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The Neon Bible
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Terence
Davies’ The Neon Bible is the story
of a down-at-heel, Southern American family life during the depressed, savage
times of the 1940s. It’s a gloomy coming-of-age tale centred on a young boy,
David (played first by Drake Bell and then as a teenager by Jacob Tierney) –
and, as such, a good antidote to all those feel-good Wonder Years-type rite-of-passage films. Above all, it features the
magnificent Gena Rowlands: a beautiful showcase for her strength and fragility,
her soulful beauty and quietly nutty sense of humour. As a matter of fact, I’ll
jump the gun on this review and evaluate The
Neon Bible in a nutshell: when Rowlands is on-screen, the film comes alive;
and when she’s off-screen – which is rather too often – it dies.
I
haven’t read the novel by John Kennedy Toole on which the film is based. Some passionate
fans of Toole’s books have been absolutely livid about Davies’ adaptation,
claiming it is untrue to the spirit, tone and detail of the original. Something
that’s obvious, even without reading the book, is that Davies has insisted on
his right to do a free, poetic adaptation of it. What’s even more obvious is
that Davies’ adaptation is deeply personal, to the extent that The Neon Bible seems an outright
continuation, or reworking, of his earlier, autobiographical films.
Some
viewers are going to find this just too strange or forbidding tat the outset. For
instance, you don’t get much sense of America, American life, its culture or
personality types – it’s still the inner, very British world of Terence Davies,
no matter where it’s set or where it’s shot. And there will also be viewers,
familiar with Davies’ previous work, disturbed with its heavy quality of
sameness. Davies is an auteur in an almost Freudian sense: he seems gripped by
a veritable compulsion to repeat himself, to elaborate over and over, from one
movie to the next, the elements of his personal, private, poetic universe.
Now,
as poetic universes go, Davies’ is not bad. His films can cast a true spell.
One of the great clichés of film and literary criticism these days is calling
something Proustian. This refers to
the way that memories – real or embroidered, perhaps even wholly invented – can
be triggered by sensory impressions: a smell, the feel of a texture, the
pattern in a pavement. Many films that try to be Proustian execute their
memory-flashes in a very obvious, underlined way: a bell chimes in the present
day, then we return to a bell chiming twenty years previously. It’s become an
easy way of making transitions between scenes, and between the present and the
past.
Davies,
however, is more authentically Proustian – or more authentically himself –
because he takes out all the bridgework. Everything we see, every event and
gesture, is like some lyrical, sense-memory impression. The character in the
present tense who remembers it all is like an unseen, immaterial ghost: the
only reality is the reality of these memories, as they flow by, one after
another. This gives Davies’ films a very pointillist flavour, almost non-narrative,
as in The Long Day Closes (1992).
The
memory scenes or impressions in The Neon
Bible are weirder and less attached to a central plot than ever – I
automatically called it a “tale” above, but is isn’t, really. These impressions
seem to refer to, or be generated from, an intense, infantile experience: an
experience of, above all, solitude. Like Wim Wenders in his good old days (up
until Wings of Desire in 1987), Davies is a poet of what I’d call the half-life experience. A half-life
because it’s the viewpoint of the stranger in paradise: watching, yearning, but
excluded from the realm of action, of history and change. Almost the entirety
of The Neon Bible sets out to capture
a certain blissful, eternal, non-narrative moment of childhood plenitude. There
is violence and madness, poverty and entropy at the edge of this picture; but,
essentially, it’s like a womb of sensory impressions for David – and for Davies,
too. And the spell is broken only by an almost random incident of shocking
chaos near the end – perhaps the oddest moment in any of Davies’ films.
As
a viewer, too, you can feel like you’re inside the womb as you watch The Neon Bible. Events of sight and
sound come at us as if cut adrift from their original meaning and source. There
are magical, almost surreal effects. At one moment, the camera tracks toward a
humble, white bedsheet blowing in the wind; on the soundtrack we hear the tinny
burst of some classic Hollywood movie music, and the sheet is suddenly an
emblem of a movie screen, a screen for the projection of fantasy. Yet there is
no actual scene anywhere of David going to the movies, or developing an
adolescent passion for them. There is only this single, almost abstract
gesture. Davies’ screen poetry is written in this type of audiovisual
shorthand.
In
other scenes, just as in Davies’ best known work (and his career breakthrough), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988),
it is the murmur of the radio – its stream of songs and mellifluous presenters
– that speaks to us from some far-off place of the imagination. And almost
every site (like a dance hall), every communal gathering in the street or on a
porch, is framed and lit like a theatre – as if every life (or half-life) is
remembered as a solemn ritual, a proscenium-arch re-enactment of things past. I
don’t entirely, rationally understand this intense, intimate association of
memory with theatre, but it has an undeniable emotional power – here as in Martin
Scorsese’s magnificent The Age of Innocence (1993), or the oeuvre of
Manoel de Oliveira.
As
in Scorsese’s film, the rituals of memory offer to Davies a guarantee of
personal identity; almost a glue that holds one’s self together. To lose these
impressions of the past would be to dissolve that self entirely, it seems.
Davies more than merely sympathises or empathises with little, passive David:
we feel that, from behind the camera, he becomes this character in a total and overwhelming act of projection, vampirically
absorbs him. In order to make his movies as he does, Davies must identify
completely with the melancholic, half-life position.
A
key aspect of Davies’ poetic universe, and hence his glued-together artistic
identity, is a certain portrayal of the adult men and women who surround the
dazed, omni-seeing (and hearing) child. This universe is overwhelmingly
feminine. Women swathe the little boy in sounds, song, perfume, the fabric of
dresses and the touch of hair (cf. John Boorman’s 1987 screen memoir, Hope and Glory). The woman’s world is a
great, maternal shell – and if even if David’s biological mother, Sarah (Diana
Scarwid), isn’t quite up to the task, there’s always Aunt Mae (Rowlands) on
hand to provide the ever-gentle mothering (and smothering). Davies’ men, on the
other hand, are strangers, intruders – brutal, barbarous patriarchs, who get
drunk and go mad and lash out with their fists at their women. Denis Leary, a
generally comic actor with a vicious edge I greatly admire, is superbly cast as
David’s dark, disappearing father.
Now,
it will sound reductive and simplistic to say it this way, but a certain
thought is inescapable to any sensitive viewer of Davies’ collected film work.
His public identity is that of a gay man, a gay artist – even though this
identity is only rarely explicitly marked in the movies themselves (as with
many gay artists, the sensibility expresses itself via many masks). When
gayness does come up as a subject, as in the early, short autobiographical
pieces comprising the so-called Terence Davies Trilogy (1976-1983), it’s
depicted with an extraordinary, almost overwhelming degree of shame and
self-loathing. But everything in every moment of his oeuvre seems to be reaching
out to tell us that his gay identity is obviously bound up with this primal
experience of feminine love and masculine terror within the patriarhcal and
heterosexual nuclear family unit – as if his sexual self finds its origin in,
and was created by, this particular, very psycho-sexually specific crucible of
remembered, formative moments.
Here’s
the less happy news. For about the first 30 or 40 minutes, I was able to flow
with the drifting, mnemonic sensations of The
Neon Bible; and I was pleasantly happy to entertain all these thoughts
about half-life and identity which it suggested to me. But, finally, it is a
very fragile half-life for an entire feature film, draining away long before
the end. It’s hard for any director, however talented, to sustain the spell of
a non-narrative procession of Proustian moments. It’s particularly hard for
Davies here, I feel, because he gives himself an almost impossible obstacle:
centring everything on a young man who is so blank and passive that he’s almost
catatonic. It takes Gilles Deleuze idea about the reactive, sleepwalker heroes
of 1960s cinema to a new and fatal extreme.
It’s
precisely here that I think people divide into opposing camps on the topic of
Terence Davies. For those melancholics (like myself) who find something
voluptuously beautiful in all this passivity and distant yearning, Davies is an
attractive figure. But I don’t doubt there are many other viewers who get
terribly impatient during any of his films, who just want to somehow reach
through the screen and grab the director, compelling him to get it together and
get on with it.
The
womb-like fantasy of the remembered half-life can, after all, sometimes be an
excuse, an evasion – a way of not trying to live at all in the ongoing, present
tense of the immediate, social world at hand.
MORE Davies: The House of Mirth © Adrian Martin November 1995 |
