Promises not made, unbroken
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Deepness full of words not spoken Promises not made, unbroken |
| date | 2000-12-28:16:49 |
| Humans |
The Virgin Suicides is a brilliant and depressing film. Kathleen Turner is a truly amazing actor. I once saw a TV show where half a dozen once and future movie stars were interviewed to find out what their job was really like. The format was that the same questions were asked of each of them and we saw all of their answers in sequence, allowing for an immediate sense of the range of responses. It worked really well, and one of the things I remember from it was that when asked about the art of acting every single one of them talked about the importance of the eyes, how you really act with your eyes, that where you look is the most important thing. I've since noticed that this is true--really bad films (think MST) routinely have actors who clearly don't know where to look or why they are looking there, much less how they should be looking. I bring this up because in The Virgin Suicides Kathleen Turner's eyes are the least important thing about her character. The way she moves, the way she holds her body, the tightly held jaw and inward-puckered lips, the way her lower arms hang slack from stiffly held shoulders, the rigidity of her neck...she is brilliant in her portrayal of a profoundly fucked up woman. James Woods is also very good as her cowardly husband, and the actors who play their daughters, particularly Lux, are competent as well. But Kathleen Turner steals the film--she is clearly to source of her daughter's troubles, and if I were her child I'd probably kill myself too. The other source of the girl's problems are the boys, who are portrayed more sympathetically than one might think they deserve, but having been a teenage boy myself I can say in their defense that they are just as confused and lost and sincere in their desire to help (and their desire to have sex) as they are portrayed in the film. There hasn't been such a good evil mother played since Mary Tyler Moore's role in Ordinary People, which is one of my favorite movies. Carolyn and I sometimes argue about the need for people to watch what parents are doing to their children, and while my libertarian sensibilities--as well as my awareness of the kinds of abuses of power the Children's Aid Society and like bodies have been involved in over the years--tend to want to give parents more power, I can't deny that a society that is less tolerant of parental license would be in many cases a very good thing, and this film illustrates one of those cases extremely well. |
| Reading |
There is something spooky about Homer. I've been making better progress as I try to get the damned thing finished before the end of the year, and am struck by how polished the language is and how rich the metaphorical range is. Doesn't a "bearded lion" sound like a male African lion? That's a reference that almost had to be pretty alien to most of Homer's audience, and must have been completely absent up to a generation or two before Homer. Assume that Homer lived and wrote circa 750 BCE. The alphabet was reintroduced to Greece only a few generations before, so at best Homer could have inherited an oral tradition of Dark Age poetry. Perhaps I'm being overly hard on the Greeks, but when I think of my recent excursions into English Dark Age poetry I find it hard to believe that Homer got a lot of value from his predecessors, who must have been working for audiences that had a much narrower compass of experience and much less time for majestic flights of fancy. I seem to have mislaid my collection of Dark Age English verse, so I can't quote it in all it's awfullness, but let's just say that the Vogons had nothing on the early Britons when it came to bad poetry. What would be a modern comparison? Suppose that the art of writing English had been discovered just after the first world war. Then suppose that any major novel of the 1960's had been written just as it was, by one of the few hundred or few thousand people who had mastered the art, and that that novel would endure for the next two thousand years and more as one of the pinicales of the art. It's pretty hard to believe, yet that's what Homer did. And even granted that I hate the senseless, repeticious violence and strutting machismo of the story and characters, I can't deny the brilliance of the poetry, granted Fagles translation is supposed to be quite true. It's just hard to imagine Homer having the cultural material at hand for this great work--it's as if the world's greatest sculptor sprang from a culture where stone was unknown, something he'd heard about in his youth but didn't encounter very much until well on in life. Yet where did he get his language from, his vivid range of metaphors, each choosen so sparingly yet well? Chester Starr's The Origin of Greek Civilization gives a fairly well supported account of Greek Dark Age culture, although he's given to flights of interpretation that I find a bit amusing. I'm not at all sure we should read quite so much into the evolution from Protogeometric to Geometric to Dipylon and black figurative pottery as Starr wants to. But the fact is we don't have much other than the pottery to go by because Dark Age culture didn't leave us that much other stuff--the archeological definition of the dark age is just it's relative paucity of artefacts, which presumably relates to but a dramatic decrease in population and a big drop in technical ability. But how valid is this presumption? How big an effect did the dark age have on the average, rural Greek? In the European dark age after the fall of Rome there was considerable technological development, exploration and economic expansion. It's true that the art we have from that time mostly sucks, but that could have as much to do with the oppressive influence of Christianity as from any paucity of material, physical or cultural, to form the substance of artistic work. I guess what I'm asking is: could Homer have really been a product of a time, only generations before, that was as physically and culturally impoverished as even late dark age Greece is frequently held to be? He could have been, certainly--what the human mind and spirit is capable of apparently knows neither upper nor, unfortunately, lower bounds. But it seems a good deal more plausible that in some ways the Greek dark age might have been an agrarian utopia, much as I dislike such a hackneyed thought. A literal Arkadia. |