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Essays (book reviews) |
Warren Beatty: A Life And A Story |
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The great show is as
furtive, and as bound by loneliness, as every voyeur’s pleasure must be.
– David Thomson
I
think there are two kinds of cinephiles, or perhaps two conflicting tendencies within
every true cinephile soul. On the
one hand, a deep attraction to states of solitude; and on the other, a
celebration of community. The movies allow, and encourage, both
tendencies. I can go home and have sad dreams about Once Upon a Time in
America (Sergio Leone, 1984) as if the film had been made only for me; and
I can also whoop it up with the gore hounds at a matinee of Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987). I have a suspicion that, as
critics become more dedicated and professional – as they alienate themselves
from the mainstream theatre complex and end up dividing their time between
secluded preview rooms, the VCR and the writing desk – melancholia inexorably
sets in, and the whole experience of film becomes intensely privatised.
Of
all the great writers on film, David Thomson seems to me also the most
melancholic. He cultivates his sense of solitude and pursues it relentlessly
through each film, motif or star that comes into his view. Whether writing
about telephones or moustaches, Cary Grant or Warren Beatty, Wetherby (David Hare, 1985) or Mike’s Murder (James Bridges, 1984), Thomson sees in each the signs of a sad shadow play:
lack of fulfilment, loss, separation, desperation. No matter what fleeting joy
or whimsy flickers across the screen, for Thomson it is all ghosted by
recognition of an unavoidable, solitary end. Although one could fairly object
that Thomson ends up rigging most of his subjects in order to produce such a
reading (and what film criticism doesn’t ultimately do just that?), there’s no
doubt that he is the most eloquent spokesperson for the melancholic aspect of
the filmgoing experience.
Prospective
readers of Warren Beatty: A Life And A Story should be forewarned of that which Thomson lays on the table in the first few
pages of the book: this is a biography by someone who has never met, spoken to
or corresponded with his subject. Thomson’s trick, in fact, is to write about
Beatty as if he is already dead. This corresponds to the book’s ideas about
stardom and glamour alike: the screen actor as ghost, myth, blank screen upon
which the viewer projects his or her own tortured desire. We cannot ever know
the real Beatty; he exists only as a fiction of the imagination. This lengthy
exploration by Thomson of the key tenets of what could justly be termed his
theory of popular film – a theory of desire and imagination – will delight cinephiles in tune with this no-so-hidden agenda; but it
may well disappoint readers in search of a more conventional (and
conventionally informative) biography.
There
are in fact two books in one – the life and a story, the latter being a novel
which runs in alternate chapters with the biography. Thomson offers his story
as a reflective counterpoint to Beatty’s life, “a part fit for him to play” (p.
5). It concerns a naïve outsider to the movie world, a writer named D, being
brought into the mysterious, duplicitous kingdom of a reclusive superstar,
Eyes. This literary gambit (or conceit) does not work as well as it should for
Thomson; it weighs the book down mightily. The story is somewhat monotonous and
lifeless – coming to it straight after reading Rudolph Wurlitzer’s not
dissimilar novel about New Hollywood, Slow Fade, I found myself
wondering whether it is a rule of the genre for the innocent narrator to have
his cock sucked by the producer/star’s secretary by page 25.
In
the context of the parallel parts, this story fails particularly insofar as,
while trying to expand and delve more deeply into the themes thrown up by
Beatty’s stardom (particularly the sinister Howard Hughes’ style secrecy), it
ends up merely illustrating and re-iterating them, over and over.
Another
reason the story doesn’t work is that, finally, I don’t think Thomson is too
good at stories. He understands them and their magic – he even provides his own
version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous “I’m just making pictures” lesson from The
Last Tycoon (see Elia Kazan’s film rendition in
1976) – but his deepest sensibility lies elsewhere. For Thomson, rattling good
yarns are only important for the moments of reflection they create, the pauses, the echoes. Movies always provide a sad revelation for
him; he cherishes the dark, frozen moments of silent watching, waiting and
listening. The cinema – and particularly that cinema based on a system of
glamorous stars – is a spectacle of interiority, of private thoughts and
hovering, luminous faces (here Thomson meets the very different theorist Jean
Louis Schefer, for whom films reveal “the unknown centre of ourselves”).
The
subject of this book is Beatty – rather than Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino – because he is an actor who “prefers to be invaded
by the perplexity of a moment”, who arouses doubt and speculation whilst
performing/being, rather than one who projects. Thomson is fond of the notion
of worrying – and Beatty is someone
who worries at his roles, rendering them strangely opaque and ghostlike.
It
has to be said that, because of Thomson’s affinity for the pregnant, frozen
moment, the most successful counterpoint he provides to the life is not the
story but the immaculately selected and often tantalisingly mysterious still
photographs – everything from Beatty’s face at its most inscrutable to haunted
highway vistas.
The
book comes equally alive when both the biography – and the numerous reflections
on what it is to write biography – give way to what Thomson does best and what
few biographers can do at all: the analysis of films. In a few brief pages,
Thomson brings Lilith (Robert Rossen, 1964), The
Parallax View (Alan J Pakula, 1974), Mickey
One (Arthur Penn, 1964) and McCabe and Mrs Miller (Robert Altman,
1971) alive in ways, and from angles, that one has never read or imagined
before. Thomson can grasp, in a truly exciting way, the interplay of an actor’s
contribution, the part he or she has been called upon to play, the persona that
has accrued to the star, and the total semantic field of the film as a film:
where all this holds together and where it flies apart.
When
it comes to the question of glamour in the cinema, I think there are (again)
two traditions, two tendencies. The first would be signified for me by the
chapter in Robert Benayoun’s book Buster Keaton called “The Mask of Glamour”, a letter of
love truly without limits. For Benayoun, Keaton’s
face is a mask, a perfect work of flesh, an imperishable image. Age cannot
wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety. In
Alfred Appel Jr’s Signs
of Life, on the other hand, a rather darker variation on the theme of the
mask works itself out: the mask as façade, as the picture of Dorian Gray, the
real decay and the genuine complexity lying beneath the surface.
Thomson
falls somewhere between the two traditions, playing them off against each
other. His story gives full vent to the grim ironies, the fatal contradictions
of the condition of stardom. But his interest in the life is the emotion of
someone fully seduced, who sees in the face of the actor and the fancy it
inspires “the ultimate transcending of history”. For Thomson, transcendence,
too, undoubtedly leads in the end to pure melancholia. But
for me, for you? We are not through yet with the cultural complexities
of desire and imagination.
© Adrian Martin 1987 |
