Moravia’s Contempt

In an article in the TLS about Alberto Moravia (“In the beginning was boredom,” 9/25/15) Ian Thomson writes, “As a novelist, Moravia was concerned with psychologically abnormal, unhappy, diseased, thwarted or unpleasant people (amongst them, perhaps himself). His books are psychodramas masquerading as novels.” Here for example is Molteni, the screenwriter protagonist of Contempt (later made into a Godard movie starring Bridget Bardot and Michel Piccoli) writing about himself: “I realized that a man who is despised neither can nor ought to find peace as long as the contempt endures. He may say like the sinners at the Last Judgment: ‘Mountains, fall on us, and hills, cover us; but contempt follows him even into the remotest hiding-place, for it has entered into his spirit and he bears it about with him wherever he may go.” It might be asked, why write about such self-hatred and hopelessness? Why make a career dealing with outcasts who suffer from boredom and bottomless anxiety? Thomson quotes, Moravia about one of his other characters, “the feckless Michele of Gli Indifferenti" thusly, “For him, faith, sincerity, a sense of the tragic no longer existed; everything, seen through the veil of boredom, appeared pitiful.” Thomson goes on to cite another novel The Two of Us which deals with “a man’s unhappy relationship with his penis.” Why deal with talented people like Molteni, who throw everything away? Why deal with those who squander their gifts? Wouldn’t it be more meaningful to write about a truly unfortunate character felled by poverty or the elements of nature than someone who is merely aimless or listless, someone like Hamlet who maintains a thoroughly negative view of the value of human life—someone, in short, who has seen the abyss? This also is reminiscent of the question that some out of towners ask when they see a Pollock for the first time. Why? Here is what Molteni writes when he comes home to find his wife Emilia has finally left for good, “all was in disorder, but it was an empty, blank disorder; no clothes, no shoes, no toilet articles, nothing but open, or half-open, empty drawers, gaping wardrobes with bare dangling coat hangers, vacant chairs.” When you’re not able to be happy, you can at least write about it—something which is comprised of its own pleasures, rewards and yes even the happiness of being able to write such a perfect description of dispossession.

Diasporic Dining XXXVII : La Grand Bouffe

We always associate Epicurus with pleasure, but he really believed in moderation and considered pleasure to reside in the diminution of pain. So what would Epicurus have thought about the all you can eat buffets that are so popular with Americans. The idea of a buffet is that you don’t have to order one thing. Buffet applies not only to food, but to love. Open marriage and swapping are the buffet idea applied to sexuality. Why should you have sex with only one person? Why must fidelity be considered a requisite of true love? There’s the old expression, "you can read the menu but you don’t have to order." But why not order? That in effect is what you do when you go to a buffet and simply move through successions of chafing dishes, one seemingly more sumptuous than the other. Then there are the old-fashioned midnight buffets which used to be a requisite of most cruises, with their groaning boards of meats and roasts. The buffet absolves you from having to make a choice, but there’s also something lost in the process and it relates back to free love. At a certain point during the buffet you begin to get stuffed, one food obliterates the next. Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Philippe Noiret and Ugo Tognazzi were the stars of a move called La grand bouffe in which a group of aristocrats make a pact to have group sex and eat themselves to death. La Grand Bouffe was a buffet in extremis and what it did was to kill people as well as taste. Say you can have any woman or man you desire and you become a licensed serial adulterer. You may satisfy all your fantasies. But what happens when everything starts to taste the same?

Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang

One of Jean Cocteau’s most famous films was Le sang d'un poete. Cocteau makes a posthumous appearance in Leos Carax’s l986 Mauvais sang currently being revived at Film Forum. One of Carax’s characters looks at the back of a white haired man and says that’s Cocteau only to be informed that the famed playwright, poet and director is dead. But actually the kind of poetic cinema Cocteau advocated is alive and kicking in Mauvais Sang which is literally about blood. The movie could have referenced another work with blood in the title, De sang- froid, In Cold Blood, to the extent that it’s about both murderers (the death of the youthful gangster in the end recalls the poetic ending of Godard’s Au Bout du Soffle) and blood itself. However it must be said that for all its hot blood, Carax maintains a cool esthetic distance or heartlessness throughout. The plot concerns a retrovirus, STBO, that is created by people who “make love without love.” This is literally the bad blood of the film’s title and the blood imagery continues as Anna (Juliette Binoche), one of the film molls (the other is played by Julie Delpy) describes herself as not being able to stop crying and suffering from hemophiliac tears. Carax creates little campuses of imagery. When Alex (Denis Levant) meets with Marc (Michel Piccoli) and his other crony Hans (Hans Meyer) they remove their shirts in an almost viral way, as if they’d contracted a new ailment, lighting up cigarettes bare chested from then on. Alex, a strange and silent kid who his parents named the Chatterbox, has grown up to be a ventriloquist. You can parse the double entendres and metaphors that run through the film the way you’d analyze a poem. The work of another renowned avant-gardist,  David Bowie, “Modern Love” is part of the soundtrack.