Longships off the coasts of Panlingua

I have just started my study of yet another foreign language (this time, Spanish), blazing the way for it to be added to the great language Pangaea (Panlingua?) in my brain. I am now unable to remember a single foreign language with any consistency. Instead I can only form sentences made up of French nouns (none of them the correct gender), Latin verbs and German conjunctions (because I learned German most recently and thus the most common words emerge in that tongue), all given a vaguely Italian pronunciation. I must admit that I learned Old English shortly after my summer of German, and because of the greater similarity between those two than between English and its ancestor, I am afraid they are hopeless entangled in my mind. When I speak to Germans I must sound like a horned-helmet-wearing Rhine-maiden, ready at any moment to lay waste to some villages and flee in my longship (an impression totally out of sync with my meek appearance). I have to wonder what place Spanish will take in this totally incomprehensible linguistic cassoulet. Though mostly nonsensical, my one uber-language does have the wonderful side effect of throwing listeners into confusion and almost totally obscuring my Americanness, which is sometimes useful when traveling in Europe.

At any rate, I have decided to take on Spanish because a playwright who interests me tremendously is from Argentina, and much of her work exists only in Spanish. Rather than take a course, as I have in previous language endeavors, I have decided to undertake this project on my own, accompanied only by the rather-too-advanced-for-me "Ultimate Spanish Review and Practice," from a line of grammar guides that I have found useful for both French and German. This is a questionable choice, to say the least, but I remain optimistic. My masterplan for correcting both my understanding and my totally unfettered pronunciation is to take up a telenovela and follow its progress for weeks and weeks, hopefully someday coming to understand what it is all about. I will let you know how it goes. My only disappointment so far is that the telenovela based (VERY loosely) on "I, Claudius" appears to be over. Sigh.

"McCabe & Mrs. Miller" (Film 434)

Apparently Robert Altman also can't resist a nice alliterative title.

We settled down last night for the second in our Warren Beatty double header, Altman's 1971 western (made when he was virtually unknown in Hollywood) "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." This is a different sort of Altman film than what we have come to associate with him: there are no grand ensembles of celebrities, no intricately woven webs of characterization that seem both entirely plot and scornful of narrative. The eccentric philosophy of sound is there, with what little plot advancement there is occurring entirely in stifled, muttered outbursts that melt away before you have truly understood them. The visual fascination with idiosyncratic detail as a building block of character and place-as-character are also there, largely (to my eye at least) unchanged over the years.

"Ah," my boyfriend said as we started the film, "Altman. Another slow meander to a questionable destination." And it is indeed slow going at first. The film concerns a, well, an entrepreneur named McCabe (Beatty) who comes to the fledgling mine town of Presbyterian Church and decides that there is money to be made there in whores, liquor and gambling. He is soon joined by Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), who convinces him that there is more money to be made in high class brothels and bathhouses than in the filthy tents he has set up. They and a few others build an entire town faster than we have understand what is at stake in these events. As far as we can tell at this point, Altman is concerned with asking the really big questions in this film, questions like "How many whores can you fit into a barrel?" and "What if it were a really big barrel?"

I began to think about how both "Short Cuts" and "Nashville" had grown on me over time, going from rather dutiful, lengthy viewing experiences to objects of prolonged intellectual interest to vividly imagistic, almost archetypal myths. Would this happen with "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"? Would distance be necessary for affection or admiration to grow? Then we entered the final twenty minutes of the film. I don't want to ruin this for anyone, although as you know I am not normally in the habit of avoiding spoilers, so I won't go very deeply into it. Suffice it to say that big business interests express a desire to buy out McCabe and Mrs. Miller's holdings in Presbyterian Church, and threaten violence if their offers aren't entertained with sufficient openness. The protagonists' response, and the ramifications of their actions for the town, transform the movie in a fairly revelatory way. The events that ensue involve (at least) one of the cruelest, most senseless murders I have ever seen in a Western, and indeed this murder takes the genre into a new sphere of morality. It occurred to me that it is often the casual cruelty of an individual scene in Altman that transforms the film into something lasting, that lifts it out of the conventions of its genre, scenes like the one in which the fishermen find a corpse in "Short Cuts," but ignore it because they don't want to ruin their vacation.

Roger Ebert has said that of the many great movies that Altman has made, this is the only one that is perfect. I pondered what he could mean by that. Although I enjoyed and admired "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," both "Short Cuts" and "Nashville" interested me a lot more, in part for their intricacy. There is admittedly a lot to admire about the production of this film, which was brilliantly designed and shot in a real town that Altman's team built (and in fact inhabited) outside Vancouver. It is obviously also a tremendously influential film for its genre, leaving its mark with particular indelibility, I now realize, on the dusty frontier amorality of HBO's "Deadwood." I grow more fond of westerns with every movie I see from the genre.

Perhaps by "perfect," Ebert was getting at a rather more fundamental meaning of the word than "flawless." Perhaps he meant the word to connote "complete," for this is one of the most containable of Altman's "great" films, the one with the narrative borders that are the least porous. This is particularly worthy of note because the Altman style is so frequently associated with the opposite of these qualities. It is an aesthetic of imperfection, of incompletion, of expansiveness; of porousness of borders and roughness of edges. In "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," by contrast, pleasure is about coziness and confinement (think of the whores in the barrel, which was in fact a tub in the bathhouse), and fear is about claustrophobia.

"McCabe and Mrs. Miller"
(1971)
Dir. Robert Altman
****

I am the last person I know to see "Bonnie and Clyde" (Film 433)

Well, the last person besides my boyfriend, who watched it with me this afternoon. It occurred to me, while watching it, that I almost always judge a film more harshly while watching it with my boyfriend, and not merely because he has a more skeptical attitude towards movies than I do. He approaches films with a more analytical eye, or perhaps I should say an analytical eye more attuned to issues of stylistics and construction than to thematics. When I watch a film with him, I become much more aware of the seams, of errors and triumphs of editing, and of the professional processes of acting. He defamiliarizes the narrative for me; suddenly film becomes much more a conscious construction, and much less an overwhelming emotional experience. Which is odd, because he is highly skeptical about applying this sort of analytical gaze to literature.

You probably already know the plot of Arthur Penn's 1967 film, even if you are in fact even more behind on your film canon than I am. It is based on the real story of two 1930s lovers and armed robbers (although honesty might require listing those qualities in the opposite order), Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who captured the attention and to some extent the affection of a nation in thrall to financial depredations of the Depression and eager to see foreclosing banks and big businesses pay. In the film, they meet in Texas, discover Bonnie's ravenous sexual hunger for the excitement of armed robbery, and then in quick succession realize Clyde's talent for satisfying her craving for larceny and his utter inability to respond to her sexual appetite. They acquire several hangers-on along the way, but the most notable is the looming presence of death in their stolen cars and shabby bedsits. This at first unwelcome but increasingly avuncular presence first appears when they pick up a terrified couple and befriend them over an hours-long drive, only to abandon them abruptly when it emerges that the young man (Gene Wilder, who emerges from Zeus's brain fully formed as a comic actor in this his first major movie role) is an undertaker.

For a time, only such a distinctive comic actor as Gene Wilder (who always manages performances at once broad/stagy and highly detailed - is this the definition of a good comic actor?) seems appropriate for the large, stylized acting that Penn demands of his actors in "Bonnie and Clyde." As the film progresses, you settle in to this aesthetic of acting, if less comfortably into the unsettling, abrupt editing style, which seems to evoke the earlier, rougher mode of B-westerns. Would that I could comment on the famous New Wave influences on this film, which might have explained and enhanced these stylistic choices for us, but since I am watching these films out of order in my 1001 Movies project, I have yet to reach its New Wave predecessors. (Curse my infidelity to chronology!!!) I can only promise to return to it when I reach the proper place in the timeline.

The real heart of this film, for us, was not the passion of the love story, nor the innovation of its violence (which include repeated and remarkable references to "Battleship Potemkin," the granddaddy of film violence), but its obsession with celebrity. The film's Bonnie and Clyde, like the real criminals, were not just aware of their public image, they manipulated it through a press which was seldom completely hostile to them, using tactics litarary (Bonnie's mythmaking, pointedly child-like poetry), visual (through pictures which inevitably evoke the ones you get taken at the fair, in different costumes and against different backdrops), and personal (winning over converts one by one on their famous "rides"). They envision themselves (somewhat broadly) in the terms of the myth they build up in the press, as populists wreaking the vengeance of the masses against the rich and powerful.

The most wonderful tensions in the film come when the drive for celebrity comes in conflict with celebrity's handmaiden, death. As Chris Rojek points out in his book "Celebrity," one of the expectations we have of celebrities is that they serve a shamanistic purpose for our increasingly secular culture, undergoing the same "rituals of descent" and abasement that we would otherwise have turned to other symbolic sources to fulfill (messiahs, prophets, gods, priests who would go to the underworld and return). An inevitable characteristic of celebrity is that someone, somewhere, wants to do them harm (sometimes as a way of expressing love), and that we will be there, hungrily watching, as the celebrity is sacrificed, ready to experience the catharsis of mourning for someone we didn't even really know. Bonnie, in particular, is well aware that this sacrifice is the price of celebrity. And she is right - the most famous, oft-cited scene in the movie is the one in which they meet their grisly fate, a scene which inevitably seems smaller in reality than the enormous symbolic place it holds in our culture.

"Bonnie and Clyde"
dir. Arthur Penn
(1967)
***1/2