Chile Journal V: La Sebastiana

There are rumors about Valparaiso being a dangerous place where pickpockets will assault the unwary tourist. These fears are vindicated when you walk out of the bus station to a seaside spot reminiscent of the faded splendor of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. The decaying neo-colonial Spanish architecture with its balustrades and ornate friezes on azure, purple and green facades is counterpoised by a generalized squalor, with large amounts of dog droppings (there are even more strays than in Santiago) punctuating a landscape of unswept streets. Ramshackled houses rest precariously on stilts along a mountain side which runs to the sea. All that’s missing to make the picture complete is a criminal character like Greene’s infamous Pinkie. La Sebastiana, the one time home of Pablo Neruda, Chile’s Nobel Prize winning poet, also lies on the mountain and as you make the steep trek up the colorful albeit still filthy steps which lead to the museum built in Neruda's honor, you begin to understand why Valparaiso is also looked at as one of the centers of Chile’s cultural life. Like the city itself Neruda was full of contradictions. He was a Communist who was determinately acquisitive, a collector of beautiful objects. He was the last of a generation of poet statesmen (Malraux was his novelist counterpart in France) who exercised imagination in the social as well as individual spheres. Yet he was also a devoted bon vivant who plainly enjoyed the good life. The Medusa face of Valparaiso is the neighborhood leading down from La Sebastiana, a neo La Boheme filled with galleries and shops and wall covered with Lorca quotations and graffiti murals (Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Wheat Field With Crows were combined in one of these). For those who don’t have the energy to make the climb after eating a meal of Churiana, a heavy dish of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes topped by boiled beef, the city sports antique funiculars and a fleet of aging electric buses with a haunting fifties design .

The Descendants

Andre Malraux wrote a famous memoir called Anti-Memoirs.  Anti can be used in the same way in talking about Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. Payne posits an anti-hero in an anti-paradise who by the end of the movie steps into the shoes of his heroic ancestors by restoring the paradise that was their legacy. George Clooney’s Matt King is the scion of an aristocratic Hawaiian family. The Kings are the repository of a huge stake of pristine real estate which is about to be sold off, producing a tremendous windfall for both Matt and the clan of relatives he represents. But King doesn’t exude the confidence of his social and material position. In fact, he’s spent his life  compensating for his good fortune both by overwork and by living well below his means. Similarly, the Hawaii in which he resides is a far cry from paradise. It’s a place where everything literally seems to be smaller rather than larger than life. The enormous real estate transaction which hangs over the movie like a dust cloud or tropical storm comes on the heels of a freak accident which has put Matt’s wife Elizabeth into a coma. King is an intentionally inchoate creation who has yet to wake up. His is a role which is not easily defined since it has yet to be and Clooney meets up with the challenge, as do the other actors in Payne’s troop who play Matt’s two daughters  the l7 year old Alexandra (Shailene Woodly) and the l0 year old Scottie (Amara Miller) and Alexandra’s slow witted but fast talking  boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause). At the beginning they are four characters in search of an author, but by the end of the movie the stamp of “earned” can easily be placed on the emotions they embody.  Pure melodrama is always lurking as a pitfall in a film where one of the central players is a comatose woman on  a ventilator. But Payne mixes up his own cocktail made up of  pathos, turning to humor and violence begetting empathy. Emotions turn on a dime and when in the end Matt says “lovely Elizabeth, my friend, my pain, my joy” you believe he is capable of mourning the fickle and unfaithful woman he has reviled, but still plainly loves.

The Terra Cotta Warriors

If you’ve ever been in the company of friends who’ve been to China, you’ve heard them launch into the requisite, world-weary confirmation that they have indeed seen the Terra Cotta Warriors. The establishment of this fact has the quality of a salutation. It’s like the meaningless “How was your trip?” converted into Renminbis. Of course there is also the Great Wall. How could one go to China without “doing the Wall?” doing being the gerund that is generally used by affluent couples who joylessly check off the must-see sites in their progress from middle to late-middle age. Imagine going to China and not seeing the Terra Cotta Warriors. What would happen? Would one have to make an appearance before the International Criminal Court of Tourism, where travelers who have gone to Rome without journeying to either the Caracalla Baths or the Vatican are put on trial, along with those refuseniks who, when visiting London, play hooky on seeing the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Many nice, intelligent people go to these sites. Many of them have advanced degrees from prestigious institutions, so it is hard to fathom what is going on. Did André Malraux visit the Great Wall, the Terra Cotta Warriors or the Forbidden City when he was collecting the impressions he reflected on in Man’s Fate? OK, yes, the Forbidden City was probably not as overrun by tourists as it is today, and the Terra Cotta Warrior had yet to be unearthed, but you get the idea. Great fiction writers like Malraux, Graham Greene and V.S. Naipaul who travel and write about their travels more often than not tend to prefer red light districts to tourist sites, for what it’s worth.