Last night, relieved to have finished my struggle with “The Dying Gaul” -- rewarding though it was -- I got all arranged in my mother’s old “lady chair” with the heating pad on my back, a down puffy over my legs (up on an ottoman so Squibbie could stretch out on them), Crackers nestled in my left arm, and the “clicker” handy alongside a big mug of green tea. The evening’s movie was the new version of “A Room with a View.” I so loved the 1985 Ivory/Merchant movie with its goofy but lovable characters and romantic world view.
What I saw was a small, brown, pinched and mocking story that I hardly recognized. It’s not worth commenting further. Check out the MANY similar cries of outrage on imdb.com. Some blamed Masterpiece Theatre with its worship of minor classics (classic being questioned as a category anyway). Others thought the problem was the writer and director team trying to overtop something beyond their capacity. I’m going to move those ideas to a closely related topic: the middle-class yearning to seem "intellectual" because it seems to them “respectable,” and then the opportunists who suggest cynicism as the alternative.
The Respectables don’t know why the classics are considered good and they don’t know the actual content of the books, operas, symphonies, plays, and so on -- but they know the names of them, they can afford to buy the popular versions of them, and thus they generate money for those who create and promote them. The proof of their value ends up being the incomes of the “best-selling” authors, musicians, etc. which lifts THEM into the middle-class. The promoters who control these folks are invisible and therefore can slip up into the high income brackets without any personal obligation to be respectable. They have the power to control the careers of the creative, forcing them to be “product,” to infinitely replicate “success.”
It seems there are two ways to be seriously creative, NOT in the terms of managers, publishers or impresarios. One is to dive down to the roots of the culture and see it anew, to shift the paradigm, to peel our eyes, to make us all gasp in a renaissance, coming out of the woolly womb of the admired into a cold world of insight that changes our lives. The other is to go out to the edge of society where the lost, the drugged, the nearly-dead, the impoverished, the ejected, the “other,” is expressing the last little core flicker of what it is to be human, whether it be despair, fury, or abandonment in passion. (Yes, I’m invoking my “theology” of the circle-edge and the center/axis mundi.)
Both of these sources are feared, hated and -- Respectables hope -- contained by mercantilism, which is now failing so that the edge and the center have much louder voices. Who you think those innovating people are, what you think they are saying, depends upon your courage and the acuity of your senses: not so much raw mechanical sounds, colors, and movements as the ability to integrate them into meaning. But you can count on two demographics: the very young and the very old. The young are already open, some of the old have struggled a long time to open up.
Artists are exploring extremes. The following is a quote from an efriend: “Anna Linderstam, the Swedish visiting artist . . . is very "edgy". She has her models pose for 10 - 20 hours so she can catch them at the moment they collapse from fatigue. She also does video and her masterpiece is a 20 minute video of herself hyperventilating until she passes out. She said that girls in Sweden squeeze each other until they faint on the playground . . . Anna did 12 takes and chose the best 3. The audience was rapt . . . It was strangely compelling.” This is just inside the line. A boy at Cinematheque set himself on fire for the camera -- that’s OUTSIDE the line. Over the edge. Self-destruction is cynical.
It exasperates me that when I say, “I’m a writer,” all the well-dressed, beautifully coiffed middle-class people (meaning that they dwell in the middle between the edge-adventure and the center-meditation) are sooo impressed. Last week it was a bank cashier who cashed my quarterly Lulu royalty check for $23.45. Sometimes it is a local mother who wants me to teach her child how to become famous. Only one man in town, when he said, “Oh, are you a writer?” and I fired back, “Must you say it as though being a writer was being a gerenuk or something?” was abashed and understood. (A gerenuk is a long-necked African gazelle, a trophy head for the wall.) He thinks this town is “culturally in-grown.” No kidding. But the way to sophistication is not paved with defiance of the authorities, which appears to be his hobby.
Not that the authorities don’t need defying as they blunder along. The churches are asleep, the school is routine, the councilmen are obsessed with lawns, the bank is predatory, and the car wash change machine is always running out of quarters. Afflictions large and small. Not that the town is so virtuous: two convicted sex predators on the state list when I looked, neglect of many kinds, marriages of convenience, drug dealers (the estimate is six of them in a town of 350) and arrogant newcomers with trivia on their minds.
The problem is that they are sooooo sure they are right, that their categories are in order and that their goals are worthy. Their hero was George W. Bush so his fall bewildered them. They believe in the valor of soldiers so the publicized murders and tortures wound them. They thought the stock market was something real, so now they can hardly bear to read the newspapers. They thought they were feeding the nation and now find that their grandmothers are dying from eating sweet baked goods.
This is what harrows the ground for new growth. Now the writers and artists and musicians begin -- not with a new opera, but with a new art form altogether. Maybe electronic. For all we know, maybe telepathic. So deep as to be defined as religious. Tillich said that valid religious symbols are not “thought up” as by an ad agency, but rather come upon us in a flash. Ideas will pop up everywhere, good bad whatever. One or two of them will change the world.
Merchant/Ivory (and their key partner, Ruth) had a vision that blossomed on the trellis of Forster’s novel, “A Room with a View.” It WAS middle-class though their partnership was based on their unconventional personal relationship and therefore celebrated the glamour of true love in a foreign country. This new version sneers at that but offers no replacement, simply vandalizes both Forster and Merchant/Ivory.
Push it over the edge. Stuff it out of sight. Sit down to watch “The Dying Gaul” with a clipboard at hand.
No comments:
Post a Comment