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Acute Misfortune
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I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again:
in 1995, I attended a media preview at the Kino cinema in Melbourne of Terence
Davies’ The Neon Bible. Only a
handful of people were present at that session, and wandering out into the
foyer at the end I realised that one of them was the singer-songwriter Nick
Cave. At the same moment, an obviously rabid fan of his clearly experienced the
same click of recognition. This guy raced up to the wary Cave and blurted out:
“So, Nick … what did you think of the film?” The celebrity replied sotto voce: “Well, I liked its message”.
The fan was thrown by that, and demanded to further know: “The message? … What
was the message?” Cave looked at him if he were a prize idiot and responded: “
Well, you know, the message is … Life is Shit”.
At that precise second, around 15 years of culture,
local and international, short-circuited in my brain. All the people I had
known – artists, students, writers, magazine editors – who worshipped William
Burroughs, Céline, David Cronenberg … and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Drugs,
sex & violence, pain, noise music, nihilism, transgression! “Death-driven”,
to put a Freudian term to it – and with peppered theory infusions from Georges
Bataille & co. (as in the critical writings of Jack Sargeant). In the
Australian context, having by then lived in the inner-cities of both Melbourne
and Sydney, I had observed, at close quarters, an ephemeral late ‘80s
underground wave of hardcore “industrial culture” post-punk style (in music,
design, the Super-8 avant-garde, poetic “small magazine” writing); and then, in
the ‘90s, a solid, overground swell of so-called grunge joining many fronts, including best-selling novels (such as
Andrew McGahan’s Praise, Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia and Christos Tsiolkas’ Loaded), commercially released films,
and frequently-curated, award-winning art (sculpture, painting, performance).
About the former, ‘80s moment, I had briefly
polemicised (against it, mostly, although I could never get away from its
presence all around me) – and, for my troubles on that score, I heard myself
parodied on stage in a song semi-improvised by a pack of conceptual-thrill
jokers (subversive types who, in some cases, later took a rather corporate,
institutional or mainstream turn in life). One lesson arising from all this
bohemian living is simple: if you hang around people who take drugs any harder
than plain old weed, you are bound to encounter this eternal cult of “dark
side” cultural worship. At the time, all throughout the ‘80s, the sleek volumes
of V. Vale’s RE/Search magazine
seemed to sum up this particular vibe – with their ingenious montages of J.G.
Ballard and Z-grade movies, Throbbing Gristle and Octave Mirbeau, Burroughs and
Henry Rollins. It was an intoxicating brew, even if (like me) you
“ideologically” itched to dissociate yourself from it.
By 1995, however, I had disconnected, in sensibility and
sociality, from the grey, putrid fog of grunge. But, checking back through what
I still have on my bookshelves today, almost 25 years on, I see that, at least
in artworld terms, I knew quite a few people who were then swimming, even
basking, in its mainstream resurgence: in and around the art school milieu of
that decade, top-level critics like Ted Colless, then-budding
journalists like Andrew Frost, hopeful publishing entrepreneurs like Ashley Crawford,
and emerging media-culture scholars like Catherine Lumby were all, at some
level or
Savage, expressionistic art, wild slashes of paint on
canvas – but underwritten by the wily irrationality of Antonin Artaud. Now, in
my own experience, I travel back to the earliest point of this history as I
lived it: at the very start of the 1980s, there was a rather bogus but
mediatically effective “war”, cooked up by various parties, between the
representatives of the “new Pop Art” (I was with them), high on Warhol,
American B-movies and Roland Barthes; and a bunch of “neo-expressionists”, an
aggressive and drunken art-school lot (as I recall them) who liked to paint big
and loud (David Larwill became the best known of that pack). It was, in the local
Melbourne tags and labels of the time, “Popism vs. Roar Gallery”, or something
equally silly. Not long later, the lines blurred and sometimes very forced
rapproachments were made; but a certain “return to painting” (or return of
painting), allied with an often obscure philosophical agenda, more-or-less
emerged triumphant, in figures such as Dale Frank, Tony Clark and ‘70s
performance-art survivor Mike Parr. In fact, it was at an arts festival seminar
circa 1983 that I probably first heard a demure, influential curator sigh and actually
giggle in public under the spell of this raw but cryptic art: “It confronts me
with things … that I would rather not think about!”
But let’s think about Acute Misfortune and its emergence in the cinemas of 2019. It’s
based on the book by Erik Jensen, who is incarnated in the film by Toby
Wallace. Jensen, a hot-shot journalist at age 19 (and today, all of 30, chief
editor of Melbourne’s Morry Schwartz-powered Saturday Paper), was invited by Cullen (here well played by Daniel
Henshall) in 2008 to write the artist’s biography, on the basis of an
appreciative review-profile that Jensen had already published. Beware of art
criticism! Royally sucked-in over the course of the next four years – Cullen
turned out to be a compulsive liar-fabulist on almost every point and at every
conceivable level – Jensen found himself variously thrown off a motor bike,
shot (and left to dig out the bullet-pellets himself), spied on in creepy ways,
psychologically abused, cajoled and generally menaced by the artist and his
animal-shooting, drug-dealing mates. Women are conspicuously absent from the
Cullen empire of savage culture.
What does the director Thomas M. Wright
(co-scriptwriter with Jensen, and actor in many previous things) do with this
story material? Before getting to that, let’s consider what the film is not. It’s not about any of the
microscopic artworld contexts of intrigue that I’ve so far mentioned – apart
from a fairly generic “anxious art dealer” figure looming at the edges, there’s
nothing about the 1990s milieux of art school, the salivating critics, or the
diverse “movements” (such as grunge or “scrounge” art) with which Cullen was,
at one time or another, associated. The film kicks off, effectively, at the
beginning of the end: eight years past the “Archie” (Archibald) portrait award
that made him a highly marketable star, Cullen has entered a deadly, self-destructive
spiral of drugs, ill health, lack of hygiene, and other invariably disgusting
behaviours.
You could say that, by this point, and all the way to
his inglorious-bastard death, Cullen lives out the myth he clearly craved for
himself: to ascend or descend to the position of Bad Boy artist of the Dark
Side, junkie, nihilist, misanthrope (and, more acutely, misogynist), an unholy
stew of Van Gogh and Brett Whiteley, Goya and Burroughs, Dostoevsky and Jackson
Pollock – firing guns to splatter paint on canvases and throwing off bon mots for his shorthand-taking
biographer like: “There’s nothing in history that you can’t find in the
suburbs”. Real life is elsewhere, say the intellectual theorists and
philosophers … but no, mate, it’s right here! (Here is a real-life flashback: a
drug-taking hardcore music fiend lecturing in my face in 1982, spreading
spittle and inadvertently quoting Uncle Charlie from Shadow of a
Doubt [1943]: “It’s all happening in these suburban
houses, the real reality is right here, if you could just tear off their
facades and see the pus …”.)
Does Acute
Misfortune celebrate this black, demonic reversal of the Male Artist Genius
image? Not likely; the guy is on the skids from the start, and what little art
we see him scratch out in his last years is way below par. Is it about – in a
tradition of the notable artist portraits or biopics by Jacques Becker, Robert
Altman, Julian Schnabel and others – the cynical vultures of the art market,
hovering to cash in over the artist’s dead body? No, the film steers away even
from the inescapable irony that Cullen’s own quoted diatribe on this point –
“They want me dead! Count the art dealers at my funeral!” – finds its queasy
correspondence or fulfilled prophecy in the existence of Acute Misfortune itself both as book and movie phenomenon.
But what is it about, then? Why tell this particular “decline and fall of the artist” tale?
It’s intriguing (even instructive) to recall the clever, salutary way that
Jensen’s book begins: as an email exchange with Dale Frank, a friend of Cullen
in the latter’s peak years of creativity in the ‘90s, who essentially refuses
to be part of the reporter’s dubious/suspicious project of possible hagiography
– and who claims, with brutal but admirable candour, that Cullen was, after
all, just another one of the very many shining art students of that era,
looking to make his way in that world by whatever opportunistic means necessary
…
Wright has tackled Acute
Misfortune not as an artist biopic (of whatever selective or fragmented
kind) but as a two-hander drama – the story of a relationship between two men.
On that level, it is almost a kind of intimacy thriller: why does Jensen stick around for all this
punishment? Beyond the gruesome, sadomasochistic push-and-pull of their
co-dependent bond (one needs his legend written, the other needs a story to
write, like in Best Seller [1987]),
Wright pushes for a kind of “sentimental education”, or at least an
emotional-psychological arc of development, in the Jensen character. To that
end – and to avoid the inherent “passive blank” that can result at the centre
of film adaptations of eyewitness-observer/recording-angel literary accounts,
such as happened with Michel Hazanavicius’s pulverisation of Anne Wiazemsky’s
autobiographical memoirs into Le
Redoutable (aka Godard mon amour,
2017) – Jensen is given a callow-young-jerk backstory at the start, some
fragments of family and working life (in particular, an older, no-nonsense female
mentor played by Gillian Jones) along the path, and an obsessive life-raft prop
(his shorthand notebook, forever on display in frame). There’s also a faint
note of Hitchcockian “ironic reversal” or transference in the slow-reveal of
the painting Cullen makes of Jensen at their first meeting (the film's final
shot, laboriously obscured until then); and the dropped hint that Cullen may
have had some severe, self-deforming problems with repressed homo– or
bi-sexuality. Not quite convincingly portrayed is a crucial factor insisted
upon in the book: the artist’s charm, which only peeks through here in the
clumsily handled scene of Jensen’s 21st birthday party. (By the way,
the film does wield a momentary film/reality frisson in its casting of the
artist’s second cousin, well-known actor Max Cullen, as his father.)
Curiously, in place of an artworld intertext (of the
kind I’ve mentioned above), Wright provides a filmic one, a veritable Great
Aussie Cinematic Tradition. How much this is justified by documented facts, I
can’t say, but Acute Misfortune goes for it all-out: the
nihilistic-dark-side-toxic-blokes-in-living-hell tradition that leads from the
animal slaughter in Wake in Fright (1971)
to the murdering families of Snowtown (aka The Snowtown Murders, 2011) or Animal Kingdom (2010) via what is,
stylistically, the Big Daddy of them all (and itself connected to the ‘80s
Sydney art scene evoked above), Rowan Woods’ The
Boys (1998) – which, here, Cullen (portrait-painter of its
star, David Wenham) appears to know by heart. This is more than a handy,
adjacent, shorthand reference for Wright: it’s the key to the thick, jagged,
moody, mumblecore-ish, immersive-subjectivity style to which he himself aspires
as a filmmaker.
The Boys-own
style is what makes Acute Misfortune both initially intriguing and, finally, a rather claustrophobic and limited
dramatic experience. Down-into-the-hole nihilism becomes its own justification
as powerful screen spectacle: this is the temptation to which so many
filmmakers (from Uli Edel in Last Exit to
Brooklyn [1989], adapting another impeccably grunge literary classic, to
Gary Oldman in Nil By Mouth [1997]) have succumbed. For
some curious reason, it’s a place to where artist biopics often want to take us
– madness growing in the close space between painter and canvas or sculptor and
material – and the best, most complex ones dip in there but then pull focus at
another, broader level, whether to evoke social swirls of pressure (as in Peter Watkins’ Edvard
Munch, 1974) or the tight
little art-communities of intersubjective binds and breakdowns (as in Ed
Harris’ underrated Pollock [2000], or
Maurice Pialat’s sublime Van Gogh [1990]). Finally, you want a little more than the only fleetingly and joltingly
edifying Nick’s (not Plato’s) Cave message that Life is Shit.
© Adrian Martin 30 May 2019 |
