woman, watching a horse-fuck video, and although one whitish-haired man in the shot is obviously struggling not to puke, it’s not implausible for a viewer to suppose these people are "zoos," as members of "the zoophile community" refer to themselves in the singular. Any newspaper report on this case identifies them as the frequently absent owners of the abused stallions. These horrified neighbors were obliged to watch the tape to identify the stable in it as theirs--at the time, Washington State had no laws against bestiality, and the only thing Tait could be charged with was trespassing. (He's probably already out, and become some stallion's bitch in one of the 12 remaining states without an anti-bestiality statute.)
The word "community" has become another vapid buzzword intended to give some rhetorical weight to the lumping together of people with similar problems, fetishes, tastes, and manias. It's misleading enough when applied to oppressed minority people: "the black community," "the gay community," etc., and ludicrous when subcultures of mentally disturbed individuals begin applying it to themselves.
Of course a horse becomes sexually stimulated if you habitually stroke its genitals, and so does a 12 year old boy. Two horses that want to screw, or two 12 year old boys who want to fool around, aren't exploiting, or being exploited by, anybody. While the age of consent itself varies from state to state, and seems most arbitrary and unjust when consensual sex occurs between someone slightly below and someone slightly above the statutory age, the wider the age gap between an adolescent and an adult, the likelier it seems that the older person may use fine-honed, subtly coercive techniques to get sex from a boy or girl too young to know what he or she is getting into.
Even in this case, where zoophiles apparently took the passive role in intercourse with horses, the horses's sexual instincts aren't mediated through any process one could remotely describe as "informed consent." In Zoo, the filmmaker seems inclined to agree with an audio snippet from Rush Limbaugh's radio program, when we hear the host's porcine, "isn't this ridiculous" blabber on the Enumclaw incident: "How do they know the horse didn't consent? If this could happen, doesn't that mean the horse consented?"
How do you know when somebody's addicted to oxycontin? Empirical observation. Horses and other animals can be trained to respond sexually to human beings. They also have the mental capacity of retarded children and no voices with which to give testimony in a courtroom. That no physical harm was done to the animals, and presumably no psychological trauma either, is irrelevant: "the zoophile community" certainly doesn't limit its appetites to creatures larger and stronger than themselves, and anything smaller than a large dog will most certainly be physically harmed or killed when raped by a human being. Horses lovingly cared for as horses indeed welcome affectionate attention from people, but to train them to be used as sex toys requires a fair amount of calculated manipulation. If the Enumclaw coven favored the passive role--and they did use straps and restraining devices to leverage the animals onto their hind legs and keep their body weight off the bent-forward "zoo," ensuring the "consent" of the choiceless animals--it's probably because if they tried it the other way the horses might kick them into kingdom come.
A good documentary could be made on this subject, one that didn't start from the premise that there was something tragic about the death of "Mr. Hands." King Lear is a tragedy. Getting your colon punctured after coaxing an Arabian stallion to bugger you is a comedy. A black comedy, but a comedy all the same.
The truly awful, glancingly referenced consequence of human odiousness towards other animals is an insensible reassertion of human ownership of all things bright and beautiful, animal and vegetable, ditto mineral: the stallion the Enumclaw coven used for stud, it seems, was “protected” against future incidents of this kind by surgical gelding. Ergo, instead of lopping off James Tait’s outdoor plumbing—a much more efficacious way to nip a few future episodes of equine jiggy-jiggy in the bud, really, than imagining that the same horse will run afoul of other, insatiable human anuses. Tait is, if you want to look at it like this, human, spawn of the same chordata phylum as the rest of us. But then, so is the horse.
What, or who, to deprive of reproductive rights? In the case of the Enumclaw stallion, unless Mr. Hands or his cohort gave the animal herpes, there’s no lucid reason to neutralize his imperative to breed. But since the guilty party and its guests were at the time beyond the law, American justice (catchy phrase, means nothing), and “human nature,” just naturally chose the worst possible redress, by punishing the victim. And the horse really was the victim: it wasn’t his idea to cornhole Mr. Hands, quite the contrary. Devore’s Zoo doesn’t waste a breath on the horse’s welfare, devoting itself instead to zoophiliac effusions of something to which “lower” animals are incapable of stooping: self-pity. Whomever it was who proclaimed that "nothing human is alien to me," by the way, was really full of shit.
___________________________________________________________________Despite prefatory titles describing the event that inspired Robinson Devore's Zoo, this murky, muddled effort to spin a documentary from it is so clumsily contrived that it would be surprising if it hadn't gotten into the Sundance Film Festival. In July 2005, a man was "dropped off" at a hospital in Enumclaw, Washington with a perforated sigmoid colon, from which he bled to death. The "friend" who deposited him there had reasons not to stick around.
Subsequent investigation uncovered frequent gatherings at the home of James Tait, a man who owned horses. Tait's immediate neighbors, who also owned horses, were often away, and sometimes boarded their horses in his stable, or Tait would look after the animals in theirs.
These get-togethers of mostly middle-aged men, as re-enacted--much of Zoo consists of "reenactments," in various places weirdly intercut with "real" documentary footage--appear to have been hearty evenings of food (bring a covered dish!), beer, board games, and slushy margaritas: nothing especially kicky, until some or all of the partygoers, equipped with videocameras, imbibed enough slushies to trot the party down to the barn, or the neighbors's barn, or, perhaps, on a busy night, both barns.
Members of Tait's circle had a powerful shared interest, and, thanks to the Internet, had emerged from their lonely isolation and flocked to Washington State to participate in Tait's soirées. They were all just plain horse crazy, to put it bluntly.
If you have ever wished to see a man getting ass-fucked by an Arabian stallion, Zoo won't satisfy your curiosity, though the hundreds of videotapes Tait and his friends shot of each other enjoying this very act are probably circulating all over the world.
Most of the horse molesters chose not to appear on camera, so Devore threads their tape-recorded voices through sequences leading nowhere: shots of empty stables, chiaroscuro clouds in the soggy Northwestern sky, mountains, horses gamboling in fields, the festive party sequence with its colorful blendor churning up green margaritas. Zoo does provide a few scraps of actual documentary information, but Devore sacrifices intelligibility to "atmosphere." It would be hard to characterize this atmosphere. Plangent? Sinister? Elegaic? Idiotically inappropriate?
Sometimes a name, or nickname, appears in the lower right screen against a black frame, ostensibly identifying the voice-over's owner. But the images that follow have no particular relationship to what's being said. One voice segues into a different one without any inserted ID of the new speaker; the general drift of every "real" zoophile's reflections on what is invariably euphemized as "the death" seems to be, We had a sweet thing going up there in Enumclaw until this had to happen.
The Boeing engineer who died from internal injuries inflicted by a horse's penis was known as "Mr. Hands." Like others roped into Tait's circle, "Mr. Hands" was cautiously screened before being admitted, but some claim there was something off about him, something odd. The man who videotaped his fatal equine fling had just finished getting sodomized by the same horse with no injuries or pain, so you just have to wonder if there wasn't something peculiar about "Mr. Hands."
There might just be something equally peculiar about videotaping the agonized-sounding noises "Mr. Hands" makes while getting it up the can from an animal weighing several tons and assuming these are moans of ecstasy, but who can really say? Maybe he liked it "rough": supposedly Catherine the Great did. Different strokes for different folks.
The utterly poisonous folly of this film is its apparent intention to "understand" this surpassingly dreary circus of psychopaths, and its total failure to do so. The only person who voices a sane utterance is, I think, the sister of the incarcerated Tait, though she may be the sister of the man who died, or an animal rescuer--this film is too crapulous to run through it again to see if it even settles that confusion--who found herself legally responsible for two horses quartered in Tait's stable. She was terrified to go into the stable and her husband didn't want to get out of the car. When she encountered Tait's housemate, she says, she immediately felt he had some affect missing, that "he was like a child molester or something." As they were leaving, she saw a young colt amble up to a stallion and commence giving it a blowjob.
Unlike Adi Sideman's superb 1994 documentary Chicken Hawk: Men Who Love Boys, Robinson Devore's insensible collage never scratches the surface of the zoophiles's mentality. They emit the occasional burst of psychobabble, in voices gravid with self-pity, and in one case someone waxes sarcastic about constitutional rights being trampled.
Sideman got the real pedophiles to show themselves, the suburban NAMBLA types inured against shame by decades of polemical rationalization. Rigorously neutral, he simply ran the camera and let them show off their worm-eaten psyches, for example in a scene where two 13-year-olds accept a lift to the local mall from a dumpy middle-aged freako, who later expresses his certainty that one of the boys "was definitely interested".
One early review of Zoo hilariously referred to Devore's "poetic lyricism," which I took to mean that his ostensible subject is so repulsive, moreover something he has so little worth telling us about it, that he's scrambled it into aleatory sequences, cutting away at poetically lyrical interludes to that big wet pretty sky and shots of bucolic scenery to beef up the lugubrious, often ominous background music, and to craft this 75 ¾ minute farrago of horseshit into a creepy sham of profundity.
Devore is inept enough to show us a group of older people, including one woman, watching a horse-fuck video, and although one whitish-haired man in the shot is obviously struggling not to puke, it’s not implausible for a viewer to suppose these people are "zoos," as members of "the zoophile community" refer to themselves in the singular. Any newspaper report on this case identifies them as the frequently absent owners of the abused stallions. These horrified neighbors were obliged to watch the tape to identify the stable in it as theirs--at the time, Washington State had no laws against bestiality, and the only thing Tait could be charged with was trespassing. (He's probably already out, and become some stallion's bitch in one of the 12 remaining states without an anti-bestiality statute.)
The word "community" has become another vapid buzzword intended to give some rhetorical weight to the lumping together of people with similar problems, fetishes, tastes, and manias. It's misleading enough when applied to oppressed minority people: "the black community," "the gay community," etc., and ludicrous when subcultures of mentally disturbed individuals begin applying it to themselves.
Of course a horse becomes sexually stimulated if you habitually stroke its genitals, and so does a 12 year old boy. Two horses that want to screw, or two 12 year old boys who want to fool around, aren't exploiting, or being exploited by, anybody. While the age of consent itself varies from state to state, and seems most arbitrary and unjust when consensual sex occurs between someone slightly below and someone slightly above the statutory age, the wider the age gap between an adolescent and an adult, the likelier it seems that the older person may use fine-honed, subtly coercive techniques to get sex from a boy or girl too young to know what he or she is getting into.
Even in this case, where zoophiles apparently took the passive role in intercourse with horses, the horses's sexual instincts aren't mediated through any process one could remotely describe as "informed consent." In Zoo, the filmmaker seems inclined to agree with an audio snippet from Rush Limbaugh's radio program, when we hear the host's porcine, "isn't this ridiculous" blabber on the Enumclaw incident: "How do they know the horse didn't consent? If this could happen, doesn't that mean the horse consented?"
How do you know when somebody's addicted to oxycontin? Empirical observation. Horses and other animals can be trained to respond sexually to human beings. They also have the mental capacity of retarded children and no voices with which to give testimony in a courtroom. That no physical harm was done to the animals, and presumably no psychological trauma either, is irrelevant: "the zoophile community" certainly doesn't limit its appetites to creatures larger and stronger than themselves, and anything smaller than a large dog will most certainly be physically harmed or killed when raped by a human being. Horses lovingly cared for as horses indeed welcome affectionate attention from people, but to train them to be used as sex toys requires a fair amount of calculated manipulation. If the Enumclaw coven favored the passive role--and they did use straps and restraining devices to leverage the animals onto their hind legs and keep their body weight off the bent-forward "zoo," ensuring the "consent" of the choiceless animals--it's probably because if they tried it the other way the horses might kick them into kingdom come.
A good documentary could be made on this subject, one that didn't start from the premise that there was something tragic about the death of "Mr. Hands." King Lear is a tragedy. Getting your colon punctured after coaxing an Arabian stallion to bugger you is a comedy. A black comedy, but a comedy all the same.
The truly awful, glancingly referenced consequence of human odiousness towards other animals is an insensible reassertion of human ownership of all things bright and beautiful, animal and vegetable, ditto mineral: the stallion the Enumclaw coven used for stud, it seems, was “protected” against future incidents of this kind by surgical gelding. Ergo, instead of lopping off James Tait’s outdoor plumbing—a much more efficacious way to nip a few future episodes of equine jiggy-jiggy in the bud, really, than imagining that the same horse will run afoul of other, insatiable human anuses. Tait is, if you want to look at it like this, human, spawn of the same chordata phylum as the rest of us. But then, so is the horse.
What, or who, to deprive of reproductive rights? In the case of the Enumclaw stallion, unless Mr. Hands or his cohort gave the animal herpes, there’s no lucid reason to neutralize his imperative to breed. But since the guilty party and its guests were at the time beyond the law, American justice (catchy phrase, means nothing), and “human nature,” just naturally chose the worst possible redress, by punishing the victim. And the horse really was the victim: it wasn’t his idea to cornhole Mr. Hands, quite the contrary. Devore’s Zoo doesn’t waste a breath on the horse’s welfare, devoting itself instead to zoophiliac effusions of something to which “lower” animals are incapable of stooping: self-pity. Whomever it was who proclaimed that "nothing human is alien to me," by the way, was really full of shit.
Patricia Highsmith: American Dostoevsky
Among the myriad appalling high points of Andrew Wilson’s “Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith” is the news that its subject regularly smuggled her pet snails back and forth between England and France by attaching them to her breasts. It is somehow a perfect image of Highsmith, who even in her rather stunning youth nurtured a dark and slimy view of the human condition, and especially of herself, yet managed to give this perspective a twist of Nietzschean triumph—akin, one could say, to getting the snails through customs.
Wilson’s book is a tour de force, an account so generous and prescient that Highsmith seems to step from its pages like a hologram, in all her contradictory glory. The element of nasty surprise so typical of Highsmith’s novels and stories is abundant in her life: We learn, for example, that her mother, who divorced her father shortly before her birth, tried to abort her by swallowing turpentine. Years later, Mary Highsmith would often tell her Sunday-¬painter daughter, “Isn’t it funny that you adore the smell of turpentine?”
Wilson has drawn on several decades’ worth of intimate journals Highsmith kept throughout her life, cahiers, which contained very close descriptions of friends and lovers as well as outlines of her fiction, produced at an astonishing rate even in the most psychologically horrible and physically peripatetic circumstances. He has also tracked down nearly everyone who ever breathed on Highsmith and come away with a stupendous trove of anecdotal material. The result is a rich tapestry of interwoven social worlds and an astute chronological explication of how a life was transformed into art.
Highsmith’s work was her life to a more marked degree than is often the case: She felt dead when she ¬didn’t work, and despite a prodigious sexual appetite and compulsive bonding to women who were, like her mother, cold, withholding and disapproving, Highsmith maintained, most of the time, a staggering daily page cou and an unflagging appetite for literary labor.
This biography makes a solid case for Highsmith’s importance even as it charts the rather grim trajectory of her life, from youthful beauty who dated the teenage Judy Holliday to depressed, alcoholic curmudgeon who would, in her cups, pour out her loathing of Jews, black and Puerto Ricans. What is clear, and constant, in a life incessant shifting of houses and countries and lovers the steady, Germanic discipline of the written word.
Wilson ties the theme of shifting identity found most of Highsmith’s books to Dostoevsky, Camus a Sartre. And properly so. There is no doubt that Highsmith wrestled with philosophical questions rather ali to genre fiction and that she worked very complex ideas about the nature of consciousness into the texture of narratives of action. In a Highsmith novel, the question guilt can arise even in the absence of a crime and yet to materialize in the brain of a murderer. Nothing is portrayed in terms of conventional morality; Highsmith’s the world of overturned values and metaphysical emptiness the existentialists discovered side this one. As Wilson sho Highsmith’s flat, unexcited, fact style leads the reader into sympathy with “abnormal” psychological states, which are described in the same limpid way as the furnishing of a room.
From Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
She traced her fascination with duality and ambiguity back to her own childhood, acknowledging that the strands of love and hate which were woven through her character had their roots in her early relationship with her parents. Yet she knew that such dark, murky territory was a fertile breeding ground for her fiction. “Out of this, I shall create, discover, invent, prove and reveal,” she said. . . .
Rejection was something all aspiring writers must face as a reality of the profession, she said. “These little setbacks, amounting sometimes to thousands of dollars’ worth of time wasted, writers must learn to take like Spartans. A brief curse, perhaps, then tighten the belt a notch and on to something new—of course with enthusiasm, courage and optimism, because without these three elements, you cannot produce anything good.”
In her Ripley novels especially Highsmith plunges us into schizophrenic perceptions of someone who is and isn’t there, wh adaptivity is that of a sociopath predator, at the same time someone who acquires the trappings educated aspect of culture, dabbles in the arts and really kills people when he absolutely must—but he enjoys it, whooping with laughter in the process. Highsmith said that the Ripley novel “wrote itself,” that felt she was taking dictation the character. Several of Wilson sources told him that Highsmith was rather like Ripley, strangely off from others, that she had really lived in the world since the 1950s but inhabited, instead, imaginary space of her fiction.
Whatever the case, Highsmith’s habit of forcing readers into complicity and identification with a criminal or disturbed mind did not win her much of a following in America, land of happy endings and neat resolutions. One could make the case that her unpopularity may have been in direct proportion to the accuracy of her map of the national psyche. It seems also that in the late 1950s, and for much of the ’60s, even pedestrian suspense fiction hit a big slump in the United States. Highsmith’s early success with her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” and her submerged notoriety as “Claire Morgan,” author of the lesbian classic “The Price of Salt,” ¬didn’t translate into mass appeal with subsequent works like “The Blunderer” and “Deep Water.” While certain books, notably “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” did garner serious critical attention, Highsmith’s U.S. sales were never particularly encouraging.
Highsmith’s unusual use of an established genre to express things more typically found in “quality” literature was recognized and lauded early in Europe, however, where she in any case preferred to live; Wilson draws on a chorus of Highsmith’s American editors to demonstrate that, depressingly, even near the end of her life, publishers here routinely rejected her work for its lack of sales potential and often enough out of discomfort with its “amorality” or lack of easy categorization. But the French, Germans, Swiss and Italians loved the odd hybridity of her narratives, as did—equivocally—the British.
In her journal she wrote, “There is no moral to my life—I have none—except: ‘Stand up and take it.’ The rest is sentiment.” This embattled stance owed much to her rejection by her native country but even more to her rejection by her mother, a commercial artist whose competitive instincts once led her to impersonate her daughter for a bevy of London journalists. Mary Highsmith’s intolerance of Patricia’s lesbianism was a hands-¬on matter, involving undermining phone calls and letters to Highsmith’s various lovers, as well as the most destructive imaginable communications to Highsmith herself.
Highsmith’s journals often reflected the fear that she was in love with her mother. (It seems, too, that during the one period when she got to know her real father, he attempted to molest her.) Her pattern was set early. By the time she became a student at Barnard she had had numerous crushes and semi-¬affairs with other girls; in college she was introduced to the Village constellation of lesbian bars and restaurants and tapped into an “underworld” that eventually extended to Fire Island’s Cherry Grove; Provincetown, Mass., and Paris.
In those years of subterfuge and disguise, a nomadic existence ¬wasn’t unusual for gays of either sex “in the arts”—the scene was forever shifting, from Taxco to Tangiers to scattered points in between. Highsmith’s own sense that she belonged in Europe proved sound, while her selection of lovers proved personally disastrous. However, Wilson’s book makes clear that the symbiotic fuel for Highsmith’s work was a quirky blend of enthrallment and disillusion, frustration at the actual, intoxication with the ideal: The constant change of scenery provided the intriguing backdrops of her narratives, while her serial embroilment with unsatisfactory and feckless lovers furnished her with the psychological dislocations she installed in the heads of her characters.
Wilson’s book is staggeringly well researched, and his account of Highsmith’s literary and philosophical influences (from the obvious Poe to the far less obvious Karl Mannheim and the French American novelist Julian Green), the random sights and encounters that inspired various plots and characters, as well as his discussion of her individual works, their weaknesses and strengths, are marvelously insightful and beautifully worked into one another. This is the best kind of literary biography, doing honor to its subject and all her warts, exactly as Highsmith would have wished.
Marijane Meaker’s “Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s” is a miniature, a semi-¬affectionate but dry and finally ashen portrait of a love affair. A compressed and crisply written book, it reveals at a more intimate angle Highsmith’s stormy relations with her mother, her wanderlust, her drinking problem, her rigid and consuming relationship to work; it’s a picture of Highsmith in her brash youth, driven, insecure, charismatic, bewilderingly attached to repulsive prejudices as well as contradictory liberal ideas.
Meaker paints a lively, if faintly bleak, picture of lesbian bars, Manhattan cocktail parties, summer houses on Fire Island and an idyll in Bucks County, Pa., that quickly turns troublesome, fraught with petty tensions and the homophobia of neighbors. Within these settings, Highsmith appears a stolid yet mercurial figure, painfully shy but obdurate in her habits, her tastes, alternately vulnerable and imperious. Highsmith was already a legend in the demimonde when Meaker became her girlfriend, and the author is, for much of the book, defensively intimidated, irrationally smitten, possessive, suspicious and to some extent naive, as anyone who thinks every new love is “forever” is naive. Highsmith and Meaker were in love in the worst way: It seems they both ignored certain provocations built into their liaison, notably Highsmith’s simmering desire to return to Europe. Meaker, for reasons never fully explained, had an aversion to going there with her. The relationship begins to fall apart when Meaker sneaks a look at Highsmith’s journal and misreads the word “hitch” as “bitch,” thinking it refers to herself; but Highsmith’s restlessness is a major issue from the beginning, and it’s clear she is sacrificing something essential to stay in the relationship.
In the book’s closing section, Meaker and Highsmith meet again after decades, when Highsmith’s drinking, and her fondness for anti-¬Semitic blather, are depressingly out of control. One gets the feeling that Highsmith was a different person for different people and may have been bent on leaving a lousy impression with anyone from the past who might presume to judge her. She may have “believed” her most rancid utterances at the time, but as Wilson demonstrates in “Beautiful Shadow,” Highsmith was many people, as most novelists are. At least a few of them probably “believed” the exact opposite. Duality was, after all, Highsmith’s métier. Everything considered, despite the somewhat heavy-¬handed epilogue, Meaker’s account is tough-¬minded but finally generous to a woman who could, in her worst moments, be almost as monstrous as any of her fictional characters.
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The Clatter of Dropping Names
In “Wayward Puritans,” sociologist Kai T. Erikson, citing Emile Durkheim’s “The Division of Labor in Society,” suggests that “crime . . . may actually perform a needed service to society by drawing people together in a common posture of anger and indignation.” Erikson goes on to say that “people who live together in communities cannot relate to one another in any coherent way or even acquire a sense of their own stature as group members unless they learn something about the boundaries of the territory they occupy in social space. . . .”
Dominick Dunne’s Another City, Not My Own, which might be described as a screed in the guise of a memoir advertised as a novel, illustrates these ideas to the virtual exclusion of any others. Despite the title’s shrugging demur, Dunne’s book is designed, precisely, to stake a proprietary claim on the city in question—not all of Los Angeles, with its jumbled demographics, but the city of Beverly Hills—by incarnating its moral aporias: He will be its voice of Christian witness in the slough of despond, flog its miscreants and succor their victims, draw the community together in a common posture of anger and indignation.
Indignation is Dunne’s forte. As a trial reporter for Vanity Fair, Dunne has for years purveyed the same demagogic “common sense” that talk TV impresarios share with their highly flammable viewers when pondering repellent concepts such as defendants’ rights, innocent-¬until-¬proven-¬guilty and other constitutional protections that extend (what better proof of our justice system’s evil?) to the culpable and the blameless alike. As the parent of a murdered child, Dunne has come to imagine himself an infallible expert on the dimensions of other people’s guilt, whoever they may be and however complex their motivations might appear to more fallible minds. Various merchants of twaddle have ratified this delusion; Dunne has made a fortune off the cable chitchat circuit, where he can be found most any evening, nattering through his dentures about O.J. Simpson minutiae.
In Another City, Not My Own, Dunne carries his loathing of Simpson into surrealistic realms. Dunne isn’t much of a writer, but he can sink his teeth into received ideas and run with them all the way to the bank. He is said to be a charming person, at least where flattery will get you anywhere, and recording the obvious for a mass readership is considered some kind of massive accomplishment. With O.J. Simpson, Dunne has finally hit the jackpot: he’s become, as the phrase goes, a credit to his race.
If the freed O.J. quite sensibly disguises himself to dine in a restaurant and take in a movie, Dunne, in tones worthy of Cotton Mather, wants to know what kind of man puts on a disguise to eat in a restaurant. If the film is “Showgirls,” the question becomes, what kind of man just acquitted on a murder charge goes to see “Showgirls”? Such questions invite us to infer Dunne’s nobility from the fact of O.J.’s supposed depravity. Dunne takes it for granted that Simpson is mocking all decency, even taunting Dunne personally, by showing his disguised face in public, or for that matter by continuing to live. Worse, Dunne offers the “Showgirls” story (evidently apocryphal) as proof that all Simpson ever thinks about are white women with big breasts. It’s the kind of inference that allows people like Dunne to exhibit their racism without getting accused of it. Of course, he did cite the profligate spending habits of the Menendez brothers after their parents’ murders, too—well, two Cubans on a spree, you figure it out.
Dunne’s continual derision of Simpson has something wildly distasteful about it, a disproportion one can easily separate from the issue of whether or not he was guilty. This may be related to the actual community that Dunne’s anger and indignation are intended to define and the stature Dunne awards himself in it. On one hand, we have the Hollywood royalty with whom Dunne spends his evenings, socialites and movie stars who live in unimaginable opulence and receive Dunne’s reports over dessert as if hearing delicious news from a distant planet; then there are the little people, out there, who scrimp and save week after week to buy the next issue of Vanity Fair, for a glimpse of that special magic only their little Nicky can give them...those piquant nobodies thrust into the limelight by their proximity to the Goldman and Brown murders—some of whom, by virtue of believing Simpson guilty, can be socially assimilated, at least for the duration of their celebrity, into the other, more exalted realm where Dunne, like Capote with his pet Kansans, serves as the liaison between castes.
Dunne declares the Simpson trial “the Dreyfus case of our time,” but fails to remember that the Dreyfus case was about the anti-¬Semitic persecution of an innocent man whom enlightened people sought to exonerate. A rather different quality of interest obtains among Dunne’s intimates, who chortle and gloat over each piece of damning evidence and swap rumors about O.J.’s sex life, falling silent whenever a black person enters the room. Though Dunne boldly vows never to forget Ron and Nicole, precious little is said about either, except as salacious or homiletic asides.
The ugliest aspect of the Simpson trial is that it provided a large number of mediocrities and gargoyles a two-¬year shot at national attention; it cemented “punditry” as the television version of thought. Dunne has located his natural constituency in this bilaterally repulsive affair among those who believe Simpson guilty. He finds much to admire about a vapid opportunist like Faye Resnick, Nicole’s chum, and worlds of depth in Nicole Brown Simpson’s parasitic siblings, who learned how to whine on cue within hours of the crime, but not an iota of interiority for his book’s villain. Not for Dunne the tortuous psychology of a Dostoevsky or a Dreiser, authors who clearly failed to understand that a murderer is a murderer, period, and what you do with a murderer is lock him up and throw away the key and that’s that. In the bad old days, novels tried to imaginatively understand the worlds they were set in; some even went so far as to speculate that a killer could be someone very much like you and me on the worst night of his or her life. But those were the bad old days of complexity, before word processing enabled any catamite or gigolo to write a “novel.”
Dunne “novelizes” his Vanity Fair ruminations and their outtakes in this book by changing his name to Gus Bailey. He likewise changes the names of his children, his ex-wife, his brother and his sister-¬in-¬law. Otherwise, Another City, Not My Own is a documentary collage of Dunne’s actual real-life phone calls, courthouse banter, hotel garage repartée, restaurant badinage and party talk, a gurgling mess of repetitious and numbingly banal opinions, ludicrous dialogue deployed as exposition (“ ‘Your Majesty,’ said Gus, giving the little bob of the head that is a requirement when meeting royalty. ‘Whenever I see you on television or read about you in the papers, I always remember that wonderful night at the palace where you had several of the journalists who were waiting to get into Baghdad . . .’ ” and so forth), awash in proper names, most of them famous, their owners clamoring for “Gus” to attend their charity events and dinner parties, where they beg him for saucy dish on the Simpson case. Nothing you haven’t already heard, but “Gus” gushes familiar claptrap with the entranced, oracular fixity that Truman Capote used to display when drawling an especially vicious whopper.
“Gus” immediately bonds with strangers who announce their hatred of O.J. and agree with “Gus” “one hundred percent” about Simpson’s guilt and the disgraceful shenanigans of Simpson’s attorneys. “Gus” shares many a wry moment with tiresome prosecutor Marcia Clark and dreary Kim Goldman, sister of murdered Ron, who think he’s the cat’s whiskers.
Movie stars, high-¬powered producers, Queen Noor al Hussein, Nancy Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor and—inevitably—Princess Diana can’t get enough of “Gus’s” tart remarks. Even at smallish Beverly Hills dinners thrown by Ray Stark or Betsy Bloomingdale, his hosts implore him to rise from his place setting and waddle about the room, holding forth about the trial. This invitation is one the incontinent “Gus” never resists, often causing friction between his super-¬rich chums and their lovable, ignorant-about-¬O.J. black retainers. (Racial implications of the Simpson case, in Dunne’s little cosmos, are limited to staff shortages on the Westside following Simpson’s acquittal.)
When he isn’t trampling through the vintage where the grapes of wrath stored, Dunne’s alter ego is busy, Proust-like, pirouetting down memory lane, recalling the plummy days of Old Hollywood.
“Gus,” then a movie producer, threw fabulous parties with his wife, “Peach.” That career went down the tubes, it seems because of drink, and marital problems, and Peach’s MS, and then the murder of their daughter. The opportunities for name-¬dropping here are myriad, and Dunne eschews none of them. (“ ‘Do I know Gore? When I was twenty years old, I met Anais Nin in Gore’s house in Guatemala, and she took me away with her to Acapulco. That’s that!’ said Gus.”)
Dunne’s intoxication with celebrity amounts to an infectious illness. Court TV’s Dan Abrams practically creams in his boxers when Dunne introduces him to Madonna. “Pretty ritzy, Gus,” teases Marcia Clark early on, admiring Dunne’s social savvy. “You don’t seem intimidated by all of these movie moguls.” Maybe not, but Dunne will twist his narrative into a pretzel rather than leave a name undropped, a famous arse unkissed.
By the middle of his book, in fact, Dunne has scattered around so many big names, from Sinatra to King Hussein, to such puny effect that one begins to suspect an incipient effort of satire, especially since neither “Gus” nor his stellar connections ever utter anything original or amusing but instead, produce the same leaden cliches babbled repeatedly during the Simpson trial. It’s possible, I suppose, that Dunne’s intention is to paint “Gus” as a Nabokovian sort of obsessed lunatic, patronized by the bored well-¬to-¬do because he’ll perform after dinner and save them the price of a mariachi band, but somehow I doubt it. Dunne is earnestly, genuinely besotted by fame and his proximity thereto—so much so that, in a final macabre act of social climbing, he has himself killed off by Andrew Cunanan, killer of Gianni Versace. (The deeper psychiatric significance of this suicide-¬by-¬fiction can be found, perhaps, “somewhere in the world of Faye Resnick,” where various commentators enjoyed locating the origins of spurious information, but it’s pretty carefully dissembled here.)
It’s bewildering, and sad, that Dunne-¬as-¬Gus writes off his entire producing career as a failure, alluding to it in the most melancholy, self-¬pitying terms. As it happens, Dunne produced some excellent films that still enjoy cult status, including “Play It as It Lays,” “Panic in Needle Park,” “The Boys in the Band,” and “Ash Wednesday.” What becomes more apparent with each mawkish reprise of Dunne’s résumé, however, is that artistic achievement has little weight with Gus/Dunne. In the high-¬rolling world he aspires to, where he knows “the kind of people who said, ‘We’ll send our plane’ when they invited him for weekends,” commercial success and a broad, undiscriminating audience are much, much better than art. If you have enough fans, it ¬doesn’t matter a toss if your “reportage was rebuked in certain quarters of both the journalistic and the legal professions” or if you write the sort of cheesy novels people skim on airplanes. “Walk down Madison Avenue with me,” Gus challenges his rebukers, “and see for yourself how often I am stopped by total strangers.” It’s an invitation any well-¬televised face could issue just as easily, from Charles Manson to Imelda Marcos, but a silly way for a writer to measure his worth.
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Barbet and Koko: An Equivocal Love Affair
Barbet Schroeder is a director who prefers the appellation “explorer” to that of “auteur,” and again and again his films demonstrate both his intense curiosity about the unexplored and his willingness to allow material he discovers to speak for itself, leaving the viewer to draw whatever inferences this material suggests.
He is not, however, a witness without ideas—if anything, Schroeder’s craft reflects an acute awareness of the implications inherent in his films, both fiction and nonfiction. What makes Schroeder a consummately generative filmmaker is his fastidious neutrality, his conviction that it’s not his job to make things tidy and comforting for his audiences.
Even the neonoir thrillers Schroeder made in Hollywood, such as Desperate Measures (1998), Single White Female (1992), and Kiss of Death (1995), reflect his aversion to pat moralisms. The characters in these films, like his documentary subjects, reveal that every person is an unstable compound of “good” and “evil,” a mixture of negative and positive qualities in varying proportions, which can become catastrophically unbalanced by a blinding sense of being absolutely “right” when we’re convinced that others are absolutely “wrong.” The seemingly or relatively innocent casually expose character flaws that are grossly magnified in their nemeses, contradictions that seem ready-¬made to activate the wrath and criminal ingenuity of people they’ve less-¬than-¬innocently fallen in with (consider the massive carnage that Andy Garcia takes in stride while hell-¬bent on securing a bone-¬marrow transplant for his son from protean killer Michael Keaton in Desperate Measures). If the unfolding of these stories turns unimaginably disastrous, their logic emanates from the lack of a rigorous demarcation between “right” and “wrong.”
Schroeder’s documentary films nimbly avoid pedantry or parti pris, though the viewer can infer his sympathies in Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978), just as one can imagine his amused horror while recording the hair-¬raising self-¬portrait he gave Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada free rein to perform on celluloid. Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of change, contingency, and impulse; that documentaries are notoriously slippery, since what the camera catches never coincides with even the most flexible script, but ultimately determines its own form. In his unpredictable daily encounters with Koko and her teacher, Dr. Penny Patterson, Schroeder foregrounds the quiddity of Koko’s situation, in episodic fashion. Scenes of teaching sessions in language recognition, displays of abstract thought, and demonstrations of Koko’s ability to recognize human speech as well as sign language carry voice-¬over commentary elucidating the scientific issues the Gorilla Foundation’s experiments address and hope to settle—the most important, in many ways, being a revised definition of “personhood.”
This film poses questions about our relationship to other species, discomforting questions most readily addressed to higher primates, whose genetic resemblance to human beings is so close that our evolution from the same phyla is indisputable. These questions are raised in the intermittent narration threaded through documentary scenes of Koko’s daily activities, and in interviews with other primate researchers. In this respect, Schroeder’s technique is not especially unconventional (though the cinematography of longtime collaborator Nestor Almendros gives Koko an atmosphere of intimate immediacy unusual in this kind of film). Schroeder’s subject, however, is full of idiosyncratic freshness and appeal.
Koko, in its undidactic way, can be related to contemporaneous investigations of language acquisition, both in academia and popular culture, inspired by the widespread influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s radical interrogation of “language games” and Noam Chomsky’s theories about innate syntactical structures. Many of these explorations sought further proofs of Darwinian evolution by discovering “intermediate forms of language” among higher primates, while others investigated the alleged development of “private languages” between culturally isolated children, a phenomenon documented by Jean-¬Pierre Gorin, two years after Koko, in his brilliant film Poto and Cabengo, about twins raised in Linda Vista, California, in a household where all the adults spoke a mélange of German and English in extremely defective ways.
In Darwin’s least-¬known important book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, he demonstrates that all animals “talk”; that the higher species all use the same morphologies of facial expressions, the same muscles, to convey emotional and mental states; that the physical motions of dogs and cats, as well as primates, have distinct meanings that can be “read” by one another, by other animals, and, if we study them, by humans as well. Can the mountain gorilla, and other higher primates, communicate needs, wishes, thoughts, in a manner that both they and humans can understand? Can a gorilla trained in sign language and able to comprehend thousands of human utterances transmit this language to other gorillas? Since the outset of Patterson’s experiments with Koko, thirty-¬four years ago, some of these questions seem to have been answered affirmatively (though the Gorilla Foundation’s claims about the transmission of human language from one gorilla to another seem at best exaggerated). Yet the quality of this communication, and the highly specialized circumstances in which it has been inculcated, raise troubling questions of their own.
Despite ambitious projects that the Gorilla Foundation has launched in Cameroon and other parts of Africa, the ongoing destruction of habitat and the decimation of gorillas, along with most other endangered species (for food, by their capture for zoos, by deforestation of their enclaves), anticipates an imminent future in which the only remaining refuge for these magnificent creatures will be nonindigenous conservancies, such as the seventy-¬acre Maui Preserve currently under construction. Seventy acres sounds like a lot; however, quite a few of the world’s wealthy entertainers, corporate elite, and scions of vast fortunes own twenty times as much pristine, unused property. Without sufficient habitat, any species “preserved” in circumscribed space, in inadequately variegated clans, will eventually exhaust its genetic diversity.
I don’t mean to suggest that Patterson and the Gorilla Foundation aren’t engaged in a noble endeavor. I fear it may, in time, prove a quixotic one, a worthy bulwark against inevitable extinction.
Schroeder made his film in the early days of Koko’s education, when Patterson and her colleagues had already made surprising discoveries about interspecies communication. Koko had, for example, already learned to manipulate a ViewMaster, to indicate her desire for objects that were not visible to her, to use sign language to invent names for actions and things. Unfortunately, female gorillas will only mate when females outnumber males, a situation Patterson hopes to effect at the Maui Preserve. While Koko developed affectionate bonds with Michael and Ndume, males introduced to the limited habitat in Woodside, California, she was unwilling to mate with either.
In an essay I commissioned from Schroeder in 1993 for a Faber and Faber anthology, Living with the Animals, the director provided some astonishing observations about his own interactions with Koko: that she quickly understood she was being filmed, and even learned to start the camera, and behaved differently when it was running; she “performed more.” Schroeder attributes “real star quality” to Koko, and there’s no question that Koko, like Idi Amin Dada—a very different kind of iconic anomaly—is continually fascinating to watch, extravagantly expressive, and even a bit of a ham. Schroeder’s first concern as a director is to find a compelling subject, but it’s just as important to incarnate the subject with the right “star”; the finished script of Maîtresse (1973) languished for almost a decade, until Schroeder found Gérard Depardieu—for him, the only possible actor to play the male lead. With Koko, fortuitously, subject and star were the same thing, which was also true of General Idi Amin Dada (1974).
Koko can, contrary to popular lore, recognize her own image in a mirror. In 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors selected Koko’s self-¬portrait, shot in a mirror with an Olympus camera, for National Geographic, as one of the top forty magazine covers of the last forty years. She has taken loving care of several pets, including kittens and dogs. Though her first kitten, All-¬Ball, died in 1984, Koko continues to miss her: “Even thumbing through picture books of cats that look like her kitty, she does react with emotional words like frown and sad,” Patterson said.
Schroeder’s film is not so much skeptical as grounded in realism. We would need to ignore the evidence of our senses, the evidence of the camera, to believe that no degree of wishful thinking enters into Patterson’s interpretation of some of Koko’s behavior. It’s doubtful, to say the least, that Koko would be “happier” in the San Francisco Zoo, from which she was purchased after extensive litigation. At the same time, Koko’s intimate dependence on Patterson over several decades unavoidably raises the question: what would Koko do if her teacher became, for one reason or another, incapacitated or unavailable? Is the highly unnatural situation Koko has spent most of her life in the only one in which she could survive?
Koko has become unique among her species—as the Gorilla Foundation website has it, “Ambassador for an Endangered Species”—and, despite numerous other, similar primate study projects elsewhere, and the presence of some other mountain gorillas at Woodside, somewhat plangently isolated from her own kind. She is a “celebrity,” obliged to appear on children’s shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and to give somewhat dyslexic interviews, with Patterson’s help, to Internet audiences on AOL.
Of course, the gaudily decorated, shopping-¬mall aspect of the foundation’s website is the necessary, quotidian means for raising money for a desperately needed sanctuary in Hawaii. But the coarse marketing of an extraordinary gorilla to rescue the vanishing wildlife of our planet depressingly heightens the feeling that nature itself is fated for extinction, since only an improbable volte-¬face, a reversal of the indifferent depredations of the human race, could possibly produce a less than entropic result.
In Koko: A Talking Gorilla, Barbet Schroeder takes no pleasure in such meditations, nor does he give explicit voice to the direst of dire scenarios the film, thirty years on, suggests to its viewers. His film is a work of stoic empathy.
At the time Schroeder made Koko, he “became a fanatic for gorillas.” He went to Africa and saw “the horrible things that were happening,” which have become infinitely more horrible still. He wrote to Dian Fossey, hoping to visit her camp, and she answered, “Don’t even try to come near my camp; I’ll shoot you.” “And she was right,” Schroeder says. “When I understood what was happening, I agreed that it was the only way to do it. But, of course, that was the last stand. Now things are getting much worse than anything she had dreamt in her worst nightmares.”
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The Serpentine Movements of Chance
Gary Indiana
Of the various insects that like to make their home in our houses, certainly the most interesting, for her beautiful shape, her curious manners, and her wonderful nest, is a certain Wasp called the Pelopaeus. She is very little known, even to the people by whose fireside she lives. This is owing to her quiet, peaceful ways; she is so very retiring that her host is nearly always ignorant of her presence.
In the library of Luis Bunuel’s house in Mexico City, there were two bookshelves that bore evidence of considerably more frequent consultation than the others: one held the works of the Marquis de Sade, the other the writings of Jean Henri Fabre, whose volume on the Mason-¬Wasp is quoted above.
Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques was the delight of my childhood, though Fabre did not write for children, and I suspect most very young people reading him would be scared out of their wits. “The Homer of Insects,” as Darwin called him, describes the lives of the glowworm, the cricket, the cicada, the praying mantis, and myriad other tiny creatures, with an empathy and keenness of observation that makes the reader love them as much as Fabre did. All the more horrifying, then, when the great entomologist, a scientist before all else, relates how his characters come to their end:
I once saw a Bee-¬eating Wasp, while carrying a Bee to her storehouse, attacked and caught by a Mantis. The Wasp was in the act of eating the honey she had found in the Bee’s crop. The double saw of the Mantis closed suddenly on the feasting Wasp; but neither terror nor torture could persuade that greedy creature to leave off eating. Even while she was herself being actually devoured she continued to lick honey from her Bee!
Bunuel’s movies almost always feature insects—the bee Fernando Rey rescues from drowning in Viridiana, the deadly scorpions of l’Age d’Or, the wasps that devour the dead mule in Las Hurdes, the fly in the martini in That Obscure Object of Desire. In The Phantom of Liberty, Bunuel’s penultimate film, Jean-¬Claude Brialy’s character disrupts the arrangement of his mantlepiece with a large spider in a glass frame: “I’m fed up with symmetry,” he announces, a line that could serve as the film’s epigraph. In this film, Bunuel gives the aleatory ordering of dreams and the role of chance in waking life equal weightlessness. And the film could easily be titled, The Dream Life of Insects.
Fabre’s genius, and de Sade’s, for that matter, consisted in evoking the human being’s inextricable connection to nature (in the unameliorative sense of “the food chain”)—Fabre anthropomorphized the insect world, while de Sade insectomorphized the human. Reading either of Bunuel’s favorite authors reminds us that nature has no morality, and the kind we cook up for ourselves is completely arbitrary. (As Witold Gombrowicz put it, if you want to know what human morality is all about, take food away from people for three days.) Bunuel, too, never lost sight of the primacy of instinctual drives. And also like de Sade, he was, essentially, a satirist of human folly. His characters often resemble “the Divine Marquis’s” instinct-¬driven monstrosities. But they also have the affectionately rendered charm of Fabre’s insects, who combine ingenuity and intelligence within their narrow ken and complete imbecility vis-¬a-¬vis their actual position in the food chain.
The semi-¬incestuous passion of the aunt and nephew at the inn, the similar fixé of the police commissioner for his deceased sister, the gambling addiction of ascetic monks, the autograph seekers swarming around the convicted (and simultaneously released) mass killer, the massacre at the city zoo—a few of The Phantom of Liberty’s nonstop, straight-¬faced absurdities—indicate how readily the human animal maintains an existence utterly contrary to its moral code as well as to its much-¬advertised ability to reason.
Bunuel perceived a “logical irrationality” at work in human affairs. His films explore the realms of fixation and unconscious desire that elude any conventional dramatic tidiness, though the genius of his Mexican-¬era films owes a lot to the selective perversion and exaggeration of melodramatic cliches and soap-¬operatic plots. In the films that follow Viridiana (and particularly the ones after Belle de Jour), his aversion to storytelling symmetry became steadily more pronounced. In The Milky Way, Bunuel began demolishing the few norms of Aristotelean structure he had, in his way, dressed a few sets with until then. (Tristana marks a final nod to novelistic method, adapted from a novel by Galdos that Bunuel long wanted to film.)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire—Bunuel’s final three films—are his most uninhibited, his best-¬realized: not every artist has the fortune to hit his highest pitch at the end of a career, but it’s evident in all the written residua—interviews, his autobiography, accounts by his sons, friends—that Bunuel remained, all his life, insatiably curious about questions many people give up asking themselves long before reaching old age. He acquired wisdom, an unfashionable concept, but a quality rather more libertine than those allergic to it imagine.
These last films are in no sense a “trilogy.” I would argue that they are three long, differently configured sections of a single film, and one of their glories—something that might not be especially flattering in the case of another director—is that once you’ve seen all three, it’s difficult afterward to say which indelible scene happens in which film.
The Phantom of Liberty has “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” But it also has several other films with beginnings, middles, and ends running inside it, around its edges, and hurtling through it. Its roots in the Spanish picaresque—not Don Quixote, necessarily, but works like The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, the succinct, 118-¬page progenitor of the picaresque, published fifty years before Don Quixote—are even more distinct than in the overlapping dreams of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (which much resembles the ghostly masterwork of Mexican picaresque, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo). Another oneric likeness can be found in Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a book Bunuel often spoke of wanting to film, an epic of ghosts and revenants, stories nested in stories, digressions that overwhelm the ostensible plot.
The Phantom of Liberty proceeds as if its sudden detours into unanticipated places were determined by rolls of the dice, and it was assembled in a comparable way, by Bunuel and his long-¬time co-¬writer Jean-¬Claude Carriere telling each other their dreams every morning. It follows the specific pattern of a less chaotic kind of narrative than the picaresque, the earliest example of which may be Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon,” the inspiration for Bresson’s gorgeous film L’Argent: Tolstoy’s story follows the career of an altered item of currency and shows its effects on a succession of people who accept it as cash, and pass it along to the next person. Another such work is Andre Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican, a novel Bunuel tried to adapt with the author in the 1920s, abandoning it after three days. (The structure is rarely used, and a few recent films that have tried it are strangely inept.)
Bunuel’s own description of his approach suits as well as a synopsis of Gide or Tolstoy. In published conversations with José de la Colina and Tomas Pérez Turrent, Bunuel mentions that he ¬doesn’t especially care for Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment and thought it would be a far more interesting book if, as Raskolnikov ascends the stairs to murder the old pawnbroker, a boy on his way to buy a loaf of bread rushed past him suddenly became the focus of the narrative instead of Raskolnikov.
As in The Milky Way and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty shifts attention not only from a central character to a minor one, who then becomes central, but also from one time period to another. The film opens in Toledo during the Napoleonic occupation, as a costume drama involving executions and drunken French soldiers desecrating a church, a statue that comes to life, an exhumation. As the story reaches its climax, we hear the voice of Muni, a plump, antic actress who appears in many Bunuel films, reading the story aloud, and next see her sitting with a friend on a park bench in present-¬day Paris.
Muni leads us to the pre-¬pubescent daughter of Brialy and Monica Vitti, who leads us to them; Brialy goes to his doctor’s office; during his examination, a nurse, played by Milena Vukotic, gets word that her father is gravely ill and leaves to drive to a distant hospital; the film follows her as she drives into a rainstorm and seeks refuge in an inn, where several monks stranded there rope her into a poker game; they’re eventually joined by a young man and his aunt who’ve just arrived and a flamenco dancer and her husband. It would be criminal to go on, and silly to relate the “plot” of The Phantom of Liberty, since the film is a compendium of surprises. Like Dostoevski’s novels, The Phantom of Liberty retains its surprise quality even when experienced a second, third, and fourth time: you find yourself intensely wondering what happens next, when you know perfectly well what happens next.
What does it mean? Phantom of Liberty? Bunuel joked that the title was a collaboration between himself and Karl Marx. It also seems jejune to suggest interpretations, since Bunuel deflected all incitements to explain himself and insisted that nothing at all in his films was symbolic or had the significance people attached to his recurring motifs. He liked the appearance of a peculiar bird—I think it’s called an emu—so he put one in. When he cast two actresses in the role Maria Schneider had been fired from in That Obscure Object of Desire, Bunuel merely threw the idea out to Serge Silberman, his producer, as a joke. Silberman thought he was serious, that it was the perfect solution—and that’s what happened.
At the end of his life, Bunuel’s filmmaking had achieved such fluidity that he could take Phantom in any direction that occurred to him, along the path of the previous night’s dreams, fantasies from childhood, premonitions of approaching death, or, if he’d cared to, into outer space. To call him a film director is like calling Einstein a mathematician. There was no artist like him ever, and there will never be another. He ¬didn’t simply direct a film called The Phantom of Liberty; he was the Phantom of Liberty.
Gary Indiana
Of the various insects that like to make their home in our houses, certainly the most interesting, for her beautiful shape, her curious manners, and her wonderful nest, is a certain Wasp called the Pelopaeus. She is very little known, even to the people by whose fireside she lives. This is owing to her quiet, peaceful ways; she is so very retiring that her host is nearly always ignorant of her presence.
In the library of Luis Bunuel’s house in Mexico City, there were two bookshelves that bore evidence of considerably more frequent consultation than the others: one held the works of the Marquis de Sade, the other the writings of Jean Henri Fabre, whose volume on the Mason-¬Wasp is quoted above.
Fabre’s Souvenirs Entomologiques was the delight of my childhood, though Fabre did not write for children, and I suspect most very young people reading him would be scared out of their wits. “The Homer of Insects,” as Darwin called him, describes the lives of the glowworm, the cricket, the cicada, the praying mantis, and myriad other tiny creatures, with an empathy and keenness of observation that makes the reader love them as much as Fabre did. All the more horrifying, then, when the great entomologist, a scientist before all else, relates how his characters come to their end:
I once saw a Bee-¬eating Wasp, while carrying a Bee to her storehouse, attacked and caught by a Mantis. The Wasp was in the act of eating the honey she had found in the Bee’s crop. The double saw of the Mantis closed suddenly on the feasting Wasp; but neither terror nor torture could persuade that greedy creature to leave off eating. Even while she was herself being actually devoured she continued to lick honey from her Bee!
Bunuel’s movies almost always feature insects—the bee Fernando Rey rescues from drowning in Viridiana, the deadly scorpions of l’Age d’Or, the wasps that devour the dead mule in Las Hurdes, the fly in the martini in That Obscure Object of Desire. In The Phantom of Liberty, Bunuel’s penultimate film, Jean-¬Claude Brialy’s character disrupts the arrangement of his mantlepiece with a large spider in a glass frame: “I’m fed up with symmetry,” he announces, a line that could serve as the film’s epigraph. In this film, Bunuel gives the aleatory ordering of dreams and the role of chance in waking life equal weightlessness. And the film could easily be titled, The Dream Life of Insects.
Fabre’s genius, and de Sade’s, for that matter, consisted in evoking the human being’s inextricable connection to nature (in the unameliorative sense of “the food chain”)—Fabre anthropomorphized the insect world, while de Sade insectomorphized the human. Reading either of Bunuel’s favorite authors reminds us that nature has no morality, and the kind we cook up for ourselves is completely arbitrary. (As Witold Gombrowicz put it, if you want to know what human morality is all about, take food away from people for three days.) Bunuel, too, never lost sight of the primacy of instinctual drives. And also like de Sade, he was, essentially, a satirist of human folly. His characters often resemble “the Divine Marquis’s” instinct-¬driven monstrosities. But they also have the affectionately rendered charm of Fabre’s insects, who combine ingenuity and intelligence within their narrow ken and complete imbecility vis-¬a-¬vis their actual position in the food chain.
The semi-¬incestuous passion of the aunt and nephew at the inn, the similar fixé of the police commissioner for his deceased sister, the gambling addiction of ascetic monks, the autograph seekers swarming around the convicted (and simultaneously released) mass killer, the massacre at the city zoo—a few of The Phantom of Liberty’s nonstop, straight-¬faced absurdities—indicate how readily the human animal maintains an existence utterly contrary to its moral code as well as to its much-¬advertised ability to reason.
Bunuel perceived a “logical irrationality” at work in human affairs. His films explore the realms of fixation and unconscious desire that elude any conventional dramatic tidiness, though the genius of his Mexican-¬era films owes a lot to the selective perversion and exaggeration of melodramatic cliches and soap-¬operatic plots. In the films that follow Viridiana (and particularly the ones after Belle de Jour), his aversion to storytelling symmetry became steadily more pronounced. In The Milky Way, Bunuel began demolishing the few norms of Aristotelean structure he had, in his way, dressed a few sets with until then. (Tristana marks a final nod to novelistic method, adapted from a novel by Galdos that Bunuel long wanted to film.)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, and That Obscure Object of Desire—Bunuel’s final three films—are his most uninhibited, his best-¬realized: not every artist has the fortune to hit his highest pitch at the end of a career, but it’s evident in all the written residua—interviews, his autobiography, accounts by his sons, friends—that Bunuel remained, all his life, insatiably curious about questions many people give up asking themselves long before reaching old age. He acquired wisdom, an unfashionable concept, but a quality rather more libertine than those allergic to it imagine.
These last films are in no sense a “trilogy.” I would argue that they are three long, differently configured sections of a single film, and one of their glories—something that might not be especially flattering in the case of another director—is that once you’ve seen all three, it’s difficult afterward to say which indelible scene happens in which film.
The Phantom of Liberty has “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” But it also has several other films with beginnings, middles, and ends running inside it, around its edges, and hurtling through it. Its roots in the Spanish picaresque—not Don Quixote, necessarily, but works like The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes, the succinct, 118-¬page progenitor of the picaresque, published fifty years before Don Quixote—are even more distinct than in the overlapping dreams of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (which much resembles the ghostly masterwork of Mexican picaresque, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo). Another oneric likeness can be found in Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a book Bunuel often spoke of wanting to film, an epic of ghosts and revenants, stories nested in stories, digressions that overwhelm the ostensible plot.
The Phantom of Liberty proceeds as if its sudden detours into unanticipated places were determined by rolls of the dice, and it was assembled in a comparable way, by Bunuel and his long-¬time co-¬writer Jean-¬Claude Carriere telling each other their dreams every morning. It follows the specific pattern of a less chaotic kind of narrative than the picaresque, the earliest example of which may be Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon,” the inspiration for Bresson’s gorgeous film L’Argent: Tolstoy’s story follows the career of an altered item of currency and shows its effects on a succession of people who accept it as cash, and pass it along to the next person. Another such work is Andre Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican, a novel Bunuel tried to adapt with the author in the 1920s, abandoning it after three days. (The structure is rarely used, and a few recent films that have tried it are strangely inept.)
Bunuel’s own description of his approach suits as well as a synopsis of Gide or Tolstoy. In published conversations with José de la Colina and Tomas Pérez Turrent, Bunuel mentions that he ¬doesn’t especially care for Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment and thought it would be a far more interesting book if, as Raskolnikov ascends the stairs to murder the old pawnbroker, a boy on his way to buy a loaf of bread rushed past him suddenly became the focus of the narrative instead of Raskolnikov.
As in The Milky Way and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty shifts attention not only from a central character to a minor one, who then becomes central, but also from one time period to another. The film opens in Toledo during the Napoleonic occupation, as a costume drama involving executions and drunken French soldiers desecrating a church, a statue that comes to life, an exhumation. As the story reaches its climax, we hear the voice of Muni, a plump, antic actress who appears in many Bunuel films, reading the story aloud, and next see her sitting with a friend on a park bench in present-¬day Paris.
Muni leads us to the pre-¬pubescent daughter of Brialy and Monica Vitti, who leads us to them; Brialy goes to his doctor’s office; during his examination, a nurse, played by Milena Vukotic, gets word that her father is gravely ill and leaves to drive to a distant hospital; the film follows her as she drives into a rainstorm and seeks refuge in an inn, where several monks stranded there rope her into a poker game; they’re eventually joined by a young man and his aunt who’ve just arrived and a flamenco dancer and her husband. It would be criminal to go on, and silly to relate the “plot” of The Phantom of Liberty, since the film is a compendium of surprises. Like Dostoevski’s novels, The Phantom of Liberty retains its surprise quality even when experienced a second, third, and fourth time: you find yourself intensely wondering what happens next, when you know perfectly well what happens next.
What does it mean? Phantom of Liberty? Bunuel joked that the title was a collaboration between himself and Karl Marx. It also seems jejune to suggest interpretations, since Bunuel deflected all incitements to explain himself and insisted that nothing at all in his films was symbolic or had the significance people attached to his recurring motifs. He liked the appearance of a peculiar bird—I think it’s called an emu—so he put one in. When he cast two actresses in the role Maria Schneider had been fired from in That Obscure Object of Desire, Bunuel merely threw the idea out to Serge Silberman, his producer, as a joke. Silberman thought he was serious, that it was the perfect solution—and that’s what happened.
At the end of his life, Bunuel’s filmmaking had achieved such fluidity that he could take Phantom in any direction that occurred to him, along the path of the previous night’s dreams, fantasies from childhood, premonitions of approaching death, or, if he’d cared to, into outer space. To call him a film director is like calling Einstein a mathematician. There was no artist like him ever, and there will never be another. He ¬didn’t simply direct a film called The Phantom of Liberty; he was the Phantom of Liberty.
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