Damage

Love and war are old pastimes; obsession brings forth much more interesting data.  Some may reply that love itself is an obsession, a maniacal urge to experience life’s greatest reward regardless of the personal cost (and as you can see, that last sentence makes as much sense as love).  True enough, obsession often comprises many facets of love, but it is a selfish love, a bitter, corrosive lust that lurks in both the good and the wicked.  Love is always nauséabond; obsession cannot lead to anything good.  We know this and yet, as we watch this magnificent film unravel, as so many reviewers have put it, like a slow-motion car wreck, we cannot look away although (or maybe because) doom for all is veritably assured.

There are no ugly people, scenery, or moments in Damage, as the film itself is obsessed with obsession, with caring about something so much that it slowly engulfs everything else.  For an aesthetic project, this means beauty, and often what accompanies beauty – youth, lust, irreverence, irresponsibility, betrayal, and pain.  Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is a rising deputy minister who will likely be promoted to the cabinet.  His life has everything a plain, material mind could wish for as well as those things that most every soul needs: a loving spouse (Miranda Richardson), two well–adjusted children (Rupert Graves and Gemma Clark), and a solid marriage based on admiration, respect, and love.  But he has been a responsible and driven workaholic for too many years, ever since he was a "young doctor, doing simple things well."  One day, his son Martyn, a young, handsome newspaper editor, announces he has a new girlfriend, apparently nothing more than the flavor of the month.  This woman is Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), whose alphabetic name already suggests her primordial importance, and before Martyn can even introduce her to his parents, she approaches Stephen at an official reception.  The look they exchange is one of the most impressive bits of understatement in recent cinematic history.  It says absolutely everything about their relationship, about Anna’s mind and personality, as well as about Stephen’s hard-won position of influence and what he has had to give up to get there.  Their first physical encounter is wordless, the phone call that abets their urges almost as taciturn, and we understand the weird chemical processes programmed into each of us, for many never to be truly unleashed.  This is brute force, animalistic and unstoppable, but there is also much more to this than meets the eye.

For Anna, Stephen is safe.  Apart from being twenty years her senior and married, he is the father of her boyfriend, so they cannot possibly have a relationship glazed with sweet nothings.  He also allows her to indulge her lifelong therapeutic need of fighting possessiveness by cheating.  If you don’t see this unbelievably selfish streak, and how she instigates everything then wants no responsibility for her actions because of the cruel fate of her young brother (a back story that I will not spoil), your ethical standards may need some ironing.  "Damaged people are dangerous," she says with some gusto, "they know they can survive."  Throughout the film, Anna thinks of herself as a tragic figure even though she has enjoyed a privileged if itinerant life, and her mother’s numerous marriages do nothing to dispel her cynicism.  No less culpable but much more idealistic, Stephen is taken by her for reasons we can and cannot understand.  Surely Martyn is reveling in the freedoms of youth that presumably eluded Stephen owing to his career and long marriage, and Stephen is sentimental for those times when his whole life lay before him, unread, undetermined, but very promising.  The less transparent reason is his own, something that he makes light of at the end of the film, and has to do with Anna as the person he was always meant to covet, to have, and perhaps to keep.  The two of them conspire on an affair that only gets more heated once Martyn and Anna announce their engagement.

Reviews of the film tend to sprinkle their compliments on the fine acting (Irons and Richardson in particular are more than perfect, they are unforgettable), beautiful decor, and straight road of destiny that each of the characters follows.  Yet among these same reviews, one finds numerous concerns about the plausibility of the whole endeavor.  Anna is not the type of woman that drives a man to passion or obsession say a few critics, apparently experts on both subjects;  there are, others point out, additional character issues apart from the extramarital affair that remain unexplored (a valid observation were it not for the fact that the movie is about monomania and the extinction of everything else); then there are the numerous sex scenes which critics tell us, with no small disappointment, are simply not sexy; finally, since this is a film about passion, an emotion to which Stephen is famously accused of being immune, the alleged sparks between the two main characters are, they are sorry to say, decidedly cold and, well, passionless.  All in all an attractive picture if a fairy tale. 

How curious it is that the same reviewers who suspend their disbelief for giant extraterrestrials, ghosts, talking animals, vampires, werewolves, and sharp-witted, benevolent teenagers find the circumstances in Damage, as well as the particular casting, unlikely.  True enough, there are certain assumptions made of artistic melodramas that confine them to the realm of the real and preclude supernatural or otherworldly intervention.  Yet how can we judge what is, in essence, a fairy tale with modern princes and princesses living in the upper echelon of early 1990s London?  This is hardly a realistic slice of life for the majority of viewers.  Why should their tastes and emotions (and the strange way in which they express these emotions) be any more familiar to us than their lifestyles?  They are not.  Nothing seems real because the whole film is a wild dream that sees its end in its beginning and rambles forth undeterred hoping that it will survive.  It is Stephen’s second youth and his death, although we pity him more than anyone else in the film.  He is lost, utterly lost, utterly without a center or a pole or gravity itself.  He cannot crash down to earth, and because he cannot let go of one woman who doesn't seem so different from anyone else, he is exiled to hover forever in space and watch his innermost desires from afar.  And, unlike Anna, he does not know whether he can survive. 

He Was a Quiet Man

Upon being asked for his creative method, a famous novelist once said he always began by constellating the criteria of an artistic problem.  An artistic problem is one that does not rely on history for its strength (the death of a real seventeenth–century queen is no more tragic than that of a peasant woman in contemporary Eritrea), nor pretends to be about art while concealing a political or religious agenda (a parable for Calvinism, feminism, or cultural differences are all simply parables, but not art).  That said, from great art you can derive every philosophical, political, ethical, and religious treatise imaginable because they are all contained, to one degree or another, in such works of creative genius.  Do you not sense all our evolution when you gaze upon Bosch’s netherworlds?  Does listening to Bach not give you a clear portal to eternal peace?  Surely, some may say, these are lofty ideals.  Yet without ideals we are but mud ticks hopping from dirt patch to dirt patch until all quickness is drained from our bodies.  So we come up with artistic problems and we masticate on their possible resolution.  After a time and some good thought, we begin to sense an outline, a thin skeleton below the water.  Pebbles become stones and rise together like a bridge across the low tide of Saint Michel, and we have seen the alpha and omega of the issue and scamper back to check our calculations.    

Such a design, common to the great artists in all fields for centuries, has either fallen into desuetude or warped itself into hyperspace.  Now films and books either have no plot at all, or are so overplotted for the demands of the reader who wants every last loose end tied into a bonnie bow, that we yearn for basic character studies unvitiated by an unpronounceable disease.  Many of us do suffer from disorders, and they deserve our compassion; but our compassion should be no narrower for the unfortunate nerds and introverts of the world who have no recourse to any joy in their lives.  There are a number of reasons for this, the least of which is the actual environment of the outcast in question.  Of greatest weight is the personality of the individual, of his ability to overcome the storms that life inflicts upon us every so often, and to rise above the morass and breathe in the air.  Most of us will not succeed.  In fact, some will fail so spectacularly in their attempt to join the rest of humanity that the oddest and most horrifying ideas start welcoming them when they get home (nothing else is there to do the trick).  They palliate their stress by going, in their minds, on distant journeys alone or with some coveted partner well out of their league.  Little by little, they move on to bolder acts of righteousness; perhaps they even contemplate a poisoning or two.  Who would miss their bedevilers anyway?  We could always do with fewer bullies and thugs.  More dreamlike strolls through the parks of vengeance lead to even more devastating ideas, ideas that would fix everything with a modicum of planning and subterfuge.  And soon, very soon, the tide is low and we have our bridge in glorious concatenation.

Such is the plan of Bob McConnell (Christian Slater), this film's miserable victim of circumstance who spends his free time getting lectured by his fish and devising the destruction of his hated workplace.  In this day and age in particular, we scoff less at the possibility of these cubiclicides since we know well what despair lies in the hearts of men.  Bob is a true threat, that is clear; and it just may be a matter of time before the fuse is lit and he perches with a remote control detonator on a nearby hill to ensure that no Schadenfreude eludes him.  What Bob does not immediately suppose is that in a building of that enormousness there are bound to be other Bobs, some maybe far more miserable than he, with similar ambitions.  And so, one fine day, Bob sneaks a loaded pistol into the office with every intention of using it or at least brandishing it wildly to gain a few seconds of respect.  Picking up one of his beloved paper clips (or so he claims) prevents him from falling victim to another shooter, an officemate that’s basically an older, bitterer version of himself who guns down a roomful of colleagues before Bob, yes Bob, slays him and becomes the hero.  The obvious question in this scenario is why no one really finds Bob’s very convenient means of retaliation suspicious.  Some characters do consider it; but Bob is so timid and pathetic and easy to pinball around that anything except self–defense is unimaginable.  The thing is, of course, that Bob’s foiled plan for retribution is essentially self–defense against a lifetime of verbal and physical battery.  
    
Bob is deified and promoted to the rank of VP of Creative Thinking by his worthless and loveless boss (William H. Macy), a former military officer whose desk proudly juxtaposes a faux Rubik's cube and a gilded grenade.  VP of CT is in all respects a high altitude post: Bob now drives a luxury car and after years of requests finally has a windowed office.  The office most recently belonged to one of the victims, the lovely young vice president Vanessa Parks (Elisha Cuthbert), herself a V.P.  The bullet that hit Vanessa left her paralyzed, which makes her curse Bob for not having finished her off before the paramedics arrived.  Soon after that, however, the two bond and a love affair hovers, but we know that this is not that kind of film.  The humor is dark, the company’s name is ADD and no one ever seems to do anything at all, and there are abject displays of cruelty lifted from everyday interaction that make your blood curdle.  Expect more than one twist, and make of the ending what you will; but don't forget to watch Slater in the role of his career.  Throughout the film he maintains the complexion and demeanor of a drunk gopher, no mean feat.  As we know he is a kind man who cannot treat others the way he has always been treated, we are sympathetic to the plight and want him to win something from this ordeal.  But all people, even the kindest and especially the quietest, have their breaking points.  

Confessions of a Justified Sinner

We are no longer naive enough to believe in an evil force that could manipulate our actions and cause our damnation.  I fear that some readers may not bother to venture past that last sentence, and may think impatiently to themselves what other fringe topics divert my attention (there are indeed others).  Malevolence in the human soul is considered by many theologians to be the wage of weakness and indulgence, of giving in to the primeval, selfish and often highly destructive desires that besiege us from all corners of our fallen world.  Yet we should not forget that while evil may or may not involve free will, it is necessarily an active force.  It cannot exist in a vacuum, nor lack an object upon which it may direct its action; in other words, if you were alone on a desert isle, you could not be evil.  You may injure or mutilate yourself, or subject your body and mind to deprivation and fatigue, but could you be justly charged with anything more than self–loathing or masochism?  To inflict woe you need another soul or another body, which brings us to this lesser-known masterpiece.

You will be surprised to learn, as was I, that the author became literate at a rather late age.  The only advantage of such a delay is the chance to devote oneself to a mastery of the colloquial language quite out of sorts with a school education, as well as an intimate knowledge of the objects of a bookless life.  Obviously, reading and writing are so essential to the development of the soul that it is hard to imagine an existence without their joys.  But sometimes, in rare cases of outstanding genius, one will find a mind that has been broadened not shrunk by its lack of exposure, dimensions which then increase exponentially once pen and paper are befriended.  Hogg’s interspersion of Scots dialect is not forced.  This is, one assumes, exactly the tone and delivery that these characters would have used.  That does not prevent it, however, from becoming somewhat of an annoyance and something gladly skipped in favor of Hogg’s magnificent normal style.  Look at how a street brawl comes to life in his able hands:

The unnumbered alleys on each side of the street had swallowed up the multitude in a few seconds; but from these they were busy reconnoitring; and, perceiving the deficiency in the number of their assailants, the rush from both sides of the street was as rapid, and as wonderful, as the disappearance of the crowd had been a few minutes before.  Each close vomited out its levies, and these better armed with missiles than when they sought it for a temporary retreat.  Woe then to our two columns of victorious Whigs! 

To the modern ear this style goes above the rich conversational language that contemporary writers use and which, unless the writer is staggeringly talented, tends to commix with plain talk.  Hogg is rehearsing the battle for a soul, split as it were in half.  Following these guidelines, the book folds into two parts: the first describes events mysterious and sinister in nature with no immediate explanation; the second part details a horrible alliance.

 

The soul in question belongs to Robert Wringhim Colwan, the adopted son of a Scottish clergyman and a beautiful if tortured youth.  The title tells us that he will fall hard upon the materialist wickedness of the world, but to what degree he has repented, if repentance is at all an option, makes us read on.  Robert has a half—sibling, George, and it is a dark day when Robert becomes his brother's shadow and keeper.   He lurches in his proximity at every corner and stretch of the gloomy, dour Edinburgh streets until George cannot believe that a mortal could know all his moments and move with such alacrity.  Soon enough, he is provoked into crime, or that is at least what the first narrative states plainly while hinting otherwise.  Then something even worse happens to George, and Robert is, well, somehow both implicated and perfectly alibied.  Yet when Mrs. Logan (the helpmeet of George's father) and Mrs. Calvert (a prostitute) travel to the country:

Mrs. Calvert sat silent, and stared the other mildly in the face.  Their looks encountered, and there was an unearthly amazement that gleamed from each, which, meeting together, caught real fire, and returned the flame to their heated imaginations, till the two associates became like two statues, with their hands spread, their eyes fixed, and their chops fallen down upon their bosoms.  An old woman who kept the lodging-house, having been called in before when Mrs. Logan was faintish, chanced to enter at this crisis with some cordial; and, seeing the state of her lodgers, she caught the infection, and fell into the same rigid and statue-like appearance. 

What they saw precisely will not be revealed here.  But the novel's second half has sufficient data to spin a thick web of conjecture around these events, if these were really events to begin with and not the ravings of a mad mind.  I would guess that many readers will find the second half too drawn out, each step too ponderous, each stride overextended.  I would also guess that immediate gratification of the type found in popular novels of the supernatural eschews suspense for horror, and deprives the reader of the most terrifying of all revelations:  an evil that knows no bounds and which seems to grow larger the more one knows of it.  This is the quandary of Robert Wringhim, a wretched youth who has little of the hero in him and much of the jackal.  It is here that we realize that the title is not meant to evoke pity, but is taken in all seriousness, and we shudder at the consequences.

The Return of Imray

Thinking of this Englishman as a writer of detective stories sounds strange, although the times and places in which he lived afforded his skills ample opportunity to develop.  What Kipling could not find in his environs in Lahore or Bombay he imported from the birthland of his forefathers, and his whimsy and sense of the nugatory cannot be better expressed than in a quote from this story:

For these reasons, and because he was hampering, in a microscopical degree, the administration of the Indian Empire, that Empire paused for one microscopical moment to make inquiry into the fate of Imray. 

This is undoubtedly one of the finest sentences of English literature: the whole tale, then, is to be a moment in the life of someone who is probably dead and surely unimportant, except to the narrator, who has other ends in mind.  Art at the microscopical degree is still art, and an inquiry into the miniature particles of its construct as commendable as the painting of a chapel ceiling.  And Imray is suddenly as significant as any other fictional character that has ever lived.

Our narrator has few contacts in the world he describes.  There is only another Anglo–Indian, Strickland, a friend and policeman who rents the bungalow formerly inhabited by the Indian Imray, and Strickland’s dog, Tietjens.  What is particular about Tietjens, a bouncy and frisky beast with more personality than just about anyone else in this story, is that she is immediately identified as both a “slut” (a connotation that in 1891 was not quite like today’s use of the word) and a “familiar spirit.”  Now I cannot say I am an expert in the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent, but this stroke suggests a sympathy with the local tradition that is often missing in “colonial” narratives, for lack of a better term.  Kipling himself was often charged with being too negative about the civilizations his country subjugated and the glee with which he spread his literature suggested a certain pride in the accomplishments of imperialism.  That view, in retrospect, comes off as too politically charged to be of any consequence: Kipling wrote about what he saw and heard, and what he saw and heard was at times appalling and inspiring for entirely different reasons.  True enough, we watch souls through their cages and imagine what they are really like within, and sometimes our guesses are spot–on.  Other times, we gaze smugly at those around us and think that we can read a soul in the vicissitudes of its face.  Perhaps we even chat with these spirits to confirm our suspicions.  But then, one day, these spirits vanish into the crowds we never seem to have noticed and, upon taking inventory of our recollections, we find that nothing will resummon them because all along they were figments or pastiches of our own projections.  We know nothing about them except that at one time they existed, although even that is assailable.  We know nothing about them and would never be able to find them again unless they entered our world on our terms, and so we forget them and find others, more beautiful or more interesting.  And our narrator realizes he knows absolutely about Imray.

It is perhaps understood that Imray is dead or returned in some other form or both.  A shadow accompanies the story line from an appropriate distance, with a reserve that seems unlikely given the beliefs the author ascribes to the natives:

The rooms of the house were dark behind me ... my own servant came to me in the twilight, the muslin of his clothes clinging tight to his drenched body, and told me that a gentleman had called and wished to see some one.  Very much against my will, but only because of the darkness of the rooms, I went into the naked drawing–room, telling my man to bring the lights.  There might or might not have been a caller waiting — it seemed to me that I saw a figure by one of the windows — but when the lights came there was nothing save the spikes of the rain without, and the smell of the drinking earth in my nostrils.

Outside, as “storm after storm came up,” Tietjens is seen howling at something or someone.  And someone tries to call out to the narrator “by name, but his voice was no more than a husky whisper.”  After that long and magnificent description, two snakes slither their way into the story as if dispatched to destroy the interlopers in Imray’s house.  Then we meet one last character who reveals exactly why Imray disappeared, an explanation that you could not possibly expect in a purely “Western” story devoted, as it must be, to dispassionate reason.  And Imray’s strange fate, like the weblike tale in which he is entrapped, is both logical and ridiculous.   

The Ninth Gate

If you are familiar with this book, you may wonder why director Roman Polanski was so bent on transforming it into a film.  The book deals with, on the one hand, a club based on the works of a nineteenth–century Frenchman, and, on the other hand, a triptych of rather macabre illustrated tomes written by a seventeenth–century Italian who was burned at the stake.  We are all well aware how many innocents fell victim to inquisitions during that harried time, but this fellow, Aristide Torchia, seems to have had certain forces on his side that led to his downfall.  Yes, those forces.  And if this conceit is not painfully clear from the first few minutes of The Ninth Gate, this is probably not going to be your type of movie.

Regardless of the original novel’s name, the Dumas story line is both secondary and far less compelling (occupations of the idle rich usually are), so Polanski wisely elects to focus on Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) and his journey through a wicked game of cat and mouse.  The problem is that Corso is both the pursued and pursuer, slipping effortlessly from Spain to Portugal and then to Polanski’s beloved France on the trail of three extant copies (the rest were torched with Torchia) of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows.  Depp is particularly skilled at playing down a character’s inner needs in favor of reacting to his environment in a composed manner.  He is never really flustered, although he witnesses both death and evil deeds.  And when he understands a chance encounter in a train with a rather seductive blonde (Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski’s wife) as just that, a chance encounter, we know his character is far too intelligent not to suspect that more devious gears are churning.  Yet for some reason he feels that these gears have been in motion for a while now and that his entanglement is inevitable, as evidenced by the very last action he takes.

Without giving too much away, I should add that Polanski does a little tinkering.  Corso’s book dealer chum Bernie (James Russo) and the “dishy” (to use the film’s terminology) widow Leona Telfer (Lena Olin) are given slightly different roles, with the latter becoming a foil to the green–eyed stranger who keeps running into Corso at opportune times just like, well, a guardian angel.  Then there is the matter of Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), who in the film combines the roles of two of the novel’s personages.  Balkan, a fabulously wealthy man and renowned translator and bibliophile, is seen very early on giving a lecture that Corso finds soporific, but that doesn’t discourage him from accosting Corso and showing him the money.  The favorite subject of Balkan’s priceless shelves just happens to be the alleged collaborator on Torchia’s work.  And if you’re wondering who might be famous enough to have thousands of volumes written about him and still find a reason to help an obscure Italian achieve eternal infamy in the year 1666, of all years, I would recommend rewinding to the beginning to survey the entire audience at Balkan’s lecture.

In the novel Corso has a back story and a soul.  He loved a young Jewish woman, but his love for books and money has come to justify their separation, at least when he doesn’t think about her too much.  Polanski’s Corso, while perfectly cast, remains a shell seeking some kind of form.  Guidance from the stars, belief in the supernatural, skepticism of coincidence and human intentions — all of these may or may not be factors for his actions and statements, which belie his actions.  Corso is not a liar, but he’s not honest with himself or anyone else, and in time he begins to understand that the happiest of men are those whose lives permit them to tell the truth as often as possible.  There is no one to whom he can open up or reveal the mildest traces of humanity and compassion, but we recognize in this condition so many lives bound by invisible, self–imposed rules and past pain that Corso becomes a real person with real problems.  And what he chooses in the end is peace with himself, or whatever is left of it.