Closer

In the course of this film, the youngest of the four protagonists – and the one supposedly least wise about the world – describes an exhibition as "a collection of sad strangers photographed beautifully, which leads the glamorous patrons who attend these types of exhibitions to think the world is happy." Admittedly,  she uses a term far less flattering than "patron," but her insight amidst a nonstop stream of semi-profound statements and banal truths has a broader horizon that is hardly matched. Is the world really a miserable place, and artists (especially photographers and filmmakers, who make more direct use of their subjects) simply exploiters of the downtrodden to make themselves feel better about their privileges? This line of thinking has long been the battle cry of those who rail against art as superfluous and reduce the world to a compost of primal needs and disorders, bereft of any spirituality, any beauty, or anything more elevated than their own graying heads (this wretched lot knows who they are and should stay clear of these pages). But this is not exactly what the above quote means; or at least, it is not all it means. It also indicates that the artist and pessimist will never share the same tramcar much less the same soul. To achieve great art means believing in art, and believing in something inessential to the lusty cravings and itches of terrestrial existence means hoping that time will redeem your labor and crown it with immortality. Or perhaps we should just make do with aphorisms such as "you've got to respect the fish. We were all fish once," as another of our protagonists avers (somehow, this same character will later announce that, "without the truth, we are nothing but animals")? Like the title suggests, an examination of the film should not dawdle on the surface.

Our characters are four, a love trapezoid that provides gender balance: Dan Woolf (Jude Law), a failed writer and obituarist; Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman), a lost soul and waitress with a sordid past; Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts), a professional photographer; and Larry Grey (Clive Owen), a dermatologist. Both the women in our quartet are American, while both men are British, and the action takes place on the men's home turf. Unlike the all-too-popular hyperlink films in which the lives of strangers are interwoven by only showing us certain segments of their interaction, our protagonists are bracing themselves from the very beginning for a four-way head-on collision. Appropriately, Dan meets Alice when the latter is almost run over by a London motorist (a sure sign of an American), and when he takes her to the hospital unnecessarily, the cab driver asks him whether the young, bleeding woman he's holding in his arms is his, to which he replies in the affirmative. They begin a long relationship despite their age difference (about ten years or so; the actors themselves are nine years apart), lack of common interests, and general discrepancy in culture. That last assertion might seem a bit snobbish on my part, yet it is owing precisely to that unbridgeable gap that Dan finds himself attracted to Anna, who possesses the quiet, introspective tendencies of someone dedicated first and foremost to an art form. There is also the matter of Alice's previous line of work, which involved very little clothing, a fire pole, and dim lighting – an early admission that guides Dan's hand, so to speak. She's a stripper, the opposite of what we want in a woman, the opposite of art, because we want to earn every naked woman we see because we are ourselves, and not because we happen to own multicolored papers with holograms and famous dead people that can be traded, at our whims, for almost anything in the world. Even if Alice were not embroiled in something more debauched than stripping, the seed has been planted in Dan's idealist mind: my girlfriend is, was, or could very well become a prostitute, and he immediately looks for something purer among the pagan hordes.   

When he goes for a photo shoot to Anna's – Anna wants to take pictures of more ordinary people, perhaps hinting to Dan where he stands – they end up molesting one another, although Anna is obviously not interested and coming off a separation from her first husband. This indifference may not be obvious to a first-time viewer, but repeated examinations of Closer leave no doubt. Anna wants to be desired by Dan; she wants a nice, unsuccessful person to make her feel better about her burgeoning career (she is a few years older than the obituarist); but most of all, she wants someone who understands that artists can be the most gracious and the most selfish people in the world, oftentimes within the same mortal form. Dan, of course, is attracted to her creative mystique, her sullen devotion to her trade, and her mature acceptance of why life can be so painful. They do not advance past that first, teenagerish session, but as the months accumulate, Dan cannot let go of what he is missing with Anna because he is missing so much in Alice. Finally, via "the internet, the first great democratic medium" (Anna's bold words), Dan attaches Anna to the fourth point on our compass, Larry, a self-proclaimed "clinical observer of the human carnival." Despite his good looks and career, Larry cannot seem to find any happiness among all the young women who would stab their sister in the sternum to go out with a handsome dermatologist, not to mention the non-comedogenic advice that such a relationship would yield. The vulgar chatroom scene in which Larry is cajoled by "Anna" to meet her at an aquarium the next day will tell you everything you need to know about why Larry is alone. In any case, they meet, awkwardly, and – unbeknownst to a horrified Dan – start to date. Four months into their relationship, Anna has her exhibition, where Alice and Larry and Dan all converge, especially around the large picture of Alice in which she is noticeably teary-eyed, and which provokes the bitter quotation that began this review.

Even if you are unfamiliar with Patrick Marber's original staging, it is obvious that Closer was initially a play: there are, apart from a few quick moments, only four characters and they all talk far too much. This is the opposite of an adaptation of a novel, where quotations from the book are so decontextualized as to seem either utterly pretentious or utterly nonsensical (one particularly egregious offender is this film). Yet chatty plays are naturally inferior products because all of us have contexts when we talk to anyone, even to strangers; in fact, it is these contexts that lead to the majority of misunderstandings between people who have never spoken to each other before and, in all likelihood, will never converse again. The acting in Closer fluctuates from very good to phenomenal (Owen, who played the Dan Woolf character in the original play, is particularly superb), and carries a rather plain story to the precipice of excellence, contorting, along the way, banal truths into actual tidbits of insight about our four creatures. Dan goes back to the exhibition that fateful evening because he can't stay away from someone with equal artistic tendencies ("I haven't even seen you for a year," Anna claims coyly); Larry, on the other hand, is a physical beast, a man of science whose specialization is quite literally the surface of us all. The mismatching is fantastic, because it is exactly how so many couples operate, identifying something that doesn't belong to them as something that they desperately need. Even the music when partners are swapped is telling: Larry enters to something industrial in a club that screams carnality, while Anna and Dan meet at a rendition of this famous opera (inducing some critics to think that the opera and our film have some parallels, which might be pushing it a bit). The ending contains a couple of nice twists, and is relieved from one inevitability by the insistence of the male characters, in typical gender tendency, on knowing details that they probably shouldn't know. What type of details, you may ask? The details that allow you to hate or love someone so intensely that it devours your consciousness. And some people should really learn that asking questions ultimately leads to unpleasant truths. Maybe that's why animals usually look so happy.     

The Wrong Shape

That there is more than one concept of the abstract and eternal among the peoples of our lonely planet is as natural as the multiplicity of language or national hymn. We may be conditioned to some degree by the culture in which we become independent adults, and it would be dreadfully tedious to have only culture, one language, and, for that matter, one anthem. Yet the enlightened few among us understand that some basic human morals do not and cannot mutate, and are certainly not relative to the realm in which they reign (this universalism is perhaps most pithily summarized in the watchword, "peace and prosperity," although there is much more to life than peace and prosperity). When a difference in faith is involved, the bridges over the rivers that split cities and countries and families are based on what that deity desires for us and how he manifests and cloaks that desire – if those two verbs somehow do not become interchangeable. For those, however, who worship something evil – even if that evil is themselves – little can be done. Which brings us to this odd tale.  

The time and place are late nineteenth Victorian England, where a small priest native to those isles and a hulking Frenchman take their rest somewhat outside of London:

Certain of the great roads going north out of London continue far into the country a sort of attenuated and interrupted spectre of a street, with great gaps in the building, but preserving the line. Here will be a group of shops, followed by a fenced field or paddock, and then a famous public-house, and then perhaps a market garden or a nursery garden, and then one large private house, and then another field and another inn, and so on. If anyone walks along one of these roads he will pass a house which will probably catch his eye, though he may not be able to explain its attraction. It is a long, low house, running parallel with the road, painted mostly white and pale green, with a veranda and sun-blinds, and porches capped with those quaint sort of cupolas like wooden umbrellas that one sees in some old-fashioned houses. In fact, it is an old-fashioned house, very English and very suburban in the good old wealthy Clapham sense. And yet the house has a look of having been built chiefly for the hot weather. Looking at its white paint and sun-blinds one thinks vaguely of pugarees and even of palm trees. I cannot trace the feeling to its root; perhaps the place was built by an Anglo-Indian.

It is the last word that should most concern us, because it aptly describes the house's owner, the celebrated poet Leonard Quinton. Quinton himself was never one of those tanned, gruff, alcoholically violent military officers who spent the majority of their careers quelling the indigenous urges of the Indian subcontinent – quite the opposite. In shape and habit Quinton has much of the Romantic poet who seeks communion with the feelings that surge within against any wilfulness he might exert. If he were a child, and many Romantic poets certainly begin and end as children, he would draw. He would take the nearest blank slate and infuse the entire spectrum of colors into one picture because colors do not mean night, death, or the white shroud of morbidity; over time, he would select his favorites and make them the markers of his world (personally, I have always had a fondness for purple or lilac).

Understandably then were so many Romantic poets attracted to the Orient. Raised in the austere blandness of Protestant Northern Europe, they sought refuge in the mad medley of Islamic and other Eastern tinctures. Some would even argue – and this argument is still relevant today, given the splotches that inhabit many a modern museum – that it is typical of the less developed artistic mind to prefer the onrush of color to that of substance, the bedlam of every permutation of the earth's light to the crystal clarity of, say, an icon. Quinton proves himself to be no exception:

He was a man who drank and bathed in colours, who indulged his lust for colour somewhat to the neglect of form – even of good form. This it was that had turned his genius so wholly to eastern art and imagery; to those bewildering carpets or blinding embroideries in which all the colours seem fallen into a fortunate chaos, having nothing to typify or to teach. He had attempted, not perhaps with complete artistic success, but with acknowledged imagination and invention, to compose epics and love stories reflecting the riot of violent and even cruel colour; tales of tropical heavens of burning gold or blood-red copper; of eastern heroes who rode with twelve-turbaned mitres upon elephants painted purple or peacock green; of gigantic jewels that a hundred negroes could not carry, but which burned with ancient and strange-hued fires. 

The scene depicted may remind the reader of this nightmare of a novel, the only difference being that Beckford's work actually makes its way into hell – but I digress. What is most mystifying amidst this tale of mystification is its title. The wrong shape may indeed refer to the chaos detected amidst the dazzling array of oils and threads, yet it also something else. When the poet's body is discovered next to a cryptic note ("I die by my own hand; yet I die murdered!"), the sermon paper on which his last scanned line is written has an edge snipped off to give it an irregular shape. The wrong shape? Well, the family friend and doctor attending Quinton seems to think so; it would probably behoove us to solicit opinions from the fakir Quinton employs, his drunken and impecunious brother-in-law, the poet's long-suffering wife (a "handsome, hard-working, and indeed, overworked woman"), or perhaps even Father Brown and his chum Flambeau. None of them agrees on who Quinton really was, a genius poisoned like this poet and this English philhellene by eastern flowers, or a decadent and jaded aesthete who had elements of both the Romantic and the fraud. Perhaps that's why it has long been a conceit of detective novels to study not only the scene and method of the crime, but also the victim, because apart from random acts of madness, it is the victim's personality that will explain who could not bear to see him live. And some souls have far too much personality for their own good.      

Greenmantle

Whatever their creed, all artists of high caliber at one point or another dream themselves immortal. The reason for such ambition is not unlike the immortality we convey in the perpetuation of our species, in watching another life grow and blossom and in turn give life to yet a third generation. There are many among us whose greatest hopes rest in what they can offer their children in terms of a better world, and no "art-for-art's sake" pundit should ever dare to berate them for such selflessness. Nevertheless the artistic soul is necessarily a soul cloven in two equal parts. He wishes himself and his offspring – we must feel sad for those who believe that partaking in parenthood might rob him of artistic accomplishment – only the best and easiest life, and still knows that an existence without damage or dismay will likely yield a plain golden field no different from anyone else's. With such fears in mind, some artists seek out conflict or, in the very least, do not avoid it even from an early age because they believe these problems will ultimately resonate in greater accuracy as to the soul's agonies. How fruitful are these attempts? Judgment will be individual, but happy lives may produce wonders just as unhappy lives may spread their bitterness to every inch of their canvasses. Perhaps the best alternative is merely to allow your own soul in all its intricate contours to shade your page. A good introduction to this once-famous novel.   

The war that Richard Hannay began in this novel has now spiraled towards its close, but his taste for danger has not ebbed. As he would confess towards the conclusion of his adventure, dodging bombs and wounded men felt very much like a homecoming, which should tell us that we are not dealing with an ordinary foot soldier: 

I never could stand London during the war. It seemed to have lost its bearings and broken out into all manner of badges and uniforms which did not fit in with my notion of it. One felt the war more in its streets than in the field, or rather one felt the confusion of war without feeling the purpose.

There are few pithier commentaries about the miserable unknowability of wartime than this. In short order Hannay is accorded the unenviable mission of deciphering and halting one of the most preposterous schemes ever devised in early spy fiction (overtaken, I suspect, by some of our current potboilers, but here I profess my supreme ignorance). A scan of Greenmantle reviews will undoubtedly summon a handful that dub this plot – involving jihads, Moslem messiahs, and an unbelievable cast of polyglots – prescient given the battles currently being fought in certain parts of the globe. Such research betrays, however, a profound misunderstanding of what was then and what is now. While green might be the appropriate color for such a mutiny, the methods and principles that Buchan employs are the fanciful poppycock of the conspiracist. And indeed, by the time we actually get some return on our expectations of the figure whose advent shall change the course of a waning war, even Hannay admits that the whole thing could hardly have worked in the fashion the heroes had predicted.

Heroes? Quite a few, as it were. As opposed to his very solo adventure in The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay this time is leagued with a band of multinational allies: Peter Pienaar, the old veld-hunter who is extremely good at everything the citified could never imagine doing; Blenkiron, a massive American ostensibly modeled on this non-American author and imbued with the latter's serene confidence and faith; and Sandy, né The Honourable Ludovick Gustavus Arbuthnot, who despite being a skinny Scottish aristocrat, can pass on any given day for a native-born Turk. This fact merits a brief aside: while Blenkiron has some command of foreign languages but generally likes to prattle in his rather comically transliterated native tongue, Hannay and his cohorts, as well as a couple of their marplots, switch among languages with almost supernatural skill. One such person is the rather wicked German Colonel von Stumm. Graced with linguistic prowess and incomparable physical strength, Stumm's other interests dawn on Hannay when the Englishman is whisked off to the Colonel's private quarters:

That room took my breath away, it was so unexpected. In place of the grim bareness of downstairs here was a place all luxury and color and light. It was very large, but low in the ceiling, and the walls were full of little recesses with statues in them. A thick grey carpet of velvet pile covered the floor, and the chairs were low and soft and upholstered like a lady's boudoir. A pleasant fire burned on the hearth and there was a flavor of scent in the air, something like incense or burnt sandalwood. A French clock on the mantelpiece told me that it was ten minutes past eight. Everywhere on little tables and in cabinets was a profusion of knickknacks, and there was some beautiful embroidery framed on screens. At first sight you would have said it was a woman's drawing-room. But it wasn't. I soon saw the difference. There had never been a woman's hand in that place. It was the room of a man who had a fashion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things; it was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer other side to my host, that evil side which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. The room seemed a horribly unwholesome place, and I was more than ever afraid of Stumm. 

There are some unpleasant adjectives that would accompany this passage into contemporary print, and there is some irony in the fact that stumm is German for "mute" or "silent", but this is all quite beside the point. No one is spared in Buchan's nasty survey of oneupmanship, perhaps because he realizes that it is precisely these types of stakes that bring out the worst in every sort of man. Although the single soldier regardless of country is a titan among cowards, war is consistently depicted as evil and idiotic. Hannay assumes a series of identities and rambles through the last months of Kaiserist Germany at almost breakneck speed, all the while encountering beautiful patches of simple life that remind him that we are all subject to a mutual covenant. The finest scene enlists the kindness of an impoverished woman and her small children, for whom an almost deliriously feverish Hannay carves from wood "the first toys ... they ever possessed." And these breaks in the action are extremely effective in that we forget about the allegedly global implications of the Greenmantle conspiracy and enjoy the minutia of the daily existence we hope it never assails – even the "woman's drawing-room" that so happens to belong to a German colonel.

I suppose we don't read Buchan anymore because his world is no longer ours. Spies and secret wars have been replaced by unmanned technologies, as well as by a noble aversion to conflict that has thankfully resulted in no large-scale battles in recent memory (the local and civil wars, alas, have been accumulating). We may smile at some of the conclusions reached in Greenmantle, and shake our heads at the ethnic categorizations, but the violence of the language is undeniably crisp. Small observations such as "I put on my most Bible face," "Narrow, twisted streets, choked with soldiers," and "Stumm and his doings seemed to have been shot back to a lumber-room of my brain and the door locked," mingle with passionate descriptions of prior years spent in Africa. This was a life Hannay wishes he had never abandoned because that world, despite its mesmerizing unfairness, still possessed the hope that soughs through so many underdeveloped areas, namely of beginning a new and grand existence far from the hum of men. Life among the wild of the veld may not appeal to all of us, although Hannay thinks that is only because of our own churlish disavowal of the distant and unexplored. "To be able to laugh and to be merciful," he says once, "are the only things that make man better than the beasts."  Those, and one other thing which Hannay knows is the result of both mercy and laughter.

Blok, "Как сон, уходит летний день"

A work ("A summer's day like sleep departs") by this Russian poet. You can read the original here.

A summer's day like sleep departs; 
And summer's eve is but a dream.   
My pensiveness is cloaked in steam,       
That slothful haze of hamlets far. 

And so I breathe, think, and stay strong: 
By wondrous, blood-rimmed western shelf; 
This hour I love like sleep itself, 
No force remains to fear its song. 

And at this hour before your prow, 
I dwell amidst a sad soul's ash.
As thund'rous song and fear will clash 
Beneath the raging waves of cloud.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

An old rule about short fiction asserts that a story should not quote its title because it will have a false clang (even more true of a film as those being filmed should not be aware that they have an audience). While numerous great works defy such wisdom – those whose main character gets top billing do not really count in this regard – the sentiment contains more than a few kernels of truth. Philosophy, as many who don't understand a lick of it have said, is a pursuit of the rich. The put-upon, the oppressed, and the marginalized have no time for the distant diatribes of the ivory tower. How could the meaning of the universe or even simply earthbound life resonate with those who struggle for daily necessities? Yet in stories of horror, incorporating the title verbatim into the narrative does not result in a wooden echo, but an omen. It becomes a chant, a legend, a premonition of unspeakable evil prophesied in riddles and warnings which any normal, reasonable mind would interpret as unbesought mercy. And despite all good sense to the contrary, we see another learned man lured into the fantastic in this story.

Our narrator identifies himself only as an intern in "the state psychopathic institution," the state in question being New York since we will be patrolling these mountains. Literary doctors always need literary patients, otherwise they cease to be of any interest at all, and our narrator's subject was foisted upon him by chance itself:

His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts .... This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did.

As well it should be forgotten, since Slater will commit a hideous crime against a man called Slader, a likely cousin amidst all this "degeneracy," and leave behind "an unrecognisable pulp-like thing." Acquitted of murder on grounds of insanity, Slater, an illiterate who "had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale," will come under the examination of our fascinated narrator. Fascinated by what, you ask? By the fact that Slater's visions imply an ocular homologue of glossolalia, of sights his dim realm could not possibly know. Our intern explains:

The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues.

Experience has a rather unfortunate tendency to diminish imagination, and not only that of otherwise blithe and hopeful scientists. One wonders whether our intern would have been so keen on learning the secrets housed in Joe Slater's terrestrial form had his fellow boffins been more receptive to those "great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys." He does not relent in his aims, which means that he will have his chance alone with his "barbarian" of a patient, should that really be Joe Slater behind those blue eyes. 

Lovecraft was a stylist of indefinite genius often waylaid by his own nightmares and henchmen. And while the detail he lends his descriptions bespeaks the idolater, it is perhaps even more impressive that no one could ever deem his krakens and godlets familiar. How can prose convey the eerie sensations that linger in the crevasses of a sleep-flushed brain, how can wickedness in its most awesome manifestations possibly jostle our spines? The monsters of most horror tales are but ghoulish parodies of homines sapientes: it is through our own reflections, our solipsistic urgings, that we imagine life corrupted and distorted. But what if we heard a voice insist, Watch me in the sky beside the Daemon-Star, what then? Would we, akin to our ever-curious narrator, be so inclined as to gaze upon the firmament in search of signs and wonders? Not if our idea of fun is a "plain tale of science," and our reaction merely a dismissive shrug of the shoulders.