For the Love of God

I saw the movie Amadeus when I was 7 years old. It is based on Peter Shaffer’s play about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s life and music, and his relationship with rival composer Antonio Salieri. At that point, I had been playing piano for 2 years already and Mozart quickly became an obsession for me. It was several years before I discovered just how much of Amadeus‘ plot was fictional, and several more years before I came to understand the power of that genre of storytelling. I suppose you could call it a historiographic metafiction, a sub-genre of postmodern literature, although I didn’t see this until yesterday when I read the play for the first time. Historiographic metafiction usually includes rewritings of historical characters and events and is written in a self-reflexive way that draws attention to the construction of the story and the apparatus through which it is being told. The best example I can think of is Jeanette Winterson’s fiction, but it is very common in all postmodern literature. Hollywood conventions necessarily rendered the film version of Amadeus as a biopic, but the structure and presentation of the play is entirely different. Salieri narrates the story directly to the audience as he is taking part in it, instantly making it a metafiction by drawing attention to the medium through which the story is being told. Although Salieri narrates the film as well, voice-over narration and flashback have become so naturalized in film that audiences barely notice them as conventions anymore unless the character speaks directly to the camera. Another major difference is in the structure. Shaffer wrote the play so that it would flow as Mozart’s music does. There are no scene breaks — the action is continuous and the sets are changed as the story is moving along. The dialogue is also very rhythmic and musical. Before I read the play I thought there would be very little I could take away from it, but it exceeded all my expectations and really drew me in. It was so powerful and beautiful and if I ever get a chance to see it produced on stage I would be ecstatic.

There were a couple of points that I noticed in the play that I never noticed in the film. Considering how many times I’ve seen the film I was feeling a bit stupid actually for not having seen them before. For example, there is a scene where Salieri writes a Welcome March for Mozart and Mozart unintentionally mocks him by playing several much more complex variations of it after only hearing it once. What I didn’t catch is that the final variation he plays is one of the movements from his Opera The Marriage of Figaro.

But the big thing I had missed is the title — Amadeus. It had never once occurred to me that there was a reason for calling it such and not Mozart or something similar. “Amadeus” means “the love of God” and the story is about Salieri’s battle with God through Mozart. And there’s another thing that had never really struck me before. Though I was aware in watching the film that Salieri was angry at God for making Mozart his instrument, it hadn’t really sunk in that that was the true conflict. Did I ever feel stupid when I finally figured it out. But then, I guess because the film comes across as more objective, I had never thought about the film as meaning anything beyond the obvious story it was telling.

If you have an hour to kill and you for some reason feel like reading a fantastic play, pick up Amadeus, it will be worth your while. And, even better, if you get a chance to see it on stage, GO! After reading the play yesterday I went to my parents’ house and played Mozart’s 12 Variations on A Vous Dirais-Je Maman (Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) on the piano for 2 hours and I’ve never enjoyed it more.

If Only I’d Gotten There First!

Do you ever read something and think to yourself, “that was the book I should have written”? Or heard a song and thought something similar? I’m not just referring to things you really like. I mean creative output that is so close to home that, had you taken the time to make it yourself, it would have come out almost exactly the same.

Here is a brief list of things I should have made but I’m too lazy so someone beat me there (not to suggest I’m actually quite that multi-talented…).

The book I should have written: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus.

The poem I should have written: “The Legs” by Robert Graves. (*see full text below)

The song I should have written: “One Two Three Four” by Feist.

The movie I should have made: Nowhere, dir. Gregg Araki.

The music video I should have made: “Here It Goes Again” by Ok Go.

Wow — that makes me sound really pretentious, doesn’t it? I don’t actually believe I would have done as good of a job with any of those ideas, but who knows cause I never tried!

—

“The Legs”

There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.

And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.

And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.

What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.

Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.

My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,

Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.

Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.

My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down?

Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.

Most Definitely

I’m a big fan of Mos Def. I love his music, I think he’s innovative and his lyrics are tight and I respect his dedication to political and social issues. He’s also an awesome actor, something I’m especially more confident of after having seen him tonight in Be Kind Rewind, a movie I think all of you should go out and see immediately. It was funny, strange, interesting, and rather touching. Especially great for movie buffs like me, who experience a special kind of geeky pleasure in seeing how films reference and play with other films and arts.

His blatant disregard for proper grammar on his My Space page kind of broke my heart. But hey, who am I to judge? My grammar sucks most of the time. And I don’t know what I was expecting from someone named ‘Mos Def’ anyway. I’m sure I’ll get over it. My love for him is not that fickle.

Carts of Darkness

I saw an amazing documentary the other night as part of the Victoria Film Festival. It is called Carts of Darkness and is directed by Murray Siple. You can see a trailer for the film, as well as some photos and other information, at his website.

For the film Murray follows some bottle pickers around North Vancouver to gain insight into their lifestyles and situations. The main character is a man named Al who, for all intents and purposes, seems like a relatively well-rounded and decent guy. He can’t get a good job because he has a criminal history so instead he collects and recycles bottles every morning and for sport he races shopping carts. In many ways Al’s lifestyle seems so free and wonderful. He makes enough money recycling to feed and clothe himself and has enough time each day to practice riding carts down hills like the Mountain Highway. The rush he gets from it seems heavenly. The underside is that he lives in the bushes, has no connection to his family, and lives under constant scrutiny from society. But somehow he seemed to maintain an air of positivity that really struck me. To have so little yet to focus on how much you have by comparison is a rare gift in life.

There is another man in the film who is a chronic alcoholic and suffers from nerve damage in his arm after falling on some rocks and breaking a sherry bottle in his sleeve. His is a much sadder story. His days are definitely numbered. Toward the end of the film his disability cheque comes through and he is able to rent an apartment for himself. The emptiness of the room is oppressive as the camera watches him go to sleep using his socks as a pillow. One wants to hope for the best for him — that he’ll get some furniture, get it together a bit, and maybe even find some comfort — but we learned in the Q&A after the film that he only lasted three weeks in the apartment before he left to go live by the river again. He just can’t be functional in society any more.

Another story line follows an artist who decided a few years back that he didn’t want to be part of the work force anymore. He says that we shouldn’t have to be prisoners of the economic system that structures our society. He picks bottles to make money for food and to help the environment but otherwise spends his time tending to his garden and working on his art. He grows the most beautiful flowers and plants and gives them away to the people in his community in exchange for their kindness towards him as he goes through their blue bins. I often think about doing something similar. Just imagine — to be able to break free and spend your time giving back to your community and working on artistic ventures, or whatever else floats your boat. If I were independently wealthy, I would still do exactly what I’m doing. It would just be nice to not need to do it for survival.

One of the most interesting story lines in the film is that the director, who used to be a snowboarder and made snowboarding films, is in a wheelchair after having had a car accident about 10 years ago. So much of the story is about the connection that builds between these men and about realizing that you never really know someone’s story until you’ve given them some time and an open heart. That someone picking bottles out of your recycling bin is not necessarily a drug addict. And that someone in a wheelchair is not necessarily as limited as you may think. If you get a chance to see Carts of Darkness I really recommend it. It got under my skin and challenged the way I think about homelessness, work, economics, disability, freedom, kindness, and understanding.

My Rant on Bad Film-Making

One of my biggest annoyances in film is voice-over narration. Sure it’s a useful tool, but the problem is that filmmakers use it in the absence of other, more effective, modes of visual story-telling. It’s like an easy escape for someone who can’t work out how to tell a story on film. If you need to tell us what’s going on then write a book about it!

It seems to me that voice-over narration is a prominent feature in war movies. I just turned on the television and they were playing The Great Raid, a movie about a rescue mission to get WWII American POWs out of the Philippines. I kind of wanted to see it but it started with the main character writing in his journal with a voice-over for like 3 minutes (which is quite a long time in the world of a movie). That was it, I had to turn it off. I’d rather watch Sponge Bob (which is genius by the way). I don’t need to read over a soldier’s shoulder that he has deep feelings and higher than average intelligence to be moved by the story. And if that’s what you need to do to move people with your story, I think you’ve failed as a filmmaker. I’m not saying voice-over is all bad, I’m just saying it gets misused much of the time to cover up other deficiencies.

But let’s consider Mean Girls for a moment — probably not the best example, but the one that first came to my mind. There is voice-over in that one, but it’s not necessary to our understanding of the story. It adds humour, but if you took the voice-over out the movie would still be effective. Take the voice-over out of Platoon? The movie loses all its power. For the record, I love Platoon. That and Apocalypse Now are the only two movies I forgive for excessive misuse of voice-over (which is strange if you think about it since they’re both narrated by Sheens).

On a closely related topic, my other beef is flashback. Again, flashback in film can be very useful, and very artfully done. But flashback à la Saving Private Ryan is all wrong. It’s only there because Spielberg and his crew couldn’t figure out how to start and end the story. Not to mention, it provides the necessary emotional manipulation to ensure that the audience will be moved no matter what. It killed any chance that I would appreciate the movie. To be more specific, I’d say flashback is generally good, but when a film is framed as a flashback, generally bad. There are definitely exceptions but for the most part that’s my rule.

Feel free to argue with me.

Adaptation

The plenary panel for this recent conference I went to was about film adaptation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the plenary was like the panel of keynote speakers — 3 individuals, this year from 3 different fields. One was a literary critic, one was a biologist, and one was a natural philosopher. Being the film buff that I am, and having done a ton of academic work on film adaptation, I was really looking forward to the presentation.

Right. So their big plan was to develop a new theory of adaptation in response to the problem that everyone is still caught up in fidelity discourse. What this means is that people generally judge the success of an adaptation based on its degree of faithfulness to the textual original. This is problematic for a number of reasons — not least of which, it privileges the ‘original’ just by virtue of it coming first; it doesn’t account for differences in media; it doesn’t acknowledge other influences; and it’s a really stupid way of judging a work of art. These are all excellent observations. They are also observations that were being made by academic film critics more than 10 years ago.

As an alternative, the panel was proposing a theory that uses scientific discourse to explain the nature of cultural adaptations. They wanted to make a “homology” (or analogy) between biological adaptation and film adaptation. So rather than looking at the adaptation as a derivative of its original, we should instead trace its genealogy. As in nature, when one feature of a species adapts to its environment, the story being told adapts to another medium or a slightly different retelling in order to talk to a contemporary audience. The success of an adaptation, just as in nature, is thus measured on two things — the longevity of the story and whether it interacts well with its environment (i.e. how widely it is received by the intended audience).

I have a number of issues with this. First, to measure the success of an adaptation by how well it is received reduces the adaptation to a commodity. It is successful if lots of people buy it, pay to watch it, buy the memorabilia, etc. This is not my own take on it — the speakers were actually saying these things. Now, it may be the case that culture has been almost completely commodified anyway, but this is a problem and I can’t believe that they would talk so plainly about it without acknowledging it as a problem.

Second, to measure the success of adaptations based on how long a story persists completely ignores the power structures that are at work in culture. Whether or not something is widely read or watched in schools and in the public depends a great deal on what those in power would like us to read or watch. Would we still study Shakespeare so diligently if a few dead white academics hadn’t decided it would be so?

Third, part of what they wanted to do was get out of the temporality of fidelity discourse, i.e. evaluating adaptations based on their sequence. But developing a history of the retellings of a particular story still does just that. It still becomes a myth of origins.

Fourth, by talking about stories in the way they are, they are essentially saying what the French Structuralists said 50 years ago: There are only so many stories, with a wide range of shifting details based on cultural moments, etc. It was like having Levi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth” read back to me in a different context. The panel even suggested that it would be interesting to chart the history of a story, i.e. to map out all the variations of the Romeo and Juliet story and all of its influences. Didn’t someone do that already? Isn’t that what structuralism was all about? And didn’t it not work? Remember when Barthes tried to map out all the textual and cultural influences that went into each phrase of Balzac’s “Sarrasine” in S/Z? It all fell apart. That’s why S/Z is so interesting, because he shows us the whole system unravelling and thus opens the door for a different way of thinking about stories.

And I have saved my biggest question for last. Does anyone care? Adaptation is not a really hot topic right now. Not to mention, I don’t think that we even have a problem with fidelity discourse. Critics have been taking that apart and proposing new approaches for like 10 years. Very little of the recent stuff I’ve read on adaptation falls into that trap anymore. It’s like they’re a decade late. And even if they’d been on time, the theory is so flawed anyway that it doesn’t really matter.

My last comment is not so much a question I had about the material, but a problem I had with the speakers themselves. Or one particular speaker — the literary critic. The delivery of the presentation was fantastic, it was clear, exciting, well-paced, and with multi-media. But the Q&A period was abysmal. There were many questions and comments after the presentation, and several challenges put forth to the theory, some of them similar to my own issues. But the one speaker monopolized the floor and responded to almost all of the questions. Or rather, didn’t respond. She was so arrogant and dismissive that she refused to answer to many of the challenges, refused to respond to some questions, and even told a few people that they were flat out wrong and didn’t even add as to why. One girl asked a very astute question and, rather than answering, she turned to the panel organizer and said “I think you can just move on to the next one”! It was a very good reminder that we should always be humble and never get too smart. There’s always more to learn and if you can’t accept the advice or perspective of others then you risk losing your way. I can certainly say that, even though this literary critic is the queen bee of Canadian academia, her new book on adaptation is not going to make waves. And when your work stops mattering, people stop reading it.

My Issue With Time Travel

This has been bothering me for a few days now…

Time travel. I know it’s not possible, not yet anyway, so you’ll have to just go with me on this one and suspend your disbelief for a few moments. Let’s say a character in a movie or a tv show or a book travels back in time to stop some horrible event from happening — a narrative that we have seen many times. And let’s say the hero succeeds in changing the future. So if there is no horrible event to stop anymore, then the hero doesn’t need to go back again, thus he would not have been present in the past to change it. Are you still with me? What I’m trying to say is that, logically, the whole system breaks down.

I saw the movie Deja Vu last week (it was horrible, don’t ask me why I watched it) and was struck by the logical impossibility of the conclusion. Denzel Washington goes back in time to stop a terrorist bombing and save a woman’s life. Of course, he and the woman fall in love but he dies while saving the day. Keep in mind that this is Future Denzel operating in the past. At the end, after Future Denzel has died, the woman meets Present Denzel and is oh so relieved. They live happily ever after. The thing is, because the bombing was stopped and the woman was saved, Present Denzel has no idea of this alternate progression of events. So of course, he won’t be going back into the past to stop these things that never happened. But if he doesn’t go back, he won’t be there to stop them from happening. You feeling me? It doesn’t work.

There is a similar logical gap in so many of our time travel stories. What about Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Don’t you think if Freud had been picked up by two guys in a phone booth and transported through time that his later works would have been much different? Then why weren’t Bill and Ted up on stage talking about Freud’s contributions to the science of time travel?

Everything falls apart.

Let’s hope we never actually make time travel possible. The whole world would just implode.

The Angriest Dog in the World

The Angriest Dog in the World strip came about when I was working on Eraserhead. I drew a little dog. And it looked angry. And I started looking at it and thinking about it, and I wondered why it was angry.

And then I did a four-block strip with the dog never moving – three panels were set in the day and one was at night. So there’s a passage of time, but the dog never moves. And it struck me that it’s the environment that’s causing this anger – it’s what’s going on in the environment.

–David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, p. 41

Some minds will always be a mystery. David Lynch’s book doesn’t illuminate the enigmas of his work really — but it does describe his attitude toward the art of living and creating quite well. Probably my favourite part is when he says: “Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas” (8).

This, to me, is a pleasant turn away from the idea that the artist has to suffer to create anything honest or beautiful.

Mind you, I don’t know if I should be taking life advice from the guy who brought us Lost Highway.