Primitive Information

What if Jim Stark, James Dean’s character from Rebel Without a Cause, left home after the end of the movie, learned some sick dance moves, and became an instructor in a string of cheesy resorts in the Catskills? That’s essentially the character Patrick Swayze portrays in Dirty Dancing, which has been playing incessantly on the TV guide channel of our cable service for the past several days. In catching bits and pieces of the flick — getting sucked in against all reason and better judgment — I’ve come to realize what a weirdly remarkable film it is. And the fact that Swayze died earlier this year adds a touch of poignancy to seeing him in this role, arguably the one he’s best known for.

In the world of the Catskills that the film presents, there are three levels of society: the upper-crust guests and resort owners, the snobbish waitstaff who are only a few years at Yale away from joining them, and the lowly dance crew and ordinary workers who come from the other side of the tracks. The central plot point in the movie is the abortion needed by Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), the dancing partner of Johnny Castle (Swayze). Everyone from the first group outlined above believes it was Johnny who got Penny pregnant, when really it was a jerky waiter who can’t be bothered to help her.

Baby (Jennifer Grey), daughter of a doctor and guest at the resort (Jerry Orbach) steps in, secretly providing the funds for the abortion and learning Penny’s dance moves so she can team with Castle at an important gig. Amazingly, there is not a single hint in the movie to suggest Penny should not get an abortion; it’s simply taken for granted she must and will get one, even though at the time of the film (1963) it was still illegal. I doubt a film with a story like this could even be made today, though in 1987 it apparently passed without much comment.

Predictably, Baby and Johnny fall in love. But it’s not what you’d expect. Far less than being about Baby’s awakening to the liberating underground world of the dancers — an awakening that happens almost at once in the early scene when she helps bring watermelons to a late-night juke party in the workers’ shack — the story really becomes about Johnny’s quest for approval and acceptance in Baby’s world. Now supposedly, according to IMBD, Val Kilmer was originally offered the role of Johnny, and Sarah Jessica Parker was considered for Baby. Needless to say, it’s unimaginable without Swayze and Grey in these parts. Daughter of Joel Grey, who was so scintillating as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret (stage and film versions), Grey has largely disappeared after a botched nose job during the 90s.

Meanwhile, Swayze in Dirty Dancing is simply astonishing. His dance scenes have energy, agility, and a feeling of pure joy that I’ve rarely witnessed on screen before or since. It’s no accident that, as accomplished a dancer as Grey is, the floor is cleared for Swayze’s virtuoso moment in the climactic scene of the film. And the acting he’s asked to do — the lines he’s asked to deliver — alongside the dancing truly defies description. What, for example, are we supposed to make of the scene when Baby asks Johnny, as they nuzzle in bed after making love, if he’s been with “a lot of women”?

Typical of the role-reversal throughout the movie, what ought to be a moment of reassurance for Baby turns into one for Johnny instead, as he describes being “used” by an endless parade of rich women shoving keys into his hands, “sometimes several a day — different ones!” etc., the implication being that Johnny, coming from the streets and not knowing any better, mistakes their momentary desire for acceptance and access to their world. That acceptance and access, we come to find out, can only be partially provided by Baby, and ultimately must come from her father, the upright and moralistic doctor who winds up getting drawn into Penny’s abortion fiasco.

This is where, I think, the film channels Rebel, which in so many ways is about Oedipal struggles and homoerotic male bonding. While women can cross the boundaries between high and low, doctor and dancer, resort suite and worker shack, only man-to-man love can truly obliterate those boundaries and bring the opposite poles together. It’s only in the moment that Baby’s father discovers it was the devious waiter, and not Johnny, who got Penny pregnant, that he shakes Johnny’s hand and welcomes him wholly into the main ballroom world. In a larger sense, as old fogies rise to shake and shimmy with the dirty dancers, we’re meant to understand this as a watershed moment, the birth of the 60s — I guess.

Somehow Swayze is able to pull this character off, wince-worthy script and storyline and all, while somehow maintaining a sense of dignity and even grandeur. He’ll be missed.

Tags: Film, Obit by dhadbawnik
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I felt ambivalent about the new, Jane Campion-directed film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Why? Biopics are always hit or miss, and I’m not a fan of Campion. When the film played for a week at a nearby theater and then disappeared before we had a chance to go, I figured I’d have to wait to watch it on DVD sometime next year.

But then Eileen Myles came to town, and it turned out that she wanted to see it, too, and Michael Kelleher discovered it was still showing way out in B.F.E., and, well — I couldn’t pass up a chance to go see it with the two of them, and Mike’s wife, Lori.

The verdict: decidedly mixed.

In Campion’s hands, the movie’s a nice enough love story, largely told from the point of view of Fanny Brawne. The actors are pleasant and unknown–thank God she didn’t plug in someone like Collin Farell and Reese Witherspoon. As Eileen pointed out, Keats’s accent was all wrong; we were talking on the way there about Tom Clark’s great book about Keats, Junkets on a Sad Planet, “Junkets” being a nickname that developed out of the way Keats pronounced his name. In the film the accent was way too properly British.

It’s a minor quibble, but symptomatic of the larger problem with the movie. In a nutshell, what’s missing is exactly the essence–the essential accuracy, the right details, the poetry.

Here’s an example: Campion seems to want to establish the idea that Brawne’s talent for sewing and embroidery puts her on equal footing with Keats and his poetry — as she has Brawne declare to Charles Brown and Keats in the opening scene (paraphrasing), “More people appreciate my sewing than your poetry — and I make money at it.” Zing! We’re reminded that she was “up all night” working on an embroidered pillow-slip for John’s brother Tom, who has just died of TB, and Brawne is shown literally bringing needlework into the drawing room where Brown and Keats work on poems. Fair enough point, but it misses the point of Keats struggling to make room for Fanny in his world of poetry, and her efforts to meet him there.

In one scene, Fanny storms into the drawing room looking for Keats, only to find Brown. (Needing a domestic villain, Campion–unfairly, I think–tries to make Brown a wet blanket in the flirtation between Fanny and Keats.) Desperate to impress Keats, she tells Brown she’s read all of Homer, Spenser, Milton, etc. etc., all in the past week. Brown quizzes her, quickly poking holes in this claim, and she storms off in a huff. The point seems to be that she has the native wit to understand Keats, and the fineness and importance of his poetry, without actually doing the homework.

But in fact, it’s not true. Quite by accident, I discovered evidence of this the very next morning after we saw the film. In an article I happen to be reading about Spenser for class, the author suddenly shifts gears to write about a stanza that was added to a canto in The Faerie Queen — by John Keats. Charles Brown claimed it was “the last stanza of any kind that he wrote before his lamented death.” Apparently, Keats was marking the text for Fanny Brawne at the time. There’s simply no way that Brawne could have understood the stanza, let alone the highly allegorical and difficult poem as a whole, unless she had undertaken a fairly serious study of it.

How do you depict this in a film? I don’t know. But Campion doesn’t even try. She instead substitutes scenes of Keats and Brawne quoting his poetry at one another, with bits from Keats’s letters sprinkled in. Obviously, she was worried about getting lost in the esoteric minutia of “the life of the mind” — but the struggle to carve out a space for himself in that life, even while dealing with the workaday grind of “real” life (sickness, poverty, issues of class, etc.) constitute the real drama of Keats. His ambivalent, troubled welcoming of Fanny into that life is the real mystery and miracle of their relationship. Campion doesn’t come close to capturing it.

But we had fun seeing it, and debating about it on the long, stormy ride home.

Tags: Film, Literary by dhadbawnik
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That Tim Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, was a bit unstable is beyond question. But was he mad? I think of this as I’m still reading Foucault’s History of Madness and sifting through recent posts on other “madmen” such as Blake, The Joker, Henry Darger — as well as Andrew’s mention of another favorite of mine, Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp of Into the Wild — who, like Treadwell, invented a persona for himself and found death in the Alaskan wilderness.

The film is quite disturbing. This would be true even if Herzog hadn’t given airtime to some marginal characters who are wacky in their own right, most notably a coroner who takes his role in the documentary a little too seriously. Treadwell’s own footage, often capturing truly majestic scenes of bears and foxes feeding and cavorting in the background, is breathtaking though ominous given that we know early on he’ll be killed and eaten by one of the bears. In almost every one of these scenes, Treadwell himself enters the frame to rant about enemies he believes are trying to stop him, or else rhapsodize about the animals he loves. It’s here that we watch him reveal himself, building up the “kind warrior” persona he’s created while tearing down the walls protecting the deeply vulnerable person inside.

Here, some quotes from Foucault might be useful:

Madness begins when images, which are so close to dreams, are compounded by the affirmation or the negation that are essential to mistakes. It is in that sense that the Encyclopedie proposed its famous definition of madness: abandoning reason ‘to walk confidently away from it, with the firm persuasion that one is following it, that, it seems to me, is what is called genuinely mad‘.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the madman is not so much the victim of an illusion, of a hallucination of the senses or a movement of his mind. He is not misled, he is making a mistake.

Madness begins where man’s relationship to the truth becomes cloudy and unclear.

Madness is precisely the point of contact between the oneiric [dreamlike] and the erroneous, covering in all its various forms the surface where they meet, which joins and separates them at the same time.

[In the above, it's important to note Foucault is not defining madness once and for all, but tracing its meaning for various ages and times.]

What’s illuminating here is the idea of madness as mistake, an idea that Herzog and others seem to share when it comes to analyzing Treadwell. Even though Treadwell mentions many times in narrating his own footage that he risks death by living in such proximity to the bears, there’s a sense he doesn’t really believe this; he worships the bears, thinks he’s one of them, and therefore in the end they won’t hurt him.

In his own narration of the footage, Herzog says that he sees only cruel and indifferent nature when he looks at the bears. This is the essence of the critique voiced many times by others in the film: Treadwell did not see reality. He was in error, and it killed him.

But perhaps Treadwell simply saw a different truth. It’s astonishing how often the word “love” comes up when he speaks of the bears and foxes and nature. I was struck by the similarity to Blake’s ecstatic visions, his seeing a chorus of angels rather than a ball of burning rock when he looked at the sun. Yet Blake was an artist and poet. Darger likewise found an outlet for his visions in art and writing, and even McCandless comes across as a highly sensitive amateur version of Thoreau or Muir in his diaries.

By all indications, the first part of Treadwell’s life was at best mediocre and at worst a failure. He had been an average student and went to college on a diving scholarship, but dropped out and drifted into a life of drinking and drugs. He became an actor and was devastated when he lost out on the bartender part in Cheers to Woody Harrelson. A friend suggested he go to Alaska to see the bears, and his life instantly changed from one of obscurity and depression to one of bliss and a kind of kooky celebrity.

I think Herzog’s right to see Treadwell as perhaps primarily an actor and filmmaker. This is his response, his outlet, his art. The creation of this character who stars alongside bears and foxes, not so much interpreting their world as placing himself within it. There’s a poignancy to his constant urge to come close, to touch the bears, even if it means fondling a mound of bear shit. To again and again be able to scare an approaching bear off. This is an audition where failure equals death. And for the better part of 13 years, he passed.

It’s no wonder that Treadwell preferred the ecstasy of his insane embrace of nature to the dullness of our culture’s insane rejection of it. That he found it more and more difficult to endure the long months away from his “grizzly maze,” where the stakes were so high and his character had attained such reality. That just before his death he flew back quite late in the season after an unpleasant encounter with a flight attendant in the “real world,” where disputes are so petty and abhorrent.

There’s a temptation to see the whole film as fake, but that’s only because the reality it depicts is so incredibly strange. Treadwell is Blake or Darger or McCandless with a camera and without any relieving introspection, because self awareness is exactly what’s sacrificed to enter the mistake of his dream. But to see it as only a mistake allows us to ignore what his life, with its risks and ecstasies, had to say — and that, too, is an error.

Tags: Film, Foucault by dhadbawnik
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Films often capture the zeitgeist of a given moment, whether intentionally or not. For some reason, while watching The Dark Knight last night at our local theater, I kept thinking of one my late-80s favorites, Die Hard. Like the latest Batman flick, that film features a wily villain who stays one step ahead of the cops and plays a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the only man who, operating alone and outside the law, can stop him. Like The Dark Knight, Die Hard has clear overtones of terrorism and a theme that touches on the ineffectiveness of our vast police apparatus, with its rules and procedures.

But that’s where the similarities end. The villain in Die Hard — played by Alan Rickman with a delicious sleaziness — is not a terrorist but a thief, creating chaos as a subterfuge for a spectacular heist. The man who stops him — Bruce Willis, at the top of his smartass, wise-cracking game — is not a disguised billionaire with high-tech tools at his disposal, but an ordinary joe cop who uses his wits to beat the bad guys. In some ways, it’s prescient of the post-9/11 glamorizing of firemen and other quasi-invisible public servants. But the film’s really a weird commentary on excess and greed, an action-film version of Wall Street, Gordon Gecko with a gun and a greasy accent.

So what aspect of contemporary culture does The Dark Knight reflect? Here’s Andrew Klavan in the WSJ, asserting that Batman represents GW Bush:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

Surprisingly, there’s some validity to this idea. I think thematically it’s a bit more complicated and less outright “conservative” (or neoconservative) than Klavan would have it, but certainly it’s there. Before I discuss why, however, I wanted to give a brief overview of some of the more remarkable aspects of the movie (spoiler alert).

First off, Heath Ledger’s Joker is great. Christian Bale, as Batman, might be the hero, and Maggie Gyllenhaal provides a real emotional center for the film as his love interest Rachel Dawes. But Ledger is the star of the show. That’s not only true of his performance, which is loaded with a sort of electrified anguish that makes him fascinating to watch every time he steps on screen — as if even the Joker’s a little confused at just how fucked up he is. It’s also true in the sense that every move Batman, the cops, and even the other crooks make is in response to something the Joker does. He’s a true “agent of chaos,” as he explains at one point; never more so than when he torches a mammoth pile of money just for the hell of it in front of an incredulous mob guy.

In that sense, it’s not that big of a stretch to compare him to a figure like Osama bin Laden, or at least our darkest fears about him. The mafia is out to make money — they have organization, structure, a “plan,” as the Joker puts it; he has none. He’s just out to “watch the world burn,” as Michael Caine’s Alfred puts it in some of the film’s characteristically wooden dialogue.

His unpredictable actions and magnetic presence also serve to mask some of the truly loopy holes in the film. Like the idea that all of Gotham’s various gangs — Italian, black, Latino, etc. — would do all their banking together, let alone with a slick Chinese dude based in Hong Kong. Or that a single bad guy with a band of what seem to be half-wits and teenage thugs is able to repeatedly overpower those mob guys and their henchmen. Or that the same bad guy — in a city already on red alert and with every cop looking for him — is able to somehow wire huge buildings, ferries, and hospitals with high-powered explosives. The incredible organization and sheer unlikeliness of the 9/11 attacks gives a terrorist like the Joker a grain of believability. We need to believe in an enemy as insane and powerful as the Joker in order to justify the response.

In The Dark Knight, that response is brutal and total. Maybe not total in the ultimate sense, as Batman appears to stick to the traditional hero’s prohibition against taking a life. But the “boundaries of civil rights” that Klavan writes about “pushing” occurs when Batman uses some of his techie toys to tap every cell phone in the city, justified of course in the need to catch the Joker. There’s a strenuous debate about this, and one of the final scenes shows Morgan Freeman’s highly moralistic tech guy — the only one with access to the rigged software — quietly destroying it on his way out the door. If one were to compare this to our current “debate” about warrantless wire-tapping, well, there really hasn’t been much debate, and no intention to tear down the machinery when the bad guys are caught, because the war on terror has no end in sight. The only parallel is the fantasy that there’s a highly moral person sitting at the controls, listening exclusively to the conversations of people who have something to hide.

Furthermore, if we’re to take GW as “The Dark Knight,” willing to do whatever it takes to capture the terrorists, even if it means being (gulp!) unpopular, how are we to reconcile that with Batman’s repeated desire to withdraw completely and support Aaron Eckhart’s D.A. Harvey Dent, who wants to do things on the up and up? Or Rachel Dawes’ finally choosing the latter over the former? One’s tempted to envision the love interest as a stand-in for the American people, understanding but unable to approve of The Dark Knight’s methods, wishing this bad boy could be more like the law-abiding D.A., and vice-versa. The only logical way to reconcile the two is to imagine GW as both Dent and Batman; he’s Batman in the sense that only he is willing to do what it takes to defeat the terrorists, but by legalizing those methods — or tearing down the parts of the Constitution that stand in their way — he transforms himself into Dent. Needless to say, this imaginative leap simply doesn’t work.

Finally, though, The Dark Knight is an accurate reflection of the current times simply by being so relentlessly dark. While Die Hard was chock full of Willis’ banter contrasting with the unintentionally funny Euro-trash villains, Bale never cracks a smile, and the only wit belongs to Ledger’s Joker. But it’s the blackest of humor, the tears of a clown. No wonder, when even the left has a hard time laughing at a silly magazine cover spoof. I’ve had a hard time lightening up myself lately, and it’s a mood I sense every time I open a paper or turn on the TV or just walk down the street. A dark night, indeed.

Tags: Film by dhadbawnik
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