Despair

About a quarter of the way into Synecdoche, I had to make a decision. Whether to go with it or not. It makes demands of the viewer in a similar way to the film You, the living. The scene which triggered this feeling is one of the less successful ones; a woman is being shown around a house by a real estate agent as smoke is billowing from its walls. Silly. Surreal. Kaufman, the writer-director on drugs. A lot of people will describe this film as a pretentious wank. And while I think it’s a head – job, it’s way more interesting than the pretensions on the surface. What it is in fact is a journey into the psyche – the psyche of the main character, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Cotard has been abandoned by his wife who wishes he was dead. (”I wish he was dead; it would be cleaner”, she tells their therapist as he sits there, blank-faced, numb.) Shortly after, she takes their young daughter and goes to live in Germany. Cotard is ill, ageing and filled with despair. He is a play director which gives Kaufman the opportunity to set a fiction within the fictions – or a set of fictions. In reality, what he is exploring is the rubbish which fills our heads. We are privy to Cotard’s paranoias, fantasies and self-talk. It’s done really cleverly through the play within the play construct so Cotard has a set of actors playing himself and other key people in his life. Through them, we see his imaginings, his preferred dialogue, possible scenarios written and re-written. At times too, there is a voice in his ear which helps him decide what to do. It is a film about Everyman and about one man, with despair the prevailing motif. Once again I am watching a film about an ageing man.

I think it’s a really brave film because it’s trying to depict what happens in the brain. Anyone’s brain. The reviewer in The Times describes it well:

“There is some bitter, anguished humour here, but the overriding tone is a deep, aching melancholy. There are numerous possible interpretations of the film, but the constant in all possible readings is the film’s immutable sadness. Does it work? Not always.Kaufman’s ambition occasionally overshoots his skill as a director. But this is a curious and bleakly beautiful piece of work that rewards repeated viewings.”

The title, Synecdoche, is emblematic of the film; hard to say, pretentious, yet trying to say something of real meaning. It means an image in which the part stands for the whole - for example, "head of cattle" meaning cow, or "crown" meaning king. The part is emblematic of the whole. Cotard‘s headspace is symbolic of what is true for all of us, his huge, mad, pasteboard world stands for the real world, is part of it, is superimposed on to it, and finally melts into it.

I also saw Samson and Delilah yesterday. Two films about despair in the one day. They both open in the same way, someone waking up and getting out of bed. In Synecdoche, Hoffman is blearily surrounded by ordinary domesticity, by the demands of the alarm clock and a daughter and telephone. His entry into the day is slow and tired. In the Australian film, we see Samson wake up into the curtain-muted morning light of an outback morning. His bedding is dishevelled and he gropes for a shirt to put on before he gets out of bed. He then gropes for a containner of petrol to sniff. Good morning Samson. Its really hard to watch. Like Hoffman, Samson is slow to start the day. This contrasts with the outdoor waking of Delilah and her nana. Delilah more purposefully and immediately tends to her grandmother’s needs. It’s outback Australia, somewhere on a small remote community surrounded by the beautiful red rock of the area.

Delilah is the one who does the tending in the film which otherwise lacks tenderness. It is bleak in the extreme. After it had finished, my friend Naomi and I talked for a long time about it. The depicted options for indigenous people are few. Down the creek with petrol. On a community with little to do and little (depicted) connection or tenderness. Being exploited by Western art dealers. Getting God. Or getting right away from anyone else. The characters are shown as having little or no agency (with the exception of Delilah, who may get hers from God). I wonder how indigenous people feel about this kind of positioning. The dysfunctionality is the primary motif.

I don’t know what to do with this film. David Stratton gave it 5 stars and described it as “one of the finest films ever made in this country”. It’s definitely about the most important topic that we are likely to see on Australians screens and I think it’s really well made. I especially liked the lack of dialogue though I’ve never known teenagers to say as little as these two. But, and this is not the film’s fault, we are left with the certain knowledge that the film could be a documentary; that it illustrates the reality of life for lots of indigenous kids and that every few people know what to do about this. It’s bleak. Blogger Jane Simpson says:

“David Stratton's review is entitled "A world beyond words" and words are what's absent in the film. Everyday chat, everyday laughter, everyday interaction, doing things together, all the things that make life on outstations much less bleak than the portrayal here. And the family connections are missing - are Delilah and Samson two lost children without parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, who no one looks out for? Or indeed without fellow petrol-sniffers?”

The thing that happened to me as I watched it was a kind of splitting – which often happens when I watch films about other cultures. I’m more tolerant of values that are at odds with mine; I sit there and think “Well that’s their culture”. I’m prepared to tolerate weirdnesses, bad singing (Tulpan) and other little things. In the instance of this film, it played out in this way. The first part of the film begins with Samson’s courtship of Delilah. She is not interested in him. She makes this clear. She’s not playing games; she repeatedly pushes him away. On only one occasion during the initial part of the film (she buys him food) does she show any positive feeling. She knows that he is trouble. But I think we are positioned to want them to be together (even through their names) even though Samson is going to be nothing but trouble for Delilah. Jane Simpson’s blog entry sums up my misgivings about this aspect of the film in this analysis of the ending:

“The end is a fairytale ending, perhaps a fantasy of male hope - that a beautiful young woman would leave her own car and gun to go off with a petrol-sniffer, come back and find the car and gun still working, that she would have her own outstation, and would then dedicate herself to looking after the brain-damaged, wheel-chair-bound petrol-sniffer on her own. Julie Rigg takes this as the commitment demanded by love. I take it as obsession. Good outcome for Samson, lousy for Delilah.”

Having said that, Warwick Thornton is a very talented filmmaker. I loved his short film Nanna. The actors in Samson and Delilah are great. I loved the small surprises in the narrative. It‘s a really important film. I hope it does really well. It‘s more worthy of attention than Synecdoche – one being a cerebral head-job and one almost a documentary. About us. Australians. And both about despair.

Homage to Marilyn

Not Monroe but French. The writer of The Womens’ Room. Two books had a profound impact on me in the 70s. The World According to Garp and The Women’s Room. It’s a funny combination but they do have some things in common. Marilyn French died recently. I bet she had a significant impact on a lot of women. When my friend Jane and I went walking the other day, she mentioned her death and the impact that she had on her life as well. Her novel made me aware of aspects of my own life, especially the relationship I was then in (in the 70s) and ultimately I broke up with Geoff as a result of this awareness. Marilyn French helped embed the feminism I had; she had a greater impact than Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir on me. I wonder what The Womens’ Room would be like now?

Treacherous ground, the relationship

“The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large.” I wish so much that I had written this sentence but it was that mighty writer Colm Toibin, commenting on Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. Toibin goes on to say “Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’)”, This London Review of Books review is well worth a read just for the extended riff about the penis.

It wasn’t the penis that got my attention in the novel (funnily enough). This is a novel which pivots on the first night of a marriage. Set in 1962, it's about Florence and Edward. “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. “ What interested me was Florence’s lack of interest in sex. Not just lack of interest but a feeling of revulsion; when Edward starts to kiss her, she contemplates throwing up.

I know that it’s possible to go for extended times without sex and without thinking of sex. (Only one of these characteristics applies to me.) Libido is a rare topic of conversation with my friends but sometimes we talk about it. Usually in an embarrassed way; no one really knows what is “normal”. Do you like sex? Is it good with your partner? Are there things you’d like to do? Have done to you? Does the other person want it more or less than you do? How do you manage the imbalance? Who do you lust after? What turns you on? For a theme that is explored at such length in the media, it is really hard to talk about. (And hard often to talk about with your lover or partner too but that's probably a whole other piece of writing.)

Florence finds it hard to talk about. She feels abnormal. I found it strange to read about; its not something I can imagine easily – the extreme distaste she has for sex. I wanted to read more, to find out why, and this provides some of the dramatic tension of the novel. At first I thought the writing was a little coy. Mark Mordue, writing in the SMH, reframes the coyness: “Initially, McEwan's writing is restrained and formal, a quintessentially British tone befitting the time in which it is set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays and "hears" the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan's voice: “This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry… It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to have ordered a red.”” The coy tone is deliberate; it reflects the times, the characters and the seriousness with which they are about to embark on sex, and on intimacy.

Because this is what I think the book is really about – not so much sex as marriage and what it means to make this commitment. What might be lost in the process as well as gained. There is a really graphic description of being kissed; “With his lips clamped firmly on hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her.” (p29) Of course this is about sex but I think it’s also about the process of marrying someone and living with them. Florence is a very controlling, independent personality who has not experienced the joys of intimacy (her family has not provided warmth or contact). The idea of intimacy, and perhaps losing something of herself in the process, scares Florence as much as the physicalities of sex. And the ending bears this out; you have to allow people into the hidden gaps to truly make contact. It’s a risk but the consequence of avoiding risk is borne out in what happens to both Edward and Florence.

What makes me think that McEwen wanted to go beyond sex is the title. He is fond of the single, life-changing incident (almost all his novels pivot round a single incident) but this novel has a very deliberate title which I think takes us further than the single failed sexual encounter of E and F. I googled the beach after I’d finished the book; it’s a really striking piece of coastline. A long narrow spit (18 miles?) with a lagoon on the land side and the sea on the other. Rocky. Treacherous. McEwen said that he kept some rocks from the beach on his desk while he was writing it (and protests after he admitted this meant that he took them back!) Chesil Beach is a storm beach developed by gravel ridges being driven onshore. It was described like this by one poet:
“Twern't a sea - not a bit of it -
twer the great sea hisself rose up level like
and come on right over the ridge and all,
like nothing in this world"

I think McEwen is thinking about the beach as a metaphor for being in a relationship. One reviewer described the spit as being the line between post-war, conservative Britain (the land and lagoon) and the tempestuous changes of the 60’s (the sea) and while its true that this is a strong theme in the book, it’s a bit lumpen as a metaphor. (And if I was being really crude, you could read this bit of verse and look at how McEwen describes Edward’s premature ejaculation – a great piece of writing). However, I think he chose the landscape deliberately to make a point; it could have been set in Torquay or a host of less interesting locations.

A lot of the writing is very fine and that makes the book worth reading, whatever you think it's about: “The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles.” And finally, worth a comparison – Philip Larkin’s poem, Annus Mirabilus.

Let the right one in

“The question of what comprises a ‘good childhood’ in current times has generated significant debate and media attention. While there has always been debate about children, today it is especially salient because of the fast pace of change in information and communication technology and because of the perceived pressures of a consumer-based media culture. According to the charity The Children’s Society, which has conducted a major inquiry into childhood, children’s overall well-being is being endangered by excessive individualism in a competitive modern age. It suggests that the increase in the belief that the “prime duty of the individual is to make the most of her own life, rather than contribute to the good of others” has tilted British culture too far “towards the individual pursuit of private interest and success” with several consequences for children:
- high rates of family break-up
- teenage unkindness
- unprincipled advertising
- too much competition in education
- acceptance of income inequality.”

Been reading this today for work. It’s a paper from Futurelab about curriculum and innovation. I’m always a bit suspicious of the good old days argument. Were we or or parents and grandparents more alive to the good of others? I’m not sure. (I think my father’s generation was better at saving, at “doing without”, but that’s another matter). I was thinking about teenage unkindness this week in the context of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. Luke Davies, in The Monthly, correctly calls this a “gloriously strange and haunted poem of a film”. The screenplay is written by John Lindqvist who also wrote the best selling novel and the film is made by Tomas Alfredson.

Philip French from the Guardian wrote this apropos of the film: "Three of Scandinavia's greatest artists, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, his friend the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the Danish director Carl Dreyer were fascinated by the subject. Virtually all Strindberg heroines are vampires. Munch's most famous painting after The Scream is his Vampyr, while Dreyer's Vampyr is arguably the greatest of all horror films."

I’ve had several encounters with the vampire genre over the years; the sensationally scary Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), the languid and hip, overhyped Anne Rice novels and more recently The Historian ( Elizabeth Kostova). I remember lying in bed in my parents house reading Stephen King scared out of my wits with the dark glass of the night window only inches away and the possibility of vampires just outside. That was 30 years ago – other things scare me more now. What was scary in Let the Right One In was the depiction of adolescence because that is what the film is fundamentally about. Oskar is 12, a lonely bullied boy who is disconnected from his divorced parents. Like most teenagers, he inhabits a little world of his own. He meets Eli, a dishevelled “12 year old” street girl of a vampire.

The vampire riff works fine as a straight narrative but underneath it is a metaphor for the disturbances of adolescence. Blood. Changing bodies. Uncontrollable events and urges. Stuff that you want to do that is forbidden. Desire. Danger. Fitting in or more usually – not fitting in. Loss of innocence – whatever this means in our society. Disconnection and loneliness – the film deals with these threads so well. The violence of adolescence is played out in all sorts of ways in this film including through Oskar who we meet when he is stabbing a tree with a knife (which is handily standing in for one of his classmates).

It’s also beautifully filmed. Luke Davies says it better than I could: “the stillness, - of framing, of pacing – catches us unawares, in the sense that, as in all good ghost stories, we are lulled unsuspecting into that place where the real and the surreal become interchangeable”. The setting is both banal – suburban Sweden, an apartment block, a school, and really beautiful – crisp snow, slender birches, a white dog against the snow. (A white dog against the snow discovering a body hefted upside down from a tree dripping blood – yes it is a vampire film.) That’s the other thing I loved about the film; Eli is by turns kind of fetching street kid and mouth covered in blood, pretty grisly. It looks real and a bit grotesque. And vulnerable. These two, Eli and Oskar, are kind to each other in this world of teenage unkindness and adult neglect. The film has a great ending. It makes you re-think some of the earlier scenes in new ways. The narrative is left open and ambiguous like the character of Eli. Lovely work.

"How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

Been thinking about the word Elegy after seeing the film of that name. John Donne was really the Elegy man and this thought sent me googling the connection. The first one I came across was Elegy XX To his mistress going to bed. Like a lot of Donne’s poetry, it’s about making the most of the limited time we have. In his world view, its best spent in bed with a lover (apart from the time taken with wondering what happens after you die). Sex and death weighed heavily on the man. I liked re-discovering him- here's a snippet from that poem.

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

The word elegy is more usually used to mean a song of mourning and perhaps Donne is thinking of the ephemeralness of this relationship and the frailties of the human bodies, both his and his lovers. As the title of the recent film, it is less harsh than the title of the novel it represents “The Dying Animal”. Roth’s book and this film is about David Kupesh, a man in his 60s who falls in love with a much younger woman played by Penelope Cruz.

The opening of the film shows him in his New York apartment quoting from Tolstoy: "The biggest surprise in a man's life is old age." This quote has the kind of truth about it that made me want to agree out loud in the cinema. Age has been much on my mind lately, not just my own but the people around me. I thought about my father who seems constantly bemused by the treachery of his body. On the weekend he said to me “I used to be an athlete; I could run 100 yards in X (I think he said 11 but this cannot be right) seconds.” He can’t understand where this fitness has gone, what has happened to him. It’s unbearably sad. And perhaps that means that what happens to Kupesh in the film is sad but not tragic (in comparison with my father who is 80 and tragically sad.) After all, Kupesh has the beautiful Cruz fall in love with him.

Kupesh is something of a tosser but the universality of the aging process is the compelling part of this film. It’s the third film I‘ve seen about aging men this year which perhaps tells us something about the demographics of current film producers. And audiences. But ultimately I had to agree partly with Monalah Dargis in the New York Times: “There’s not a hair out of place here or an emotion. It’s as if Ms. Coixet (the director) had tried to quiet the howls of a dying animal.” I thought the film would end about 20 minutes before it did; there is a twist in the plot that shifts our perspective somewhat. What the twist raised for me is the question – do we feel more keenly for the really beautiful? Would the impact be the same if the plot twist was applied to Kupesh’s older lover? (A woman who I identified with quite strongly). Would that have made the story more interesting? Made us forget the twee beach love scenes that populate the early part of the film?

Cruz plays the role as a cipher; unknowable in her beauty. This tease of the audience is set up quite early when Kupesh first sees her – she is carrying a copy of Roland Barthes “The Pleasures of the Text”. And Kupesh’s friend says something along the lines of the unknowability of the truly beautiful woman; it is a complete distraction. I don’t think that Mr Donne would have agreed but he was truly a renaissance man. Head and heart. Go John. He was up for it – the howl of a dying animal in a way that this film isn’t quite. Re-reading Donne's words, there's a robustness and energy that is never felt in the film; the Kupesh character is way too restrained and melancholy. at one stage, Kupesh compares the Cruz character to a painting by Goya and the relationship has that element; a woman reclining to be admired, a woman looking lovely on the beach, a man looking sad in a darkened apartment. Somehow the blood has left this film. I'm going back to Donne for a bit more sex and death... And maybe Philip Roth. And definitely John Updike.

Ego integrity and despair

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.

The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”

Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…

Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...