The Talkies: Suffering Poses
Bowman, James
by James Bowman Suffering Poses They're nothing like the pain Ethan Hawke can inflict. I n The Virgin Suicides, written and directed by Sofia Coppola from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, one...
...This endless striking of suffering poses and the wearisome self-pity it implies may be a little un-Shakespearean, but it is just the thing to appeal to an audience of moody teens, looking to have their own sense of the world's cruelties flattered and consoled...
...and Mrs...
...Mr Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on TAS Online at v~vw.s#ecta*or.org...
...Inadvertently (one supposes), the film makes clear what was only implicit in the novel, which was that its attempted enshrinement of the late twentieth-century American teenage sensibility as the standard of serious art is really only a fagade, hardly able to cover the monumental self-pier that lies behind it...
...The verse is routinely butchered and words mispronounced or got wrong apparently unknown to the director, whose concern is only to make everything look hip...
...Such sentimentalism is characteristic of the infantile mind-which it has long been the aim of American popular culture to protect from the more serious constraints of reality until well into a Hamletian middle age...
...To be fair, this version of Shakespeare is not without warrant in the text, which John Updike in his latest novel, Gertrude and Claudius, is only the latest to recognize can be read as being critical of a bratty rich kid who expects the world to accommodate itself to his moods...
...JAMES BOWMAN, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Absent an), more of Mr...
...At any rate, this use of the most philosophical of the Four Quartets is typical of the novel's portentousness: "For the eternity that Lux Lisbon looked at him, Trip Fontaine looked back, and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subseqnent loves because it never had to survive real life, still plagued him, even now in the desert, with his looks and health wasted...
...When Mohammad, whom he had seemed to have abandoned at the school for the blind in Tehran where we first meet him, embraces him and turns to him, his blank eyes full of tears, saying: "I thought you'd never come," his father weeps too...
...Who cares for me...
...This makes for a nice transition to a generalized, Seattle-like protest against human unhappiness which the Christlike Hamlet suffers vicariously...
...Their trying to keep their daughters from the enjoyment of casual sex in 197~, even to the point of burning their rock 'n' roll records, is so mean that it's no wonder the girls all killed themselves...
...The Virgin Suicides actually makes us think of another bit of T.S...
...Eugenides tells us in the novel), he found a cop?.' of T.S...
...The American Spectator "Ju~e 2000 67...
...But what the emotionally austere Eliot could not have foretold was the extent to which the character of Hamlet could come to be seen as the prototype of the moody, self-pitying teen (all the better that he is said to be 30 in the play) who became a national icon with James Dean's performance in Rebel Without a Cause...
...Who helps me...
...Not, alas, in many others...
...How sweet, for example, of the President of the hnmortals to There is an element of wish-fulfillment in all romance, but recent films wallow in it...
...How uncharacteristically nice of the Lord of Hosts, so fond of smiting people back in Old Testament times, to disrupt space-time to allow both the daddy (Dennis Quaid) and the mommy (Elizabeth Mitchell) of the waiflike 36-year-old Jim Caviezel not one or two but several chances to avoid what would otherwise be their respective gruesome fates in Frequency...
...Ahnereyda's version of the play, in which James Dean's image along with other trappings of the late century's youth culture puts in an appearance, is at least a success in this respect...
...Lux, along with her four sisters, later went on to become one of the eponymous suicides that haunt the male youth ofGrosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1975 while Trip went on to a detox center where, a quarter century later (as Mr...
...But by keeping the masculine menace mostly off-screen--apart from a comic rustic, played by Dylan Bruno, who abandons the pregnant Miss Portman at a Wal-Mart in the opening scenes--the film keeps our focus on helpless female suffering as its moral and emotional center...
...But Almereyda, like Jeffrey Eugenides and Miss Coppola, likes teenage self-righteousness...
...One of the few virtues of the movie is that it cuts out, by necessity, a lot of this writerly verbiage, but it doesn't seem to have noticed that, in doing so, it has also eliminated the novel's entire reason for being, which is to rnystiR ~ and imbue with romantic significance the experience of adolescent sex after the sexual revolution...
...And pat it comes!--a Hamlet, directed by Michael Almereyda and starring the perpet~mlly pouting Ethan Hawke, whose purpose is to present us with the Melancholy Dane as spoiled American teenager...
...But he is not a monster, nor impermeable to feeling on behalf of others...
...Lisbon (James Woods and Kathleen Tnrner) are "strict" parents after the time of strict parents had passed...
...The emotional excesses of all these films remind us that both self-pity and wish-fulfillnmnt are forms of sentimentalism, or the attempt to elicit feeling on behalf of unworthy objects...
...True, the honor of my sex is in some measure redeemed by a couple of gentle, sensitive, nurturing sorts of guys, played by lames Frain and Bob Coonrod...
...I'll bet molnmy and daddy were sorry afterwards too...
...This stars a remarkable little boy (Majidi also found wonderful children for his earlier film, Children o) c Heaven) called Mohsen Ramezani as Mohammad, who is blind, whose mother is dead, and whose father (Hossein Mahjub) is trying to get rid of him so that he can marry again...
...has the hang-dog, preoccupied air of the inveterate self-pitier...
...Eugenides's high13 ' wrought prose than she can squeeze into an admittedly large number of tremulous voiceovers read by Giovanni Ribisi, Miss Coppola can only convert the thing into a b,pically crass Hollywood jererniad against "repression...
...allow poor, doomed Joely Richardson in Return to Me to be "returned" to the embraces of her distraught widower, David Duchovny, in the form of luscious Minnie Driver, his new love, into whom her heart has been transplanted...
...Fortunately, the former is corrigible, and in what is the antithesis of the posturing hipness of Hamlet, the film ends with a dramatic episode through which the father has to learn the hard way to thank God for his burden...
...But the more Claudius's identity as corporate chieftain is stressed, the less the boy's anguish seems to have much to do with the death of his 66 Jun e 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator father (a remarkably unhorrible-looking ghost played by Sam Shepherd) and the more with the capitalism of his uncle...
...Naturally, most of the original Hamlet's savage selfcriticism is silently dropped from the script...
...Not quite what Eliot had in mind, I think...
...he wails to his mother, the boy's granny, when she tries to get him to think of the child instead of himself...
...Of course there is an element of wish-fnlfillment in all romance, but recent films seem to wallow in itas much as Almereyda does in the self-pity of Hamlet...
...What have I done wrong to be stuck with taking care of a blind child for the rest of my life...
...What is this but an appeal to self-pity7 And the other side of self-pity is wish-fulfillment, which comes as our suffering heroines finally find their soul-mates in the sensitive and nurturing New Age Unmenschen wholn they marry...
...When he is taken away from his beloved grandmother (Saltine Feizi) and thinks that she has abandoned him too, his sobbing that nobody loves him is only too true...
...Not only is his Hamlet a jerk and a royal pain in the Elsinore, presumably on the grounds that the bad behavior of Claudius, the corporate mogul, justifies such a response, but we are supposed to love and sympathize with him for it...
...His raw emotional authenticity is uncalculated and without a thought for its manipulative possibilities...
...Eliot--that where he says that the emotion in Hamlet is in excess of the facts as we know them--that it lacks an "objective correlative...
...in "Burnt Norton" that the "Smyrna merchant," who makes an indecent proposition in "The Waste Land," is called Mr...
...You'd certainly never find any of that corny religious stuffin an American film these days--for in the most Christian country in the world learning to profit from our suffering has taken on a whole different meaning, cN lames Bowman welcomes e-mail at [amesBowman@home.com...
...I n The Virgin Suicides, written and directed by Sofia Coppola from the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, one Trip Fontaine refers to Lnx Lisbon, his partner in an unforgettable teenage sexual encounter, as "the still point of the turning world...
...Something similar seems to be going on in Where the Heart Is, in which the young and attractive Natalie Portman and Ashley )udd are routinely treated appallingly, even criminally, by men, and no one seems at all surprised...
...Instead we have his "What a piece of work is a man" speech wrenched out of its context and delivered at the beginning of the film, against a background photomontage of airplanes dropping bombs...
...A s usual, I'm sorry to say, we are forced to look abroad for the antidote and for the Movie of the Month...
...This is another way of putting the point that Eliot was making about the excess of emotion in the play...
...He might be one of the Seattle protesters, who also turned up in April in Washington, D.C.: the children of privilege who seek imaginary corporate monsters to slay" out of sheer boredom...
...And he goes on to lament the loss of his own father at an early age...
...Such subtlety is approximately equivalent to that of having "To be or not to be" delivered to a video-camera while Hamlet holds a gun to his own head-which also happens here...
...Eliot's Collected Poems...
...When, remorseful about her final illness, he offers to bring the boy home again, she tells him "I'm worried about you, not him...
...You've got to wonder, by the way, if he noticed in addition to "the still point...
...There can be few better correctives to the temptation of self-pity than the marvelous new Iranian film by Majid Majidi called The Color o[Paradise...
...And so are we, as we begin to realize that it is his moral and spiritual blindness and not the physical kind suffered by Mohammad which is the more serious affliction...
...His Ophelia, Julia Stiles, could be one of the doomed Lisbon girls in The Virgin Suicides and is equally annoying in her teenage self-righteousness...
...You might think that Mohammad would be more justified in self-pity than Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) in The Virgin Suicides, who was grounded and had her Captain and Tenille records burned...
...Of course Hamlet, unlike the protesters, has a genuine grievance...
...But he hasn't learned the art yet...
...His father, on the other hand...
...He is probably as much concerned with his mother herself as he is with "losing face" when she leaves his house over his treatment of Mohammad...
...His Hamlet is heir to the corporate empire of Denmark Inc., run after the death of his father by a very young and dynamic Uncle Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan...
...Who is going to look after me when I'm old....Your God...
...Hamlet's self-pity and self-righteousness, like that of the Seattle protesters, is elevated to the level of a political principle...
Vol. 33 • June 2000 • No. 5
