The Talkies/Hardcore and Despair
Yagoda, Ben
THE TALKIES by Ben Yago da Hardcore and Despair It's not surprising that moviemakers have traditionally been attracted to obsession. Scarface, The Searchers, Walking Tail, Taxi Driver-stories of...
...Schrader has not yet hit his directorial stride (this is his second feature, after Blue Collar), and, especially in the first half, the film is a bore...
...The funny external jokes with whicfr Stop-pard has replaced the internal ones of the book are quite the kind of thing Nabokov would have come up with...
...Thematically, such films are problematic: Movies have simply not afforded the complexity this subject deserves...
...At Christmas dinner, before Kristen is lost, he concludes grace with, "Bless all our missionaries...
...My mother was a Rothschild and her dowry was her weight in diamonds...
...Bogarde was an interesting choice, since he is beginning to resemble James Mason (Humbert in Lolita) and since, in Visconti's Death in Venice, he played Aschenbach, one of the "post-romantic artist-heroes" Nabokov sends up in Despair...
...Before finding her, he spends five months (and thousands of dollars-he is conveniently wealthy) exploring every corner of the California porn underworld...
...In describing the way his chocolate business works, he begins "Chocolate, as everyone knows...
...His obsession...
...As 3 result, the connections between public and private psychosis are nebulous...
...Lolita), deciding to make a complete departure from the dynamics of the novel...
...He is to be commended for broaching themes normally shunned in Hollywood (Blue Collar was a story of assembly-line alienation), and for sidestepping the usual Hollywood pitfalls of sensationalism and sentimentality when treating them...
...falls with the character of Van Dorn...
...To take the rnqst obvious, in the book the matter of Felix and Hermann's resemblance can remain something of a mystery;, in the movie they must be literally unalike...
...After a few weeks, the detective he has hired (Peter Boyle) unearths and shows him a cheap porno film starring Kristen...
...Nabokov makes up for it by including another joke-Hermann's blindness to his wife's love affair with her cousin-and by directing the reader's attention not to events, but to the voice of Hermann...
...All of this, presumably meant to show the search as a religious crusade, falls flat because it isn't integrated into story or character...
...To fill the gap they relied, first of all, on Dirk Bogarde to play Hermann...
...Whether the obsessee wants to save the world or to rob 10,000 banks, his motivation either is ignored or is explained by simplistic psychology ("Rosebud...
...Maybe two...
...Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) is a Grand Rapids furniture manufacturer whose teenaged daughter, Kristen, disappears while at a Galvin-ist Convention in Los Angeles...
...He devises and carries out a plan to dress Felix in his clothes, shoot him, and then *'become" him...
...Clearly, director Rainer Fassbinder and scenarist Tom Stoppard faced some difficulties...
...Later, munching on a sample, he muses, "This chocolate tastes...
...with doubles and mirrors, the elaborate and doomed scheme he devises, even his maddening inability to get on with the story-all are manifestations of the artistic personality at its most warped...
...Apropos his obsession with doubleness, Hermann asks, "What do you know about this subject dissociation, when a person seems to stand outside himself...
...Despair, like Hardcore, doesn't reveal enough about the hero's relationship to his quest...
...In.the novel it's clear that Hermann regards it as the ultimate work of art (another poke at those "artist-heioes"): "I longed, to the point of pain, for that masterpiece of mine...to be appreciated by men, or in other words, for the deception-and every work of art is a deception-to act successfully...
...routine about black shirts, brown shirts, White Russians, and the Red Army...
...I'm thinking .of writing a book on the subject...
...You didn't approve of my friends...
...The other side of the coin is Hitchcock's specialty-the innocent ensnared in a web of evil and pursuit that is notof his own making...
...ellipsis his...
...Hardcore, written and directed by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), fits squarely into this pattern...
...In the novel on which the film is based, Vladimir Nabokov mocks literary modernism-the tradition of Dostoevski, Kafka, and Mann, in which obsessions and doubles {Death in Venice and The Double) are a dime a dozen...
...A similar problem is what defeats- barely-the film as a whole...
...Yet Schrader doesn't flinch or preach as he presents the incredible array of sexual services offered, payable by Master Charge...
...As you may expect, the film rises or...
...some vintage Stoppard wordplay in a who's-on-first...
...He performs splendidly: The ironic contortions of his face, and his offhand, bitter, and unheard jokes, very nearly create the cinematic equivalent of Hermann's voice-that is, of despair...
...Neither simple madness nor insurance swindle.'(after "his" death Hermann expects to collect) is a satisfying explanation, and his obsession is a sort of motiveless malignity that must be accepted as a given...
...He has included a subplot about the rise of the Nazis (who are never mentioned in the novel), and has made Hermann a Jew...
...In the book the wife's affair is funny mostly because Hermann tells us about it without realizing what?s going on...
...Nabokov's hero, a Russian emigre in 1930s Berlin who is called only Hermann, is convinced he has found his double-a Czech drifter named Felix-and the idea of trading places takes over his life...
...The private eye calls him ' 'pilgrim...
...Bitter?'' an assistant puns bilingually...
...Mostly it falls...
...Tom Stoppard's sensibility is peculiarly sympathetic to Nabokov's: Both are emigres whose alternately comic and discomforting thoughts on human aspirations are expressed in the brilliant play of words...
...and the general sense that beneath the well-lighted and clean Berlin streets lurks a terror...
...As a result, the final scene, where Kristen tells him, "I didn't fit into your goddamned world...
...Despair, another tale of single-minded-ness, hails from rather a different tradition...
...Admittedly, this is a pretty thin joke to carry an entire novel...
...My wife is a Finkleberg and her dowry was her weight") Some of this material is effec-tive: an outdoor cafe where, from one scene to the next, the two Hassids playing chess are replaced with blonds...
...A Dutch Reformist, Jake says he believes in TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, inestimable grace, and perseverance of the saved...
...As to the worth of the quest, the films tend to alternate between uneasy ambivalence and unsatisfactory moralizing...
...This narrator is the comic culmination of the modernist strain of first persons: so overwhelmed by self-consciousness, and so scornfully familiar with all the conventions of "literature," that at times we fear the story will never be told...
...Still, there's no question that only a troubled man would take on the search with such fervor...
...The only trouble is, Felix and Hermann bear only the slightest resemblance...
...Van Dorn's initial discovery about Kristen Would have worked better dramatically if he had been sneaking a porn film on the sly...
...Scarface, The Searchers, Walking Tail, Taxi Driver-stories of individuals who will let nothing interfere with their goal, and who therefore cannot but get into trouble-allow the movies to do what they do best: show action...
...The problem is the same one that flawed Taxi Driver: Schrader isn't sure whether his hero really is a hero...
...You drove them all away," is puzzling: We don't know whether she's being endorsed or mocked...
...But that would have implicated Van Dorn, and Schrader wanted to keep him pure...
...As it is, we know exactly what's coming, and merely await the inevitable bravura agony...
...What sets Stoppard apart from Nabokov is his (mostly recent) interest in politics...
...Despair is pretty, witty, and wise, but it lacks the central coherence that would have made it a great film...
...In the film these meanings are lost...
...But it doesn't really work-mostly because Hermann himself ignores the Nazis...
...Predictably, it isn't as funny on screen: Fassbinder and Stoppard opted against the device of voice-over (used to good effect in the comparable...
...When the girl still has not been found after several more weeks, Van Dorn fires the detective and takes oh the search himself...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
