Spacing has been affected in this essay, further vandalism, suppressions of speech, censorship, alterations of written work, together with the usual harassments emanating from New Jersey's government computers must be expected. Joe Coniglio's conviction and long-awaited grand jury decisions pertaining to Senator Robert "Bob" Menendez may have something to do with this N.J. criminality going out-of-control.
Perhaps Anne Milgram will be distracted from her lesbian daydreams (for which I don't blame her) and actually enforce civil rights laws. N.J. Chief Justice Stuart Rabner "demurs." I suppose I owe an apology to Robert Downey, Jr. for this defacement of my essay celebrating his work. The tampering by hackers is only with my efforts, not his. Please see one of Mr. Downey's movies today. "Ironman, II" is awesome.
M.S./I.G.M.
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and time of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, which is the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your Will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 57, Sonnets (1609).
The following review was written by Johnny Gossamer.
I.
Robert Downey, Jr. is a rare actor-artist, whose genius is as much a product of courage in accepting (and even plunging into) dangerous waters, as it is the result of talent and effort. Downey's specialty is "dangerous acting." Part of what is fascinating about his acting is exactly what draws us to a high wire act without a net -- a vicarious taste of life-threatening danger in a shared search for meaning through the catharsis of art. (See "The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
If dangerous acting interests you, then see Al Pacino in "Dog Day Afternoon" or Dustin Hoffman in "Straw Dogs." Compare Montgomerry Clift's performance in "From Here to Eternity" with Meryl Streep's acting in "The French Lieutenant's Woman," then see this movie. Among Brits who kick ass on screen, Kate Winslet is one of the bravest artists I have seen. Kenneth Branagh, Ian McKellen, Judy Dench (all titles are not mentioned in America to avoid frightening the natives), and so many others are unforgettable, like Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Rachel Leigh Cook, Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz and, if you like psychological thrillers, see Hitchcock's Frenzy, the London actor in that movie (he's not Michael Caine) delivered a classic performance, also anything with Denzel Washington. Michael Caine in "Blue Ice" is an example of a flawless performance in a classic Noir film. I love the acting of Rupert Everett (two "t's?") whose voice is so beautiful and rich-sounding. I hate him.
Truman Capote spoke of writing as a dive into the murkiest waters of the subconscious. After the writing is done, Capote added, "things happen." He paused. With tears in his eyes, he said: "I fall apart." Brave artists -- like Mr. Downey -- are well aware of the price attached to certain psychic journeys. They pay that price to create something beautiful and true, work that is lasting, even in a horrifying way. Don't judge such people without appreciating all that is sacrificed (by them) to lead an artist's life -- sacrificed, willingly, for the sake of self-giving through artistic creation, which is a kind of love.
Don't actors make a lot of money? Yes, some actors make money. Many actors are very poor, but if you think that some of the emotional journeys and psychological costs accepted by great actors are about money, then you really are missing what is involved in any life-or-death artistic effort. Not all actors fall into the "dangerous acting" category and this acting ability has little to do with being a movie star, since I have seen great acting on stages both on and off Broadway, also terrible acting in movies.
Laurence Olivier (British spelling) spoke of the actor as a "magnificent artisan." He or she is a craftsperson, surrounded by tools, in a corner of a dusty jewelry shop. The artist labors for many hours each day, for months and years, to create a magnificent jewel -- a broach or cameo -- then makes a gift of it to you. Do not ask how he or she made this beautiful thing, but rather -- What is it? What does this performance mean to me? Examine the jewel, then decide exactly how beautiful it is for you. Turn it over in your hands, place it under the light, discover its colors and forms ... and you will find that this jewel -- an actor's performance -- is always a portrait of its maker. More mysteriously, it becomes a portrait of the viewer, a portrait of you.
I think this message of revelatory power in aesthetic experience -- the crystal ball quality of art -- is true of great paintings, sculptures, drama and musical performances, also all great poetry. It is most brutally, nakedly true of memorable acting. The artist says: "See me. So you can see yourself." Like that obscure British actor without a Hollywood agent -- William Shakespeare -- our best actors these days say to their audiences: "This is what you are." The very best actors also demonstrate something more ... "This is what we are together."
Robert Downey, Jr. is among our very best American actors, who is often without honor in his own village. I feel sorry for him. In Robert Downey, Jr.'s best work I see myself. I also see you. I cannot avoid noticing what it costs this man to create these performances. There is always blood on the ground after his best efforts. It is his own blood.
There are several of Downey's movies which I think are very good, some may surprise you. I will concentrate on one, "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang." First, I provide biographical information and some background analysis. This is a recent movie. Those who are not great fans of this actor may be led to consider Downey's work, in a serious way, from a careful viewing of this one subtle and complex, also fun-filled movie. Two scenes, in particular, are especially worthy of your attention. More on that later.
Why "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang"? This is a film made in a new cinematic language that is still developing "simultaneously" in several places in the world, rooted in American cinematic culture and visual idioms. It is a rich postmodernist work in which "reality breaking" is a feature, so is cultural irony and commentary based on associations. You'll notice the quotation marks in this review and movie. The film routinely winks at the reader by directing and criticizing itself -- and you -- the audience member.
Like Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy at the dawn of the history of novels, this visual "text" is self-mocking and invites skepticism. As you see "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang," you hear a time-bomb ticking and realize that the movie is wired to explode at regular intervals. Alfred Hitchcock is specifically invoked in one scene when Mr. Downey is hanging from a height, as the Jimmy Stewart character does in "Vertigo." Hitchcock said that it is always much better to let the audience know that there is a bomb under the table as two people are having tea, oblivious to the danger. For every second that the movie characters are unaware of the risk, the suspense is heightened.
This brilliant young (whatever his age) director ("Shane Black," pseudonym?) of "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" does exactly the opposite. Every time you are hanging on the edge of your seat, his characters remind you that this is only a movie -- for example, by stopping the frame, echoing classic cinematic language, wit, humor. We all do such things in our "real" lives today to protect ourselves from the barrage of unreal and stressful elements that we live with. Thus, at a family dinner we have a "Kodak moment."
We distance ourselves from the awkwardness in our contrived social experiences. Irony is now the style of hipsters and soccer moms, even politicians are starting to get it. We must live between contradictions. How real is your life? How real do you want it to be? Why are we in Iraq? What would you like as a rationale for this war? Oil? Evil Terrorists? Evil Americans? Adventure? Boredom? Let's stop the frame and ask: "What exactly are we doing in Iraq?" Wasn't "Shane Black" a character in a Western with Alan Ladd? Maybe it just sounded like that -- "Mr. Shane." Who is the director of this film? Who is "Johnny Gossamer"? Are you, the guy or gal sitting in the audience, the "real" Johnny Gossamer?
I am writing a novel in the first person, as a memory play; then in the second person as bildungsroman; then in the third person, as grand narrative, a realistic narrative in linear time -- punctuated by mythic and dream-like moral allegories in non-linear time, illuminating the story unfolding in the text. I hope. Either I write this novel or it will destroy me. To do that writing, I need a few people's help and some privacy, a computer that is hacker-proof. Really, one person's help. To complete this film, the director needs you, the viewer, besides the actors and others who help to create the work. (See "'The Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
This movie conjures thoughts of fancy non-linear time-sequences in physics and hermeneutic philosophical theory, explicit references to several Raymond Chandler novels serve as chapter titles or symbols -- "Farewell My Lovely," "The Lady in the Lake." But also, for the benefit of slow-witted readers whose lips move as they read and all lawyers, the self-commentary and irony is underlined by a non-fiction work, which was also written by Mr. Chandler, that is used as a chapter title: "The Simple Art of Murder."
That famous essay by Chandler provides one blueprint for a thematic thread or motif in this celluloid symphony. Actually, I think most movies now are digital. You know what I mean. Everything Chandler says you're supposed to do in the hardboiled detective novel is both accepted and turned on its head in this movie. You think Mr. Black is trying to make a point? I do. We live in a jaded age. Pass me the popcorn.
Whoever this director may be, he or she must have been smoking funny cigarettes before coming to work in the morning. (And no, I don't smoke at all -- since, unlike Demi Moore, I can no longer afford good cigars.) "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" is a movie that becomes a hall of mirrors. Hence, the writings of Jacques Lacan immediately become relevant. Look up Lacan if you were out that day in school. What this film suggests is not that classical cinematic realism is impossible in our increasingly unrealistic lives -- lives that are so lacking in versimilitude -- but that we can no longer escape irony. This is true whether we choose realistic or surrealistic visual styles, whether we are directors or actors, even if we are accountants or lawyers. This insight is the secret to the best film work of Bruce Willis.
In the Second Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton warned: "... construction and destruction can no longer be brandished against each other." (See Magritte's painting "The Assassin Threatened," then see "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang" again.) This film is "over-the-top" -- but only because our cinematic expectations now require everything coming out of Hollywood to be over-the-top in order for it to be appreciated: Thus, "Godzilla in 3-D Goes to Hawaii with Gidget and Discovers That He is Gay" is not a movie title that gives us pause. We are far too wised-up about cinema to be shocked. Again, we are all ironists now. Thank you, Professor Rorty. Americans' lives are over-the-top. Aporia is dispensed with the "Super-Combo" at your multiplex.
Slavoj Zizek (I refuse to supply those marks over the "z"s in his name on the ground that such a punctuation mark is un-American, irony?) writes eloquently of Lacan's psychoanalysis and philosophical arabesques, as applied to movies, in our amusingly devastated social landscapes:
"The easiest way to detect changes in the Zeitgeist is to pay careful attention to the moment when a certain artistic (literary, etc) form becomes 'impossible' ..." -- or if not impossible, no longer unproblematic -- "as the traditional psychological realist novel did in the 1920s. The 20s mark the victory of the modern over the traditional 'realist' novel. Afterwards, it was of course still possible to write 'realist' novels, but the norm was set by the modern novel, the traditional form was -- to use the Hegelian term -- already 'mediated' by it. After this break, the common literary taste perceived newly written realist novels as ironic pastiches, as nostalgic attempts to recapture a lost unity."
Looking Away: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), p. 48.
We can no longer accept or "see" the American hard-boiled detective story, for example, apart from genre or cinematic culture. We are immediately aware of Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell and many others in those famous films, "playing" Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. However, new movies can (and must) establish a relationship with those earlier cinematic masterpieces by sharing in the archetypal forms which they have created, while commenting on them, and upon the distance in our lives today from the value schemes giving emotional power to those earlier works. (See "Brian Greene and the Science of Memory.")
We still want the pleasure provided by those old films. However, we must now live at a distance from their dominant values because the world in which those movies were created is gone. You have to admit that's a neat trick for film-makers to pull off -- to enter a genre and yet comment on it, at the same time, "yes-and-no." This movie succeeds in doing just that sort of balancing act because it is a movie about movies, which is also about us. Cool. See Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).
Jean Paul Belmondo's tribute to Humphrey Bogart in "Breathless" comes to mind ... "Bogey." Where is Jean Seberg and that Herald Tribune? The first thing I did in Paris was to buy that newspaper and search for a hat like Jean Paul Belmondo's. See what I mean? Movies. Movies are like women, aren't they? Metaphors. Yes-and-no. Elizabeth Wright's interpretations of Lacan can not be avoided:
"Every positive determination, any attempt to define woman as an essence, as she is 'in herself,' can only bring us back to what she is performing, what she is 'for the other': for it is precisely in so far as woman is characterised [sic.] by an original masquerade, in so far as all her features are artificially 'put on,' that she is more subject than man.' ..."
Here's a kick in the balls:
"The masquerade can be seen as a veiling of the lack, a hiding of its nothingness. Jacques-Alain Miller, the literary and intellectual inheritor of Lacan's work, cites the fact that men have always been fascinated by the covering up of women, the imaginary 'semblance' that is preferred to the threat of the real lack that the removal of the veil would reveal."
Lacan writes of the "mystery of the eternal feminine." I think this mystery is more about dressing and undressing her, discovering her physicality (which is always changing), and only then her infinite capacity for transformation with costumes. Her mood can be created by, not just "reflected" in, what she wears. This is to say nothing of a woman's ultimate "accessory" -- the man in her life. Men are roughly equivalent to handbags for women. Generously, women admit that we can be much more fun than a purse. We exist as a form of self-expression for a woman, a color in her palette, like a poodle. Every woman is a different person with a man she loves than she is with others. Every woman who feels loved experiences herself differently. This is much less true of men. Read this quote from Lacan as it appears in the text:
"... 'We no doubt cover women up because we cannot discover Woman. We can only invent her.' ..."
Substitute this possibility:
"Maybe we can only be invented by Woman."
Lacan and Postfeminism (London: Totem, 2000), pp. 36-37 (see my short story "Pieta" and Spielberg's "A.I.").
The Big Sleep is a shadow-like presence sharing the screen with this movie all the time. "Simultaneities" -- or "aesthetic syncretism" scholars call it -- two time periods coinciding, overlapping, bleeding into each other on screen. Meanwhile the embodiment of American heroism and masculinity, the tough-guy detective, is transfomed into a sexually ambiguous persona and an underdog-antihero, while the ethics of America's knights errant is preserved and vindicated. The antihero is fully heroic in the end, notions of masculinity are questioned. Yet "Harry" (Robert Downey, Jr.) still gets the Babe. American values are modified and dressed in Armani, but still carry the day. Mad cool.
Only Robert Downey, Jr. could pull off this performance. Like Chaplin, he can break your heart and also inspire you to follow him into battle. Downey can make you laugh and recoil in horror from so much human suffering. Downey is a walking treasury of the full range of human affective capacities for my generation of artists and intellectuals. "Nothing human is foreign to him," to quote Horace (I think), or is it Terence? This is to say -- "Robert Downey, Jr is one hell of an actor." Now take a look at Johnny Depp in "Don Juan De Marco." Comparisons?
The Babe (female person) in this "guy's action movie with a twist" -- played by the amazingly charming Michelle Monaghan as a combination of Carol Lombard and Lauren Bacall -- is mega-smart and -witty. She is a reader, gesturing at everything from Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" to the archetypal knockout in forties' movies who -- while sitting in a bookstore or office -- suddenly removes her eyeglasses, lets down her hair, bats her eyes, then smiles lethally. Graduate students in mathematics sitting in the audience are known to experience an erection at such moments. This is not only the forties judged from 2005, but ourselves in 2005 as seen from the point of view of the forties as re-interpreted by Hollywood.
You have not lived until you've seen Suzanne Pleschette turn to James Franciscus, who is the novelist in "Youngblood Hawke," remove her glasses -- explain that she is his new editor -- bat her eyes (myopically), and whisper: "Shall I call you 'Youngy' or 'Bloody'? ... " To this opening gambit, there is only one reply: "Why don't you call me a cab so we can go to your place and screw."
Youngblood Hawke is a classic novel and film gesturing at movie history in the sixties, way ahead of its time. My response could not have appeared in that sixties movie, but it is possible today. This suggested response creates any number of options. She might slap him. She might smile. She might pick up the phone and call a cab. She might, very slowly, put her glasses back on. Then look him up and down, start to undress as she closes the door, and say in sexy whisper -- "I think I'll call you 'bloody." I know one woman who would opt for this final version of a response. Select one of these options and write the scene.
What more could you ask for $10.50, plus the price of popcorn. You may want to throw in some twizzlers. I definitely want to see more of Michelle's movies. Trust me, you want her to be a blond. Make up and wardrobe people, take note -- Veronica Lake meets Joanne Woodward, then they go to the mall. That's Michelle. ("'Eagle Eye': A Movie Review.") I cannot wait to see the new "Star Trek" movie.
If I can persuade the reader of this essay that Robert Downey, Jr. is an important American artist, then I will be successful in my efforts. Among the Downey films to which I may refer are "Less Than Zero," "Restoration," "Two Girls and a Guy," "Chaplin," "Weird Science" (not to be missed!), "The Pick-Up Artist," "Soapdish," "Richard III" (Ian McKellen's "Richard"), "Wonder Boys," "The Singing Detective," "Gothika," "Good Night, and Good Luck," and others. Mr. Downey in a film version of Hamlet -- set in New York in the forties -- keeps turning in my mind. Ian McKellen is Polonious, Rachel Leigh Cook as Ophelia, Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford as Claudius, and Meryl Streep as Gertrude.
II.
Sources for factual information:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Downey_Jr.
Robert Downey, Jr. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000375/
Robert John Downey, Jr. was born on April 4, 1965. He is, unfairly, five years younger than I am. Happily, he only looks two years younger than me thanks to my regular exercise, besides some astonishing good looks and sexual capacities inherited from my aunt Petunia. Mr. Downey claims that his birth took place in a manger in Bethlehem. Actually, Downey was born in Greenich Village, New York. Downey's mother Elsie Ford, a dancer and singer, is a source of Robert's artistic genes. My genes are also artistic, as is my black underwear, which features a glow-in-the-dark version of the Batman logo.
Downey's father was a director of underground films and not "an underground director" as People magazine would have you believe. Downey's roots are Irish and Jewish -- he's got the best of both worlds! -- and he has never lived in New Jersey. Furthermore, he is not likely to live in New Jersey.
Downey is a California person. Gore Vidal suggests that many an avocado tree in L.A. shades its own smog-bound zen master. Downey has been known to do the meditation thing, along with tantric sex (preferably with others) and is heavily "into" the power of crystals. Downey joined the cast of "Saturday Night Live" for one season. After his starring role in 1987's "The Pick-Up Artist," Downey was off on a movie career. In 1992, he starred as "Chaplin," earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He should have received one for "Restoration" and another for "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang." Furthermore, Downey should have won for both performances.
I will pass over in tactful silence Mr. Downey's stint on Ally McBeal, as an unfortunate episode of disconnection from reality. He won a Golden Globe award and a nomination for an Emmy. I only recently learned of his career in music: Downey sang a duet with Sting on The Police's "Every Breath You Take" song from 1983. However, I do not remember Downey wearing a cap and gown and dancing in an "orthodox-white-British-person-way" in that band's classic music video. I was also unaware that (in 2004) Downey released a debut musical album "The Futurist" on Sony Classical, also designing the cover art. There is no end to his talents. And yes, I will get the CD and clue you in on how good it is.
Downey returned to the unreal world of movies in the mid 2000s, and has established, if any doubt remained, that he is among the greatest screen actors in the world. He was married to Deborah Falconer and is the father of a son named Indio. Divorced on April 26, 2004, Downey married producer Susan Levin, in Amangansett, New York on August 27, 2007. Jewish women merit separate -- indeed, book-length! -- treatment, to say nothing of Amagansett, New York -- which is much noted for its devastating variety of lime disease. For symbolic reasons, this may be the perfect place to get married.
Why is Downey so good? Some artists have an intuitive grasp of the aesthetic realities people inhabit in their shared cultural spaces. Very few, Downey among them, have a feel for the future collective psychic space of a generation. Some philosophers anticipate the intellectual climate of their culture and help to define it. (Derrida) Some actors can show you what you will be feeling ten years from now. These rare artists anticipate the cultural mood of a generation -- usually, without knowing it. Also, there is such an abundance of pain in Downey's eyes, at times, and a child-like vulnerability that, I fear, there must be some childhood trauma in his life. I hope I am wrong about that. It takes one to know one. A person who can put that much suffering and pain in his eyes, instantly, is tapping into something real. I have always dreamed of a recording of Shakespeare's sonnets where each of the 154 poems is read by a different actor -- white, black, brown, men, women, young, old, all sorts of accents, some in the original and in famous translations. Robert Downey, Jr. should read the twenty-ninth sonnet in such a recording.
Downey, literally, vibrates with emotional intensity and psychic energy. Without his art and gift for empathy, I suspect that he would fall apart. He is always in danger of doing so anyway. Love will make an enormous difference in his life. Loss of love, separation from loved-ones, will always be fatal to this man. Yep, me too. When Downey is happy, he will explode with creative efforts. I am sure that he can write and, probably, also paints well. Downey's feminine energy is as powerful as his masculine energy, as with Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Mozart and so many others.
Downey's difficulties with substance abuse and struggles to overcome such difficulties are identical to the experiences of someone I love. In both instances it is not surprising that trauma produces such pathologies. Neither Mr. Downey -- nor the woman I am thinking of -- should ever have been sent to prison with hardened criminals. Intelligent Jungian therapy for artists, including creative efforts as part of that therapy, aimed at helping others, will always be more effective with such pathologies, especially when experienced by talented people who are involved in good relationships. Love is the answer. "Conditioning" is the opposite of an answer. No wonder they want to destroy these writings. I am going to put psychobabblers out of work -- I hope.
The most severe and irreperable harm done to many suffering souls that I have seen in my life has been the work of so-called "therapists" with pet ideologies, usually trendy forms of faux feminism or low-calorie postmodern behaviorism. These are the ideologies which are known as "bullshit" in my neighborhood.
Unless the goal of a legal system is to produce hardened criminals, the only people who should be sent to prison are the tiny number who cannot be sent anywhere else. It is nothing short of a miracle that, despite my experiences in life, I have not ended up in prison or as a drug user. In any case, Robert Downey, Jr. is better than most us. I mean better creatively and morally. So is the woman I am thinking of and all of the women in my life. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")
O.K., now let's get back to "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang."
III.
Val Kilmer is fantastic in this movie, which is one of his very best performances. An actor gutsy enough to take on his own screen persona, as the classic hero, playing a gay character and an "inside-out" Hollywood action figure -- an alter for the Downey character -- is worthy of an Oscar nomination. It is amazing how each actor's best work improves all others in a movie or play. Mr. Kilmer's intelligence, judgment, comedic timing are on display in this movie, as he and Robert Downey, Jr. play a verbal tennis match in scene after scene. I thought of Val Kilmer as a movie star, action hero guy. Kilmer has forced me to see that he is a genuine actor, intelligent and self-reflective, aware of his movie persona and at a distance from it. Irony again.
"Harmony Faith Lane" (Michelle Monaghan), notice the "Faith," is a dream-struck movie character escaping a hinted history of abuse in books of gallantry and adventure. She discovers hard-boiled detective "Johnny Gossamer" -- Philip Marlowe, as reinvented by Shakespeare or Cervantes for a midsummer's eve -- and becomes a professional dreamer, an actress. Other women fulfilling fantasies might be described as "professional dreamers," except that their own dreams tend not to be fulfilled. My goal is to fulfill one such dreamer's dream of love and happiness. This female Don Quixote -- Jane Austen's Catherine Moreland with American dental work -- arrives in L.A., struggles to survive as an actress, doing commercials with bears and bottles. (Think Jung on power animals, then Freud.)
"Harry Lockhart" (Robert Downey, Jr.), notice his "heart" is "locked," meets this old friend in Hollywood where he has arrived, he thinks, to make a movie, really Harry is there to manipulate Colin Farrell into lowering his price for the role. The entire city of L.A. is a movie set and everyone is performing, which is one of the points being made here. Postmodernist societies are gigantic versions of L.A. or Hollywood. Lunch at "Mars 2112"? Anyone? My people will call your people, then your people will call my people. However, no one will pick up the phone. That's L.A. -- Oh, and then we all get in a convertible, drive around "taking" a meeting, exchanging kisses when we arrive at our destination and/or insulting one another after we separate. Or is it before we separate?
Let me pause to deal with anticipated comments from morons. "Weren't you complaining about 'low-calorie-postmodernism'?" Yes, when therapists presume to rearrange the lives of their often helpless victims on the basis of some inadequate or dim-witted (Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli), illiterate or half-baked understanding of writers like Lacan or Kristeva, then I object to the human misery that usually results. When applying postmodern theory or any good aesthetic and cultural theory to the interpretation of works of art, I do not object. Context is all. Intelligence on the part of the critic or theorist doing the interpreting is everything.
I mentioned two great scenes: First, Downey is escaping from a failed robbery, when his co-conspirator is shot. An earlier self has died, so he must create another. He runs into an audition for a movie part. What follows is an "enactment" of a hall of mirrors. A great actor, plays a non-actor, reading very badly (yes, you can say "badly") for a part, who then actually experiences the emotions in the text, being transformed into a great actor by the "reality" of what he is feeling and communicating -- which is recreated, at two removes, by Downey -- and the movie persona is then offered the part in the fictional movie (within this movie) that never happens. "Las Meninas"?
An actor plays a would-be actor, who only becomes a genuine actor because he "really" feels what the script conveys, which is communicated by the "real" actor having the movie character appear to feel those emotions, only to evoke the feeling response in you "for real." Now you see me, says Downey, but then you don't -- but maybe, you do. Oh no, wait, that's you you're really seeing, it only looks like me. Movie magic, without special effects -- great acting, writing, directing and all for a measly $10.50. The most difficult word to define in the aftermath of Bush/Cheney's dictatorship is "reality." Movies are the ultimate "Weapons of Mass Deception" -- except that movies are concerned to reveal truth through lies. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
I am going to try to see "Sleuth" this week. "Atonement" is great. $12.50 is now the cost of a movie at my local megaplex, without twizzlers or popcorn, because -- or so I'm told -- many of our films come from the warn-torn Middle East. Hollywood insists that all of the import fees make it necessary for the price to go up or we will be driven out of business by China. The Chinese are working on a synthetic version of Scarlett Johansson. Meanwhile, scientists in Japan have perfected a duplicate of Woody Allen, who refuses to make movies because he only wants to play the clarinet in a jazz club in Tokio. I will see "Star Trek" and imagine the perfect companion for the outing, then I'll write about my "experience."
What sort of a movie are you seeing in "Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang"? Is this a new version of "The Big Sleep"? Or is the subject of this movie the way we see movies and how that affects the way we see each other? O.K., now think of gender as performance: What is "really" masculine or feminine? How is gender different from sex? Extra credit points go to readers of Norah Vincent's recent book on the mysteries of American masculinity, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge. (See my essay "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
The action sequences and violence is almost a cartoonish distraction from the heavy themes in this Downey movie. One mystery is the sidekick gal-pal in the first encounter between our fair Lady Quixote and her Dulcineo, Harry -- who is obnoxious to our leading man, only as a prelude to screwing his brains out. Will anyone decipher the mysteries of the feminine mind? I doubt it. Harry screws Harmony's best friend. Harmony screwed Harry's best friend and is kicked out of bed because of it. But does Harry kiss her fingers or not? It depends on how you see the movie? Is all of this about doubles? That's called "irony." Kind of. Here is the Master, Gore Vidal, to explain it to you:
"... the depiction of human character is no longer possible. [Not in traditional terms.] ... for both author and reader" -- or for film-makers and their audiences -- "... 'character is the converging point of their mutual distrust,' and [Natalie Sarraute] makes of Stendhal's 'the genius of suspicion has appeared on the scene' a leitmotif for an age in which the reader [movie viewer] has grown wary of practically everything.' ..."
"French Letters," in Sex, Death, and Money (New York: Ballantine, 1968), p. 120.
To understand both Harmony and Harry (H&H Bagels? buttered?), masculine and feminine selves, consider this:
"Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no other company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination. I was Puck; I was a long dead Egyptian; I was a time-traveller to Rome; I was many other selves. But now suddenly I wanted to be not Puck, or even Mickey Rooney. I wanted to be myself twice."
Gore Vidal, Screening History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 23-24.
"To be myself twice" is called "romantic love." There is one other self for each of us -- in this unique and passionate sense -- if we are lucky and can find that person, we may have a chance to be happy and do our best work, whatever else happens to us in life. There are also many other kinds of love. Movies (and all art) promise us this bliss, "sweet bewitchment," sometimes as a consolation prize for those who are denied so much of the joy and meaning of life in our cruel and wounding world. The realization of this promise is not sex, but love-making as self-giving and beauty-making, also as self-giving.
Love-making can be mutual construction and identity-creation. I wonder why I am linking words? Perhaps I am thinking of someone. Every loving couple is a nationality, a "self-created" community, a "you-and-me." This brings me to the second great scene in this movie, the tender love scene between Harry and Harmony, together with his kiss of her finger tips (under the blankets?), we also see Harry's separateness from Harmony as she sleeps away from him. I can relate to this moment of cinematic gold. Look at Downey in both of those scenes, if you can take it. Then go to the MET Museum and see Rembrandt's great self-portrait. You'll get it. Downey is Pierrot as thinker and sufferer. (Picasso, then Dali.)
The movie ends (but does it?) with a kind of bull session about what we have just been seeing. Cinematic time circles and inspects the moment, now. We are then brutally ushered back into what is laughingly known as reality: "Get your feet off the table." We are kicked out of the magic space of the movie theater -- like Adam and Eve (or Steve?) -- exiting the Garden of Eden.
I was planning on illustrating these themes of fractured images and selves with analogies to Mendel's work on genes in plant studies (bifurcation) or fractal geometry and Mandelbrot's mathematics of forms, perhaps time-spirals and Hawking's physics. I will save that stuff for another day. You are free to come up with your own list of Downey films. I won't supply one.
"Lord, but I do love thee ..." Now I must do the laundry and scrub toilets. "When I love thee not, then chaos is come again." As I do the laundry and scrub the toilet, I will think of my novel. "Appropriate," you say?
Corbin Bensen is excellent as the L.A. Law-like villain of the piece, by the way, echoing movie villains of the past and movie moguls of the present. "Indio" Downey is in this movie at some point, perhaps in the early sequences. Another Downey who will someday win academy awards. This is film-making as art and commerce, an illustration of Umberto Eco's concept of "The Open Work." In closing, I will quote the Master theorist of cinema, that young French novelist and analyst, auteur de notre jours -- whose name was unknown to the salesperson at Barnes & Noble. "How do you spell it?"
"Today where literature was movies are. Whether or not the Tenth Muse [appears] on a theater screen or within the cathode tube, there can be no other reality for us since reality does not begin to mean until it has been made art of."
Gore Vidal concludes:
"For the Agora, Art is now sight and sound; and the books are shut." -- Boy, are they ever! -- "In fact, reading of any kind is on the decline. ...."
Screening History, p. 5.
This is the perfect moment to write that novel in which, fleetingly and imperfectly, "she" is finally seen.
