An hour later, with ten more miles and the visit to the World's Biggest Drugstore safely behind us, we were back at home, and I had returned to that reassuring but profoundly unsatisfactory state known as "being in one's right mind."
This is a short piece I wrote awhile back when the first Luhrmann Gatsby trailer surfaced.
While
the release of the Luhrmann Gatsby
trailer last week elicited a fairly mixed response overall, the overwhelming
majority appeared to be dismayed, often to the point of disgust, with the
provocative, if not entirely unexpected, aesthetic choices that the trailer
highlighted.Underlying much of the
rancour was a sense of broken decorum – a strongly engrained feeling that
adapting a classic and a periodpiece is a highly formal exercise not unlike meeting the queen.You approach the queen with an air of
self-conscious frigidity, and then proceed with the elaborate ritual of
courtesies, because that’s how it’s done.Some of the Gatsby reactions
suggested the kind of horror that might accompany somebody tongue-kissing, or
even goosing, the queen in lieu of the usual formalities.While it’s far too early to say, obviously,
what kind of picture Luhrmann has fashioned out of Fitzgerald’s hallowed
literary classic, it’s worth teasing out some of the attitudes that underlie
this sense of decorum regarding literary adaptations and period pieces.
It’s
often felt that the chief criteria by which we judge literary adaptations is in
terms of their fidelity and faithfulness to the source material.This is an attitude shared, oddly enough, by
literary purists and comic book nerds – though at wholly opposite ends of the cultural
spectrum, both share a kind of fundamentalist fervour for the Holy Writ of the
source material.It’s an attitude not
without some merit – nobody really wants Gatsby with a sci-fi or zombie twist –
but at the same time, it fails to acknowledge that movies and novels are
fundamentally different mediums.All
novels worth their salt defy any kind of direct translation to the screen,
because they are so rooted in language, and in the specific properties and
effects that can only be achieved in the novelistic medium.Those novels, on the other hand, that do
facilitate direct translation are the pulpy page-turners that were never more
than fleshed-out film scripts to begin with – Jaws, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather, Jurassic Park, and so on – all vastly superior movies than they
ever were novels.The point is that
novels and their movie adaptations are not joined at the hip – they are
separate entities that deserve to be judged on their own terms and relative
merits.If a perfectly faithful
translation of a novel was possible, it would render the source novel itself
obsolete – as has essentially happened with The
Godfather and the other page-turners.
The Great Gatsby is an unfilmable novel
because its essential character lies not in the surface plot, but rather in
Fitzgerald’s treatment of it.In the
hands of a lesser author, it could easily have been so much forgettable
melodrama, but Fitzgerald – by means of the evocative, suggestive quality of
his prose, and unerring sense of what to leave unsaid and un-shown – turns the
story into a highly compressed, almost ineffable narrative poetry.Any attempt to replicate this effect on
screen is doomed to failure – even to flesh out any of what Gatsby stirs
in the mind’s eye of the reader is to threaten the delicate, tenuous magic by
which Fitzgerald maintains the perfection of his small novel.For this reason, the filmmaker has the
freedom to strike out on his own with source material like Gatsby – to create something congruent with, but not slavishly
faithful to the original – something that is allowed to breathe in its own
cinematic context and its own moment.
This
leads to the question of anachronism in Luhrmann’s trailer.All period movies are anachronistic to a
greater or lesser degree.The idea of a correct way to approach period on film
is as illusionary as the perfectly faithful literary adaptation.How we think period should be approached on
film has little or nothing to do with historical accuracy, or the nature of the
period itself – rather, our ideas about period decorum are simply the set of
anachronisms that have become conventionalised as to how period should be shown on film.Since the past is only the past relatively speaking, and was the present to those who actually lived it,
the most accurate period ambience would feel exactly like the present moment –
this is the paradoxical realization that made Public Enemies such a formally bold and contentious film.
The real irony here, however, is
that although Luhrmann has eschewed the frigid and fussy approach to period, he
seems to have done so in a way that is conspicuously old-fashioned.The stylized,
almost psychedelic artificiality of the imagery in the trailer seems to me to
be much closer in spirit to the lush, painterly artificiality of the
Technicolor Era – to the Old Hollywood worlds of Minnelli, Busby Berkley, and
Sirk – than to the romanticized realism of the 1974 Jack Clayton version.The 3D orientation and CGI appear heavily
anachronistic to us – only because of our more recent conventionalized appetite
for surface realism and verisimilitude in a period or drama movie.Hollywood in the 40s and 50s made ample use
of sound-stages, matte painted backdrops, crazily phony-looking back projection
for driving sequences, and so on; artificiality and stylization in a movie like
Gatsby wouldn’t have bothered them
the way it does us.
Anyway,
all this is to say that Luhrmann’s Great
Gatsby strikes me as more promising than horrifying.A restoration of Techicolor lushness and Old
Hollywood artificiality – shot through with a brash, energetic modern
sensibility – may well be a context in which 3D is actually aesthetically
justified and rewarding.I’m curious to see
how DiCaprio acquaints himself with the titular role.All movie stars who make it really big have a
touch of Gatsby about them - a touch of the mystery of having everything and
yet remaining unfulfilled – and it will be interesting to see if a star of our
generation finally manages to nail Fitzgerald’s elusive shadow at the heart of
the American Dream.
The grooviest thing I saw today was this footage of Teddy Boys and rockers getting down to a funky Bo Diddley performance in London in 1973. Okay, in fairness I didn't see too many groovy things today, but this would still be pretty high-up on a red letter day:
More outrageous Brylcream and proto-breakdancing action from the Teddy Boys here:
Formed in 1969 from the ashes of the NYRW (New York Radical Women), the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) was a decentralized association of covens dedicated to feminism, socialist activism, and surrealist guerrilla street theater. As such, they neatly embodied many of the most significant tendencies of the emergent counterculture: the often precarious mixture of political radicalism and dadaist spectacle patented by the Yippies, as well a brand that echoed the burgeoning revival of witchcraft and occultism. According to an early manifesto:
WITCH is an all-women Everything. It's theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It's an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression - particularly the oppression of women - down through the ages. Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous, aggressive, intelligent, nonconformist, explorative, curious, independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. Witches were the first Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth control practitioners and abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue the whole idea of money!) They bowed to no man, being the living remnants of the oldest culture of all - one in which men and women were equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing sexual, economic, and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.
Their first act was to place a hex on the Black Iron Prison of Wall Street. According to an article on Jo Freeman.com: "Because WITCH actions could be done with a small group and were both fun
and political, they quickly spread around the country. Boston women
hexed bars. DC women hexed the Presidential inauguration. Chicago
women zapped everything. On January 16, 1969, eight undergraduate women
at the University of Chicago hexed the chairman of the Sociology
Department, which had recently fired a popular woman professor. Dressed
in black with their faces painted white, they told him to "beware of
the curse, the witch's curse." The WITCH acronym was used to mean a variety of different things on different occasions: Women Inspired to Tell their Collective Histories, Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays, and, most comically, Women Incensed at Telephone Company Harassment during a demonstration against Bell Telephone. Here is a wonderful picture of the witches dancing on front of the Chicago Federal building on October 31, 1969:
These wonderful conceptual space colony illustrations, produced by NASA's Ames Research Center in the 70s, have been doing the rounds on the internet for awhile now (I used to use one of them as a banner for this blog.) I come across them again recently on the Daily Mail (via the Daily Grail), so here's a selection:
Continuing the acid mania theme of a couple of posts back......In the thirties and forties, Hollywood's Sunset Strip was the glittering playground of movie stars, moguls, and mobsters. By the mid-sixties, it had become the locus of the new music of the counterculture, with clubs and bars like the Whiskey a Go Go, Pandora's Box, and the London Fog providing a venue for the giddy ascent of The Doors, Arthur Lee's Love, and the Mothers of Invention. Square local residents and business owners attempted to curb this growing saturnalia, and in 1966 a strict 10:00pm curfew and amped-up loitering laws precipitated a famous riot, in which hippies clashed with police, and Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson were cuffed and arrested. Within six months, American International Pictures released an exploitation flick based on the incident called Riot on Sunset Strip. It starred Aldo Ray and the delectable Mimsy Farmer; the title track was a great stomper performed by the Standells (listen here.) I doubt it's any great shakes, even by bad movie standards, but the trailer is enough of a gas to justify its existence:
With the community welfare foremost in mind, the trailer asks "Do you know what acid can do to an inexperienced young girl?" This, apparently. Mimsy Farmer went on to cultivate a more androgynous look, and moved to Italy where she starred in Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and Barbet Shroeder's far more clued-in counterculture movie More. The curfew riots on Sunset Strip also inspired this song, which I hadn't heard for donkey's years:
Been looking for this one for awhile: Luigi Scattini's irresistible Mondo-style exploitation/documentary feature exploring witchcraft and occultism in the Space Age:
Steven Halpern was a musician on the New York jazz scene in the 60s - but he didn't much care for the bustle. He moved to California instead to develop what he called "non-frantic alternative" music - what the world would later know as New Age. Even truck drivers and burnt-out disco debauchees gravitated towards towards this healing new sound:
Here are a couple of psychedelic fashion promos that caught my eye recently. The first is directed by Asia Argento for Lodovica Amati's 2013 Spring/Summer collection. Some people have evinced considerable displeasure at the idea of an ayahuasca ceremony as a scenario for a fashion shot. I dunno. I'm a sucker for all things Argento, Asia is as hot as hell, and this looks pretty stunning and hypnotic to me:
In 2010, Missoni enlisted the talents of legendary Dark Magus and old favorite of this blog Kenneth Anger to promo their Fall campaign. I don't know why I'm only seeing this now, but here it is:
Continuing the early Cronenberg theme, I discovered this horror disco track by an artist or group called Cronenberg. I think it's quite good stuff, although I'm probably a bit of a sucker for a track called High Rise by an artist called Cronenberg:
The album Things Inside has a blogspot page here, where you can listen to the rest of the tracks. I've been impressed with the music so far, and it's a cool design sensibility.
One of my favorite ever Brando monologues comes from Sidney Lumet's 1959 Tennessee Williams adaptation The Fugitive Kind, in which Brando played drifter Valentine "Snakeskin" Xavier (the source of Nicholas Cage's snakeskin jacket in Wild At Heart.) It's a hypnotic example of Brando's narcissistic lyricism:
Secure
within the shell of the high-rise like passengers on board an automatically
piloted airliner, they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the
darkest corners they could find.In many
ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make
possible the expression of a truly free psychopathology.
JG
Ballard, High-Rise (1975.)
2012
was the year of the existential stretch limo film, or so say Cashier du Cinema,
having voted Leos Carax’s Holy Motors
and David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis
their top two films of the year.There
are certain intriguing, if superficial, similarities between the two
movies.Both are set during the course
of a single day, and both their protagonists experience episodic adventures
while being ferried around in stretch limos.The limousine has lost much of its mystique as a symbol of wealth,
power, and conspicuous consumption in recent years; in Holly Motors and Cosmopolis it
becomes symbolic of how technology tends to insulate and isolate modern
individuals from the world, operating as a womb, a shell, and a prison.Both films remind me vaguely of the John
Cheever short story and subsequent Burt Lancaster movie The Swimmer, in that they are long day’s journeys into night, or stories
of men who are gradually exhausted and disillusioned by the close of their
compressed odysseys.A more comprehensive comparison between the
two films might make for an interesting essay, but since I’ve only seen Holy Motors once, and wasn’t overawed by
it, I’m going to concentrate on Cosmopolis,
which strikes me as the first real Cronenberg
film since 1999’s eXistenz, and the
first really good Cronenberg since his adaptation of Ballard’s feverish prose
poem Crash in ’96.In fact, Cosmopolis
feels like a mature companion piece to
Crash, and a long awaited return to the weird and coldly fascinating shared
universe in which the director’s best work takes place.
The
quintessential theme of early Cronenberg was the transformation of the body
through its marriage with technology.In
Videodrome, James Woods’ flesh was
subject to a literal transformation; in Crash,
with the exception of copious flesh woods, the body preserved its integrity,
but the mind underneath was transformed.James Ballard and his wife Catherine (played by James Spader and Deborah
Kara Unger) have a cold, oddly affectless quality; they appear to have moved
past emotion as it is conventionally expressed, and regard their bodies and
sexual compulsions with the rapt but clinical interest of physiologists
examining a cadaver.It could be argued
that Cronenberg was always primarily concerned with the mental rather than
physical transformations engendered by technology, and in this sense both he
and Ballard were pioneering theorists of an idea which only acquired a name
much later on: the idea of the posthuman,
or the radically transformed new species that emerges from our increasing
symbiosis with technology.Ballard’s
fictions constantly present aspects of the topography of modern life as
potential incubators for new types of human behaviour and new species of human
being: automobiles, motorways, high-rise apartment towers, and luxury gated
communities become the behavioural laboratories of emergent social orders and
pathologies:
“A new social type was
being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality
impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs
for privacy, who thrived like and advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere.”(Ballard, High-Rise.)
Cosmopolis finds Cronenberg exploring a
similar kind of detached, posthuman ennui
to that which characterised the fusion of his vision with Ballard’s in Crash.In Crash, however, the
technologies which transform the psychologies of its characters are primarily
those of the first Machine Age – the mass produced automobiles and crowded
motorways which also formed the centrepiece of Godard’s 1967 consumerist
apocalypse Weekend.
In the 21 century Information Age vision of Cosmopolis, both people and technologies
have become subservient to the transfer of information which they facilitate –
the idea of clock-time which facilitated the physical, labour-based capitalism
of the Industrial Revolution has given way to a permanently encroaching present
or future-present of instantaneous information, and a wholly abstract economic
system where “money talks to itself”:
“You don’t believe in
doubt.You’ve told me this.Computer power eliminates doubt.All doubt arises from past experience.We used to know the past but not the
future.This is changing,” she
said.“We need a new theory of time.”(DeLillo, Cosmopolis.)
With Burroughs
and Ballard in his earlier movies, Cronenberg proved adept at finding literary
sensibilities which could be merged with his own thematic and stylistic
concerns to the point where it was difficult to pinpoint exactly where one
begins and the other ends (influence as a perfect viral infection or
parasite.)In Don DeLillo’s source novel
he has found that perfect symbiosis again, and the result is one the year’s
most exciting and original films.
Just as the
Greeks saw fire, atoms or water as the ultimate constituents of matter, so we
now see information flowing through all things.
Brian
Appleyard, The Brain is Wider than the
Sky.
Published in
2003 and ostensibly covering the period of the dot com collapse in 2000, Don
DeLillo’s Cosmopolis feels remarkably
prescient in 2012.It tells the story of
Eric Packer, a 28 year-old billionaire asset manager who decides on a whim to
get his hair cut in a barber shop across midtown New York.In order to do so, his limousine must travel
through an urban landscape which has become as complex and fraught with
variables and vectors as the financial system itself: a presidential visit is
in progress, a Sufi-influenced rap star is publically being laid to rest, and
an anarchist/anti-capitalist protest, operating under the symbolic banner of
the rat, has exploded into a riot of graffiti and self-immolations.While the limousine is attacked by
protesters, Packer’s “theoretical” advisor insists that the riot is “a protest
against the future”, or against the reformulation of temporality into the
perpetually unstable now of cyber-capitalism.(In 2010, protestors attacked the
Royal Roll Royce; the expression on the faces of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess
of Cornwall was less of everyday fear and more of a kind of shock that the
symbolic order of the world had been breached and shattered.)
Packer is
himself making an unconscious protest against the future, however.His desire for a haircut in a traditional
barber shop, and in an establishment which he used to visit as child with his
father, represents a nostalgia both for his own childhood, and for the
vanishing world of traditional, tangible commerce.He seems, in various inchoate ways, to be
trying to remember what it means to be an authentic human being:
He felt these
things.He felt the pain.It travelled the pathways.It informed the ganglion and spinal
cord.He was here in his body, the
structure he wanted to dismiss in theory even when he was shaping it under the
measured effect of barbells and weights.He wanted to judge it redundant and transferable.It was convertible to wave arrays of
information.It was the thing he watched
on the oval screen when he wasn’t watching Jane.(Cosmopolis.)
He encounters
his new wife, a young heiress and would-be poet, and attempts throughout the
day to have sex with her, an act which he believes will be cleansing and
cathartic.Failing this, he has
intercourse with a female bodyguard in a hotel room, and tries to persuade her
to stun him with her Taser gun.All the
while, however, his world is crumbling around him.He is haunted by the fact that he has an asymmetrical
prostate.Somebody is trying to kill
him.Most catastrophically, he has
gambled hundreds of millions against the rise of the yen (the yuan in
Cronenberg’s adaptation) and his fortune is ebbing away.In his book The Quants:How Math Whizzes
Helped Sink the Economy, Scott Patterson describes how Wall Street quantitive
analysts dreamed of finding hidden patterns amid
the chaos and complexity of the global financial system which would make it
possible to gamble the markets with the predictive accuracy of a hard science:
Regardless of which
signature trade each man favored, they had something far more powerful in
common: an epic quest for an elusive, ethereal quality the quants sometimes
referred to in hushed, reverent tones as the Truth.The Truth was a universal secret about the
way the market worked that could only be discovered through mathematics.
Revealed through the study of obscure patterns in the market, the Truth was the
key to unlocking billions in profits. The quants built giant machines—
turbocharged computers linked to financial markets around the globe—to search
for the Truth, and to deploy it in their quest to make untold fortunes.The quants created a name for the Truth, a
name that smacked of cabalistic studies of magical formulas: alpha.
According to Brian
Appleyard in The Brian is Wider than the
Sky, “thequants’ superstition
that infected the financial markets is the most vivid example of a superstition
that infected the entire world in the post-war period – the fantasy that maths
could be applied to the human realm and, with the ever-increasing power of
computers, arrive at truths that were as hard and testable as those of physics.”In Cosmopolis,
Eric Packer embodies this mixture of venal hubris and Platonic mysticism:
He knew there was
something no one had detected, a pattern latent in nature itself, a leap of
pictorial language that went beyond the standard models of technical analysis
and out-predicted even the arcane charting of his own followers in the field.There had to be a way to explain the yen.
The absolute
fallacy of these notions is revealed to Packer in the course of Cosmopolis, as it was revealed to the
world in the aftermath of the crash of 2008: the application of computerized
mathematical models to the global financial markets didn’t make them more
stable and predictable, it did the opposite.It created a volatile, perilously interconnected abstract monster that
nobody could predict because nobody could really understand it.Cosmopolis was not warmly received when
it was released in 2003, but it strikes me as a very prescient and original
thing: a strange lovechild of David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Bret Easton Elis, and
JG Ballard.It is a bone-dry black
comedy and an intricately constructed prose poem where every recurring image
and theme is very carefully interwoven.
Cronenberg’s
adaptation has been similarly underappreciated on its first critical airing.It’s the type of film that makes you wonder
what exactly you’re watching at first; it feels a little like movies do when
you watch them in a sleepy, hypnogogic state of mind, and everything feels a
little weird and austere and lifeless and hypnotic because your mind can’t
quite follow what’s happening.The
interior of Packer’s limousine is a striking creation, like a HR Giger
sculpture without the explicit references to human biology.Cronenberg stresses its artificially, using
green-screens that echo the unconvincing back-projection of film antiquity;
when Packer eventually steps out into the world it startles us, because we hadn’t
believed there was any world outside its artifice up to that point.The director and his cast – including the Vampire
Valentino of the Young Set – do a remarkable job of performing the novel’s ultra-mannered,
Mamet-like dialogue.Cronenberg himself
responds to the challenge of the novel’s dialogue-heavy theatricality by
producing a master-class in careful, arresting composition.“I feel located absolutely nowhere” one of
the characters says, and Cronenberg’s compositions constantly wrap space around
the protagonists, shrinking the world while it expands the constrictive bubble of
the limousine.Most of all, it’s a joy
to see the director firmly back in the very particular world he made his own in
the 80s and 90s – a chilly, Ballardian world where oddly lifeless characters
are absorbed and coolly obsessed by dreams of putting on a new flesh in a world
of high technology.Ballard and
Cronenberg and DeLillo’s posthuman fantasies may seem exotic and affected to
many audiences, but as a recent New York
Timesarticle How to live without
Irony suggests, we are a culture moving to some extent towards a kind of
detached and distanced relationship with the world.What Brian Appleyard calls the superstition
of the post-war world still presides over our lives today, despite the crash of
’08.The internet was once envisioned as
the ultimate interaction with a vast environment whose positive virtues were
its randomness and unpredictability; increasingly, however, it is being
designed to reflect ourselves back at us – but not ourselves precisely, rather a version of ourselves and our interests
which has been reverse engineered from our footprints by algorithms.Travelling, again, in a bubble.Cosmopolis
articulates a pervasive underlying anxiety of our time: that in our intimate
relationships with technology, we are willingly and even enthusiastically participating
in our own obsolescence.
“He was thinking about
automated teller machines.The term was
aged and burdened by its own historical memory.It worked at cross-purposes, unable to escape the inference of muddled
human personnel and jerky moving parts.The term was part of the process the device was meant to replace.It was anti-futuristic, so cumbrous and
mechanical that even the acronym seemed dated."
