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...
...The only trouble is, Felix and Hermann bear only the slightest resemblance...
...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...
...Before finding her, he spends five months (and thousands of dollars-he is conveniently wealthy) exploring every corner of the California porn underworld...
...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...
...In describing the way his chocolate business works, he begins "Chocolate, as everyone knows...
...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...
...Thematically, such films are problematic: Movies have simply not afforded the complexity this subject deserves...
...What sets Stoppard apart from Nabokov is his (mostly recent) interest in politics...
...As it is, we know exactly what's coming, and merely await the inevitable bravura agony...
...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...
...routine about black shirts, brown shirts, White Russians, and the Red Army...
...But it doesn't really work-mostly because Hermann himself ignores the Nazis...
...I'm thinking .of writing a book on the subject...
...As you may expect, the film rises or...
...As 3 result, the connections between public and private psychosis are nebulous...
...Yet Schrader doesn't flinch or preach as he presents the incredible array of sexual services offered, payable by Master Charge...
...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...
...He has included a subplot about the rise of the Nazis (who are never mentioned in the novel), and has made Hermann a Jew...
...His obsession...
...Mostly it falls...
...In the book the wife's affair is funny mostly because Hermann tells us about it without realizing what?s going on...
...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 private eye calls him ' 'pilgrim...
...As a result, the final scene, where Kristen tells him, "I didn't fit into your goddamned world...
...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...
...falls with the character of Van Dorn...
...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...
...Despair, another tale of single-minded-ness, hails from rather a different tradition...
...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...
...A similar problem is what defeats- barely-the film as a whole...
...Bitter?'' an assistant puns bilingually...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...A Dutch Reformist, Jake says he believes in TULIP: total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, inestimable grace, and perseverance of the saved...
...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...
...Despair is pretty, witty, and wise, but it lacks the central coherence that would have made it a great film...
...some vintage Stoppard wordplay in a who's-on-first...
...Hardcore, written and directed by Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver), fits squarely into this pattern...
...When the girl still has not been found after several more weeks, Van Dorn fires the detective and takes oh the search himself...
...As to the worth of the quest, the films tend to alternate between uneasy ambivalence and unsatisfactory moralizing...
...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...
...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...
...All of this, presumably meant to show the search as a religious crusade, falls flat because it isn't integrated into story or character...
...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...
...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...
...Admittedly, this is a pretty thin joke to carry an entire novel...
...My mother was a Rothschild and her dowry was her weight in diamonds...
...You didn't approve of my friends...
...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...
...In the film these meanings are lost...
...Still, there's no question that only a troubled man would take on the search with such fervor...
...At Christmas dinner, before Kristen is lost, he concludes grace with, "Bless all our missionaries...
...After a few weeks, the detective he has hired (Peter Boyle) unearths and shows him a cheap porno film starring Kristen...
...Van Dorn's initial discovery about Kristen Would have worked better dramatically if he had been sneaking a porn film on the sly...
...To fill the gap they relied, first of all, on Dirk Bogarde to play Hermann...
...Later, munching on a sample, he muses, "This chocolate tastes...
...Despair, like Hardcore, doesn't reveal enough about the hero's relationship to his quest...
...Lolita), deciding to make a complete departure from the dynamics of the novel...
...Clearly, director Rainer Fassbinder and scenarist Tom Stoppard faced some difficulties...
...Apropos his obsession with doubleness, Hermann asks, "What do you know about this subject dissociation, when a person seems to stand outside himself...
...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...
...Maybe two...
...He devises and carries out a plan to dress Felix in his clothes, shoot him, and then *'become" him...
...The problem is the same one that flawed Taxi Driver: Schrader isn't sure whether his hero really is a hero...
...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...
...and the general sense that beneath the well-lighted and clean Berlin streets lurks a terror...
...ellipsis his...
...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...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
