Room at the Top

The mystery behind Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959), currently in revival at Film Forum, is what constitutes the fatal love between Alice Aisgill (Simone Signoret) and Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey). Alice is an unhappily married French woman living in industrial England and Joe ia an ambitious working class war veteran. Joe is the ultimate arriviste and his ambition is primarily sexual to that extent that his desire is created by the perception of what he thinks he can’t have. “Find a girl of your own…” his boss warns. “Class?” Joe responds, angrily finishing the sentence. “Background” is the reply. Taking off from the title (is there room at the top?) the film is shot in angles. In the first scene Joe sees Susan Brown (Heather Sears), the daughter of a wealthy businessman, getting into a sports car from a second floor window. He’ll eventually follow her into a lingerie shop in which the bra she might wear is tauntingly displayed in a storefront window. Is Joe enthralled by the woman or the world she represents? Is he stalled at the intersection of sex and ambition? Ironically he spots both his lovers looking up at the same stage of the local theater troop and one that he’s significantly laughed off of when he tries to read some lines. Later in the movie Alice and Joe will escape to Sparrow Hill which looks down on their industrial town of Warnley. It’s a scene right out of a Thomas Hardy novel and it may give a clue to the essence of the love which is so uncharacteristic of the bounder Harvey plays. Love freed from social climbing is as foreign to Joe as Signoret’s accent. It’s basically an unnatural act which flourishes in natural settings (besides the room of the title there's actually a lover’s aerie in the countryside which is a respite from the cruel dog eat dog world in which Joe is trying to make his way). The real evolution of the movie revolves around the development of Joe's sensibility. His relationship with Alice changes him (it's something Alice actually remarks on in a scene) and he's ultimately caught in a vice. Room at the Top was one of the first of the angry young man films that included The L-Shaped Room (1962), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and of course Look Back in Anger (1959)..Shot in black in white it captures the gloom and entrapment of the industrial North. The whistle of a teapot segues into the shrill sound of a train’s steam engine as an ongoing leitmotif. Irony is the emotion that accompanies the film’s tragic denouement. “You’ve got everything you wanted,” is the taunt that Joe faces more than once. As he drives away from a wedding that seems like a sentence, his new wife declares, “Now we really belong to each other, til death us do part.” There are artful bits of stage business throughout like one scene in which school kids are coming up a road towards Joe as he descends and one final truly lovely touch. The car carrying Susan and Joe away to their future disappears into the horizon and then just a lone figure crosses the road.

The Elementary Particles

In essence man isn’t free. That was the message of determinists like Zola and his latter day incarnation, Michel Houellebecq, whose The Elementary Particles is an essay on the shadow fate (in the form of history) casts, particularly in an atmosphere of seeming freedom. The sexual liberation of the 60’s which is the chrysalis out of which the novel grows, is ultimately rendered as a virus rather than an ideology. This was Freud’s message too, epitomized by the famous “anatomy is destiny” quote. Protestantism and in particular Calvinism lend a totally different etiology to determinism, in the notion of predestination. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is an attempt to pinpoint the bizarre form such a constraint of liberty take in the formation of the free market. In other words the very idea of freedom can be loaded with contradiction. In his Justice For Hedgehogs the late Ronald Dworkin questions the limits of liberty. If actions have consequences then say pleasure and satiation don’t exist in a vacuum, but have their effects on others. It’s nice to think that humans can exist in a perpetual tabula rasa, but then the price to be paid would be a kind of collective amnesia in which remembrance was the province of rebels like Winston Smith of Orwell's l984.

Pornosophy: John Wayne Bobbitt at Colonus

"You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It," was the title of a piece that recently ran in The Times (1/30/19). The piece anticipated the recently released Amazon Prime documentary Lorena. Actually it’s rather amazing that the whole tale hadn’t become the subject of a major dramatic work even before this. You would think that a composer like John Adams might have tackled it for an opera. You might say that Sophocles' Oedipus deals with the things every guy is afraid of, killing his dad and sleeping with his mom. But what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt is really the nuts and bolts of what every guy fears—that someone will cut his dick off. Guys often refer to a tough boss or partner as busting their balls, but whatever you think of Bobbitt (who Lorena accused of rape and who would later be convicted of battery against another woman) this is worse.  Given an occasional shot of testosterone you can probably function OK without balls, but without a dick you’re in trouble, unless of course you have any interest in transitioning (though without a penis there isn’t going to be much to work with). Luckily the cops were able to find Bobbitt’s dick and through the wonders of modern medical science, it was reattached. In fact, Bobbitt went on to have a career as a porn star while Lorena became a feminist icon and hero to battered women. However, what if a dog had eaten it? Let's suppose Sophocles had written the play. It might be John Wayne Bobbitt at Colonus or Charlottesville and the subject is certainly worthy of a Greek chorus. Let’s say someone cut your penis off, wouldn’t you, to echo Arthur Miller’s words about Willy Loman cry, “attention must be paid.”

The Remembrance of Wild Strawberries Past

Imagine a schema in which you appeared at your present age as someone who's now senior to a mentor or other parental figure who you knew at the prime of your and their lives. In fact, there's nothing new under the sun, but imagination is the most advanced scientific invention ever created; there’s a time machine in your mind which will allow you to enter a room as the senior of someone who you once looked up to. “The Child is father of the Man,” wrote Wordsworth. You’ll want to take advantage of this portal since despite all the reports of parallel universes, string theory and multi-dimensional travel, it’s the closest you’re ever going to come to effectively transmigrating your soul. Here you get a chance to redo things. How you hated that pompous advisor in college or graduate school! How dismissive and self-involved they seemed as they enunciated their perfect locutions, preening themselves with their familiar vocabulary and paying little attention to your sputtering engine! Now you come back and see them from another point of view, as immature personalities suffering from the pains of growing up, even at the late stage of life where they’d already become noted figures in their field. In Wild Strawberries Ingmar Bergman imagined such a character, returning to the scene of his own early years, wizened, but no less pained by the limitations of his own character. The movie may not have been science fiction, but through the wonders of his cinematic genius, Bergman engineered his own prototypic voyage to the past.

Eye

"The False Mirror" by Rene Magritte (1928)

In England the problem is that everyone speaks with an English accent. So it’s more difficult to get the feeling Americans almost always have of being culturally inferior. The same thing applies to France.  Only it has to do with looks and sexuality. There are so many good looking people and especially women with perfect Gallic features, that a set of morphological characteristics that might turn heads on say Jones Beach doesn’t have the same effect in Paris or St. Tropez. It’s reminiscent of an old episode of The Twilight Zone, The Eye of the Beholder. A female patient is told that surgeons will operate one more time in order to remove her deformities. The operation turns out to be a failure, but when the camera pans up from the face of what's obviously a preternaturally beautiful woman, the audiences see the that the faces looking down on the operating table are hideous gargoyles. Now the state of affairs for French and English folk living with their alternating air of cultivation or attributes of beauty is not as dramatic, but the shock for either a patient or observer simply lies in the mundaneness of it all. In a place where lots of people speak the King’s English or have beautiful features, individuals have the burden of finding other ways of distinguishing themselves.

Climax

Gaspar Noe’s Climax is an example of a Dionysiac bacchanalia with the Pentheus myth thrown in for good luck. If The Living Theater gained its notoriety from Paradise Now, this is a kind of filmic Paradise Lost, minus the poetry. Known for classics of violence and eroticism like Irreversible (famous for its 9 minute rape scene), Enter the Void and Love (which provided an insider’s view of penetration), something went terribly wrong in Noe's current production, which features a troop of dancers who lose control when the punch at their after party is laced with LSD. Continuing the analogy with Greek theater, it’s at this point that the Furies take over with a pregnant dancer getting kicked and punched in the stomach and with the child of the company’s manager adding to the chorus of screaming as he piteously cries out from a locked electrical closet. Though there are several light moments including a Tarantino like exchange about the joys and pitfalls of analingus,  what follows is shrill even by the standards of say Medea. The movie courts comparison to collective forms of drama not only in its themes of ecstasy and destruction, but also due to the fact that it lacks an iota of character development. Anarchy on film and the "derangement des sens” a la Rimbaud are naturally viable themes in any age, but Climax is as hermetic as it is disturbing. If you’re one of those people who has been flirting with taking low doses of LSD as a treatment for depression, you’re likely to have second thoughts after seeing Noe’s latest work.

No U-Turns

Tapco R3-4 High Intensity Prismatic Square Standard Traffic Sign

Life is long enough for most people to accommodate a certain amount of acceptances and rejections. People who are free-lance writers will remember the age of the SASE. The ominous self-addressed stamped envelope rarely if ever brought good news. Today, many magazines use a site called Submittable which allows writers to see the fate of their work on line. For others the experience of acceptance and rejection relates more to early romance and then college. After that they go on to careers in which the playing field is usually more level. But there's a certain thrill akin to gambling that one begins to miss when the old outlets dry up. Unless you're unfaithful in your marriage you're not going to experience the thrill of that first kiss or the disappointment of the slap in the face and ditto once your performance on this or that standardized test is evaluated. Writing is an interesting case actually. Since the literary world has become so moribund, there are less and less magazines in existence and the few that continue on more often than not appear in an on-line format which doesn’t pay much if anything for a writer’s work. The thrill of acceptance, when it does come, brings fewer rewards. In the  face of this some writers have begun to seek other outlets--for instance the emergency rooms of their local hospitals. They may even try to fob their work off as evidence of this or that kind of aberration. You might for instance send a poem with a dark theme to The Journal of Forensic Psychology and Psychology. There is also The Journal of Irreproducible Results that runs parodies of scientific papers; there is even an Ig Nobel prize awarded each year by another satiric magazine The Annals of Improbable Research. Economics changes culture and the dearth of outlets for writers' work has even led some eager beavers to try to make their work perform a dual function. For instance, remember the no U-Turns sign? Who knows but couldn't that have resulted from a poem anonymously submitted to the DOT?