“The [ballad] form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and the term is now often used as synonymous with any love song, particularly the pop or rock power ballad.”
“In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self contained story, often concise and relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic. Another common feature of ballads is repetition . ..”
-- Wikipedia (so I’m lazy)
“The Ballad of Jack and Rose” is not concise: in fact, when the critics split about in half over the movie, complaints were about rambling and length. It reminds me of my early sermons which, as one listener told me, “had everything in it but the kitchen sink.” Not that anything was irrelevant, but that the focus was missing. It was “self-indulgent,” meaning that things were in there for MY sake and not for the listener’s sake. But entirely earnest.
Much writing is for the writer’s sake, a way of trying to find meaning in real life by working it through in a virtual story. Isn’t that what the New Testament Gospels do? Then why should we be criticized for doing it? But easier said than done. When I wrote my biographical memoir of Bob Scriver, it was not a ballad, not concise, not that focused except by the process of bronze casting. The problem with it was that too many people assumed it would be an indictment of Bob Scriver for bad behavior and they insist on seeing it that way. He did behave badly and so did I and others. But they are pushing their own feelings in and pushing out evidence they don’t like.
It would be easy to read “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” that way, assuming that the relationship between Day-Lewis’ character and his “daughter” is a mirror of Arthur Miller and Rebecca Miller. No doubt she was drawing on her feelings about her own father and her own life, but this is neither a memoir nor an autobiography, nor is it an indictment. It seems more like an exploration, as though she were as innocent as Rose. One critic called it “respiratory,” as though she were thinking while just breathing.
Richard Stern used to tell us to change gender, nationality, physical description, but keep the relational structure for the story. He did this with “Other Men’s Daughters” but, of course, everyone assumed that the novel was straight autobiography anyway. There doesn’t seem a way out of it, unless the reader takes responsibility for seeing more than confession magazine sensationalism. Arthur Miller himself used the people of his life when he wrote and he was hailed as a great man. Are we going to take that away from his daughter?
Beyond that, writing IS a way to figure out larger philosophical issues whether we’re talking about the author or the reader or the watcher of a movie. Somewhere someone compared this story to the basic plot of “The Tempest,” where the sorcerer has been living with his daughter entirely isolated and somewhat enchanted. One of the more intriguing ideas is that the two sons are Caliban and Ariel, though here they aren’t attached to the father. Perhaps, since Arthur Miller was not warm and fuzzy (maybe) the Daniel Day-Lewis figure is really Rebecca Miller’s MOTHER, Inge Morath, and her fusion with her mother is what was broken, sending her out into the world. (They say women marry their mothers.)
There are refrains: the snake (we all know what that means), the houses. Sometimes the metaphors seem a little too too, but they are almost throwaways, kind of good-humored until we get to the “acid pad” where things escape control. Is that freaky girl a Marilyn Monroe character? Or the young woman Miller took up with after Morath died?
What I see here most of all is people who have built small worlds for themselves (like the developer) and have been able to maintain them Even Jack’s oddball girlfriend and her sons know what they’re about, have done it before with various success. When one reflects on the lives of Rebecca Miller and her family, it’s clear that they are very much members of an “international artistic elite,” who could move with confidence that they would be interpreted as doing something gifted and meaningful and who could choose seclusion.
Chris Boot said of Morath, “[H]er approach to a story was 'to let it grow', without any apparent concern for narrative structure, trusting in her experience and interests to shape her work rather than in an editorial formula... She unsentimentally made pictures that were guided by her relationship to a place... Similarly, her photographs of people are born of intimacy without sentimentality. It is as if the presentation of relationships takes the place of story structure, and her work is best understood as an ongoing series of observations of the life she made for herself.”
These remarks could apply to this “ballad” as well. The accusation of “inscrutability” and “capriciousness” that Jack uses to describe Rose’s mother might be explained as personal (idiosyncratic) attachment and lack of sentimentality. Sentimentality -- after all -- just means being conventional. That’s why greeting cards can be mass produced.
The “message” that Miller seems to be pursuing in this story is that people love different worlds in different ways and that an environment that is too privileged, too protected, too attached, can be deforming from a conventional point of view. And yet it can also allow the growth of ox-like strength (the ox is a strong Zen symbol) and the ability to find a new place and attach there with new friends.
I wonder whether Miller really understands how intensely many of us attach to that world of Jack’s and Rose’s and how hard it was to see Jack surrender to the idea that his beloved commune was only one way to live, made possible by inherited money, no different than any gated community. I only believed that Jack saw that the Beau Bridges’ characters housing projects could also be valid because it was Daniel Day-Lewis. In truth I will never give up the dream of the green commune on a seashore somewhere with beloved people. It’s an ox I don’t want gored.
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