4 FILMS ABOUT ART AND NUDITY

The computer that runs the Netflix algorithm has decided that I like art -- and also nudity.  They sent me four movies.  Okay, I picked them, but they sent me a limited list of streaming films.

“The Thomas Crown Affair”

“The Artist and the Model”

“The Woodmans”

“Interior. Leather Bar.” 

These four films bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever except that the computer evidently noted they are about art and contain nudity.  Everyone knows that real art is about nude people.

STANDARD ALL-AMERICAN SCHLOCK

Renee Russo, Pierce Brosnan

“The Thomas Crown Affair” is about an art thief played by Pierce Brosnan as though he were still James Bond.  The insurance bounty hunter is Rene Russo, very “Vanity Fair,” very "Vogue."  They go through glorious shenanigans evidently guided by a travel agent who likes warm climates.  It’s all nothing.  Posing.  Money.  A child’s notion of what being rich might be like.  Also a child’s notion of how grownups have sex.  It’s all a matter of who can fool whom and who’s tougher than the other. 

Budget: $48,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: £916,452 (UK) (20 August 1999)

Gross: $69,304,264 (USA) (11 February 2000)

ART HOUSE FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM

The Artist and the Model in the Studio

“The Artist and the Model” is at the opposite pole of the spectrum.  Black and white, French (mostly), about an ancient sculptor married to Claudia Cardinale (you might not recognize her) and waiting for WWII to end.  A fleeing resistance fighter, a pretty young woman, is taken in by them and becomes his model.  She knows NOTHING about art.  The old man treats her like an object while he makes old-fashioned plaster statues of her that, as she points out, don’t look like her.  But they grow together into a relationship that includes the leaf-filtered sun, another resistance fighter, a Nazi officer who loves art, and a disapproving old woman.  

Box Office

Opening Weekend: $16,900 (USA) (2 August 2013)

Gross: $107,300 (USA) (6 September 2013)

DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A REAL ARTIST

Francesca Woodman, both photographer and model

“The Woodmans” is a straightforward documentary about an actual young gifted photographer who committed suicide.  The parents are an odd couple linked by a passion for art.  Both their children were artists, but the girl in particular was gifted, impatient, always pushing the limits.  Until she literally went over the edge.  Her parents, brother and friends talk to the camera quietly with much honesty and insight.  We see a great deal of her work, which is often of herself, nude, in tricky contexts like under fragments of wallpaper or lying on a sifting of flour.  Her journal is always present.  Her father, who was more attuned to her, leaves his abstract art to do photography rather like hers.  Her mother, a ceramicist, has success in her work but cannot solve the riddle of her daughter.  

Box Office

Opening Weekend: $5,874 (USA) (21 January 2011)

Gross: $38,330 (USA) (26 August 2011)

STAGED DOCUMENTARY CALIFORNIA IMPERSONATION

"Interior. Leather bar."

“Interior. Leather bar.” is another “documentary” about a forty-minute section of “Cruising” that was cut because of censor's ratings.  It was considered too obscene.  Not even Al Pacino in the role of a cop who is undercover in the SM scene can persuade the censor.  So this is supposed to be an account of an attempt to recreate those censored minutes, after a lot of time has passed, and a young actor (Val Lauren) has been hired to “be” Pacino.  He is flattered, eager, philosophically on board, and so are the other young men who have been hired as background.  They have not really been made aware of what might happen and they are nervous.  They ask each other,  “Have you ever played a gay before?  Have you ever kissed a guy?  Are you straight?”  

The point is supposed to be, in part, what impact this short scene has on the actors and on the viewers.  The director makes an impassioned speech about being open and actors accepting all human experience, and so on.  As it turns out, there is explicit sex  but we’re assured it’s between two committed guys, maybe married.  There’s no real SM, just leather accouterments.  Some spanking and boot-licking.  

Box Office

Opening Weekend: $5,218 (USA) (3 January 2014)

Gross: $40,862 (USA) (11 April 2014)

Let’s be real.  Movies are supposed to make money.  Scandal is one way to make money.  Doesn’t matter much whether the scandal is about the actors, the director or the subject.  The REAL scandals about the world at large generally go unremarked. 

Let’s look at the art.  Thomas Crown’s “art” is all Impressionists in museums.  We learn nothing about the value of art or why the Impressionists are still all the rage (so is Thomas Kinkade) or the necessity of protecting fragile paintings.  I flinched when the thief folded the admired masterpiece in half, which would be likely to flake a lot of paint off.  But the paintings are pretty, familiar, and certainly sell for a LOT at auctions.

Sculpture by Maillol

The sculptures in “The Artist and the Model” are pretty standard -- faux Malliol.  The idea that one specific piece is a life-fulfilling masterpiece is a little bit bogus, but at least it’s based on the idea that a piece of art has integrity and value for itself.  The idea and execution of a work of art has meaning to the artist himself and, in fact, is drawn from his experience of life.  The Nazi fan reminds us that even the most objective people can understand this value and study it in a second-level experience.  The model keeps the focus from leaving real life, the sensorium that is the source of art.

The Woodmans

“The Woodmans” is two artists, married, talking about their artist daughter who committed suicide.  Her work was self-photography, usually nude and sometimes on video.  The art is shown to us and explained.  Many people think that being an intense artist is a kind of psychopathology: the first thing you know, the artist is cutting off his ear.  But by the end of this film (it sneaks up on you) the obsession is not with the art, but the success of the art.  And the real scandal might be that no one paid attention or valued Woodman's work until she committed suicide.  At one "jump" she became valuable and so did her art.

Travis Mathews

“Interior.  Leather Bar.” is not the same thing.  It is a xerox of a xerox of a xerox, each version imprinted with the ambitious narcissism of young men focused on sexuality.  There’s a lot of talk about freedom and reality, etc. but in forty minutes of fiddling around -- always keeping us aware that we’re seeing a simulacrum -- it doesn’t look like anything much is revealed.

These kinds of value judgments can’t be made by a computer, no matter how elegant the algorithm, because the algorithm IS a simulacrum, a derived reduction.  It has no sensorium, no empathy cells behind its forehead, limited ability (making lists of what to mail out and to whom), and only the wildest guess about what its programmers thought would make money for THEM (Netflix) rather than the film makers.

Jean Rochefort (sculptor) and Aida Folch (model)

My preferences and sympathies should be obvious by now.  I’ll watch almost anything, but big blockbusters attract me the least.  I prefer my French impressionism “straight up” as in the movie about the old sculptor as both his life and WWII end.  As for the "Leather Bar" movie, It’s clear that taking on a dark category of underground people while employing safe vanilla actors, is courting ridicule, even if you accept them as artists.  

But it is the actual lives and work of artists as understood -- or misunderstood -- that can break your heart.  So, I watch.

DO ENGLISH TEACHERS READ "HEAVY METAL"?

Recently I was talking to someone (young, bicoastal, male) and told him that for a while, maybe fifteen years ago, I was a regular reader of “Heavy Metal” graphic adult illustrated magazine. He, being convinced that English teachers are enforcers of good grammar and manners, hopelessly prissy and rigid, was vastly amused.

I had a former student serving time for murder one. I thought of him as a good writer, so I sent him books. He asked for “Heavy Metal,” so I got it, but I never send any print to anyone without reading it first. It was much like “The Crow,” one of his favorite movies and also “Near Dark.” a cult vampire movie, which he packed around in hopes of finding a VCR so he could see his fav scene (the blood-spattered small town redneck bar). Any idiot would say I was enabling, including me, but I hoped I could somehow turn the tide. I’d let him watch it if I could sit alongside and comment.

For instance, I would watch “Near Dark” and point out that it’s about the marginal powerless person who has finally found a group to belong to that is as hated as himself and they are able to take revenge on the bully oppressors. “The Crow” was about the same, except in the deteriorated city where the hero is a kind of Batman who can swoop in to save the small, victimized child from gobbling exploiters. It’s a mix of Gothic thriller and romance. I’d point this out and he’d snort, “Oh, Mrs. Scriver, you just KILLED IT!” which was both ironic and true. But my fangs were not long enough or sharp enough or something. The dynamics of the tale were undead.

The one Heavy Metal story that has really stayed with me was about a bored octopus, beautifully drawn. The octopus divided into two humans, heterosexual, and made love between the two halves of itself -- that WAS graphic and beautiful. All underwater, an erotic ballet. Then, exhausted, the octopus mutated back into itself. It was an ingenious concept, beautifully drawn. Not a printed WORD in the whole thing.

So when I was in Great Falls this week, I picked up the latest issue. I was a little surprised at how different the stories have become. These are almost like Prince Valiant, or maybe Prince Valiant has become more like these stories. The drawing continues to be elegant but now the hero seems more like a “normal” guy, except that like all genre heroes someone is after him and he has an amazing ability to survive grave damage. The plots and supporting cast are a dense mix of James Bond, Lord of the Rings, classic children’s fairy tales and fantasy, and plenty more along those lines. Harry Potter shows up as a little old man. Christian and Islamic ideas, Masons, Knights Templar -- much of the stuff is in “The Novel: an Alternative History” by Kevin Moore. It’s enough to make you believe in Jung’s shared unconscious.

There are no children. I wonder why: pedophiliaphobia? There is violence, more subtle than “blam, splat.” Sex is implied but not pictured. There are careful drawings of beautiful interiors and fantastic underground passages, peopled by Star Wars. No blacks. (Some greens and blues.)

The first story is the one I like best: “Animal’s” -- told by a dolphin. The drawing was like the octopus story I remember. The creator is listed as E. Bilal. http://wn.com/Enki_Bilal_working_in_his_Studio He’s in Paris and the vids are great. The story itself seems to be part of a series about two men, a woman, little bionic seahorses and lobsters who are servants, all on a boat.

“Wisher” is a little more conventional -- well, given fairies and djinns. Familiar elements to this reader, who went down every fairy tale and myth shelf in the local library by the end of the fourth grade and went on to sci-fi just as it was beginning. This is what English teachers think about besides grammar: “The Red Planet Mars” and how it is reincarnated in “Star Wars,” which goes back to Norse myth and English fantasy writers like Tolkien and George MacDonald (my fav), Inklings. Arthur Rackham illustrations. If YOUR English teacher wasn’t up to it, I’m sorry. But I must admit that I only now realized that “The Dark Crystal” is considered a vampire movie. (It was on a list.)

I see that Heavy Metal magazine in the States was originally the French Métal Hurlant which translates literally as "Howling Metal" or “Screaming Metal.” You could look all that up. See if you can get a research paper out of it.

It seems to me that the graphic genre is bending back into the past to pick up North African exotica/erotica while expressing a surreal but glamourous aesthetic and an athletic potency more Australian than Austrian. Very “Black Swan.” There’s a sense of despairing post-war existentialism (the last best planet) along with a defiant explosion of other emotions: regret, resistance, determination, maybe even alliance. Many contemporary movies seem to have the same vision. Technology is magic; old men are untrustworthy; women are replaceable, but . . . The only animals I see are the horses of the Four Riders of the Apocalypse -- skulls for heads. (Sumptuous illustrations.) Is anyone surprised? The current “real” reality is not a young man’s world, unless they want to be soldiers, but young men can come alive in these pages.

When I reflect on how this old lady former English teacher developed an affinity for Heavy Metal, I think at first about my years as an undergrad when I babysat for an editor of “Rogue” magazine who kept piles of the mags everywhere. But it goes back even earlier to our childhood box of Classic comics. My brothers and I had them all and kept them obsessively in order (they were numbered) even as we read them again and again. You could put a section of “Lorna Doone” into Heavy Metal and it would fit.

I had a serious break with a good friend because her son married a Japanese girl who loves Manga and my friend thinks that Manga is indecent, sinful and should be eliminated. I don’t read Manga, barely recognize it, but I defended it. She couldn’t handle that. To her, the world will end unless it obeys the Catholic Church. The irony is that she renewed contact with me in the first place because she wanted reassurance that she was educated and “with it.” I guess she thought that would be like an English teacher -- all prissy and corrective. At least the young men in the world have moved past that.

A NEW GENRE OF WRITING

Now and then someone expresses the desire “to enter your life.” Mine. It’s a little scary. They imagine that if they come into my house and ask me questions, they’ll be able to figure out what it is “to be me.” But this is an impossible goal. It’s taken me my whole life to be me, as I am today, and I’m still working on it. It’s not a matter of “life-style:” diet, clothing and interior decoration -- though the advertisers of better things than I have would like you to think so.

The way my life "is" consists of a way of thinking, but not according to advertising glamour. This way of thinking probably cost me and the UUA about fifty thousand dollars at seminary and the U of Chicago Div School. (I’m not counting undergrad. And the cost would be much greater now.) And yet any interested journalist or high school student assumes they can think about theological and churchly matters as well as I or others educated this way can. It’s not a matter of being smarter or “having more education,” both of which lead to the accusation, “You think you’re better than the rest of us.” It’s more like learning to speak a language.

It’s more about stepping inside a circle -- not a circle that encompasses faith-based believers -- but a circle that accepts a certain way of thinking and a certain body of assumptions. It wasn’t just a matter of money, but a matter of time and access, which can both be very expensive. So much so, in fact, that I think there is some argument to be made that all this “fundamentalism” in third world countries (Including ones internal to the US) is essentially about the lack of time and access to do what it takes to become a true theologian or ethicist or comparative religionist. Under straitened circumstances -- both censorship and poverty -- one can only repeat what one was told, without questions.

The response from the ordinary person might be that religion understood as requiring an elite education is a different kind of fundamentalism, that is a lot like snobby gate-keeping, creating an artificial priestly caste.

Theology (okay, and philosophy, since some argue that theology is always about the theos, which doesn’t interest me though I can talk that language) is about questions, but not idle or random questions. Rather, what one learns and uses is a range of protocols, what the U of C called “method,” as in, “what is your method?” Every argument is on two levels, one of which is the “method” (basically a justification and defense of why this specific method should be used for this particular inquiry) and the content, which is what the method turns up. My content never includes much about “theos” because it doesn’t start with any method looking for a big “Guy in the Sky.” If you start with “who is God?” naturally you end up with a description of God. “He” takes up the whole foreground.

So now I’m going to jump over to a different “discipline,” that of writing fiction, which we normally think of in terms of the novel. Maybe I’m going out of the frying pan into the fire.

For some reason we popularly privilege novels above almost any other kind of writing, though memoir -- which is supposed ambivalently to be a kind of novel that really happened -- runs a close second. In fact, lately we seem to be obsessed with the line between novel and memoir, that purports to be a difference in method, but which I would propose keeps slipping over into an argument about content. The key questions seem to be “did that really happen?” and “are you really who you say you are?” One is allowed, as a memoirist, to write only about one’s own certifiable ethnic, economic, gender, educational, and geographical self. If it’s fiction, though, anything goes.

These thoughts came to me in part because of Sunday’s review in the New York Times of a book called “A Happy Marriage,” by Rafael Yglesias who is capable of considerable eloquence on the problem. He chose to write “fiction,” about the actual fact of his marriage. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/books/review/Watrous-t.html?hpw There’s a link to a podcast interview. His thirty years of marriage ended with the death of his wife.

I called my book about Bob Scriver a “biographical memoir,” in an attempt to signal that it was fact-based, but filtered through my own experience. Some readers were “surprised” (as they put it) and covertly sneered that “so much of this book is not about Bob -- it’s about YOU!” Other readers were shocked that I told stories that did not contribute to the “legend” that so many expect when they read about “Western artists.” It’s a kind of dream that they feel I denied them. In other words, expectations rule. Readers are also tyrants.

The U of Calgary Press called it “uncensored,” but in fact I didn’t put in the worst things I could have included. And the U of Oklahoma Press wanted to exclude anything but the monetary value of the bronzes, the prizes it won, and praiseful gratitude to B. Byron Price and Charles Rankin, both of whom make their living as parasites on artists and writers. (Publishing, editing, institutional management) They also wanted to eliminate all four of Bob’s wives and the other “cloud of women,” for their own reasons. They would particularly liked to have eliminated me. Still would. This is not ivory tower stuff, elevated idealism.

All of which is funny/ha-ha, in a lot of ways, but also illuminating. Value in the arts and in many of the “soft” sciences like psych, anthro, sociology, and the like, depend upon reputation and popularity. Therefore, certain parties -- writers or not -- are always interested in enforcing their view because it affects their income which is based on their prestige. When memoirs sell better than fiction, they tout memoir. When fiction is selling better, they make the pitch for “brilliant” fiction. So these distinctions have real consequences.

But Yglesias was thinking about something different. As he said, he didn’t want readers to be dissecting analytically what happened in the past. Rather he was trying to create an experience (well, okay, the illusion of an experience) so that what the page told made it “happen” in the mind of the reader as he or she read. THIS seems to be the real power of good fiction: that for a little while one really IS inside that circle of consciousness shared with the author. Maybe this is one of the key premises of what is called “modernity,” which includes stream of consciousness and gritty reality. Post-modern, then, tries to occasionally step out of the circle of constructed reality into a constructed UNreality (magic realism?) or into a disillusioned analysis, a political point of view. Or just aesthetics, in which the prettiness of the writing adorns a story that is meaningless. The way some theology can be.

I don’t care a whole lot about the above, except that I want to increase my skill in managing the experience of the reader. I respect Barrus, who writes to create or re-create an experience for himself and leaves his readers to “try to get it.” It seems to me that this draws another narrative circle, an even tighter one, right on top of the boundary between fiction and memoir -- almost like story in search of an explanation, or an easing, even a therapy. It has cost him a lot, in time, money and pain -- and has taken his whole life so far.

It's not over yet. The basis of our ability to collaborate may be our interest in a method that is still being defined, neither fiction nor memoir. Strangely, the new element that has entered the circle is videotaped narrative, both stream of consciousness and surreal. It is a growing edge, possibly a new genre of what we used to call “writing,” meant for a new generation of readers.