One of the stand-out features I saw at last week’s Florida Film Festival (where I was a juror in the Narrative Features category), was Lady Parts, written by Bonnie Gross, directed by Nancy Boyd. It’s a fictionalized version of the writer’s experience with vulvodynia and vaginismus, the surgery she endured “down there”, and the hilarity/trauma of the recovery process. We were so impressed with this film, particularly its script, so much so we gave it a special jury award. I chatted with Bonnie over Zoom about her script and the process getting it made. I am hoping Lady Parts will soon arrive to a streaming platform near you.
It’s the birthday of Lee Miller, fashion model, Surrealist artist, and … as if all that wasn’t enough … the only female combat photographer in Europe during the war, taking photos of concentration camps, firing squads, and all the concomitant horrors she saw embedded with the 83rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, documenting the Allied advance from Normandy to Paris, as well as the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald.
Much of her history was erased through decades of obscurity and a total and shameful lack of a proper archive where her accomplishments get proper credit. Her son discovered a treasure trove of over 60,000 photos and negatives, and slowly but surely Miller is taking her proper place. More work needs to be done. There are biographies out now, and art books featuring her photos, and there have been a couple of very prominent exhibitions, heavily covered in the press. Because of her background as a fashion model, her work has also been covered by Vogue (which launched her career), Elle and etc. This little tribute post is the tip of the iceberg of this completely fascinating woman.
Miller’s lifetime was crammed with many lifetimes, through which she was both photographer and a photograph. Miller was a stunningly beautiful woman, but her beauty was the least interesting thing about her. However, her beauty should not be discounted or ignored. It would be an elephant in the room otherwise. What was it like to be her? What was it like to turn heads, the way she did? Consider how she was “discovered”: She was 19 years old, crossing the street near her apartment on West 48th Street in New York and was almost hit by a car. A man pulled her out of the path of oncoming traffic. That man was Conde Nast. You can’t make this shit up. Soon after that, she appeared on the cover of Vogue, in a drawing by George Lepape.
Vogue fell in love with her. Photographers did too. She was in demand. She had the look of the 1920s modern woman. Everyone wanted to photograph her.
Lee Miller, Vogue, 1931. Photographer: George Hoyningen-huene
Considering the weighty sum of Miller’s historic accomplishments as a combat photographer with not just a front-row seat to the horrors Germany inflicted on the Jews – she was actually on the stage – it may strike people as unfair to start off with the beauty/modeling part of her life. That’s fine, write your own piece. I, however, find it fascinating that this woman – so used to being looked at – would end up Looking At some of the worst atrocities of not only the 20th century, but all time. Who better to observe than one so used to being observed? As a model, and as a Surrealist artist (and collaborator of Man Ray – let’s not say “muse” – we’ll come back to that), Miller was woman as Art Object from a very young age. She was also, disturbingly, Child as Art Object. This was all normal for her, and it’s not possible to untangle all of it and I don’t think Miller untangled it either. The Surrealist movement wasn’t about untangling, it was about tapping into the unconscious, the Jungian dreamworld. For such an artist to then stare unblinkingly at WWII reality is one of her many fascinations. For Miller, “being looked at” was the air she breathed from an upsettingly young age, and so of course she would be fascinated by the art of Looking.
Born in 1907, Miller died in obscurity in 1977, broke, broken, and alcoholic, having alienated everyone who loved her, including her family. Her legacy as a combat photographer – all that work – was completely erased – it was as though it never happened – and yet her image – her face and body – was still famous the world over, because of all the photographs Man Ray took of her. SHE wasn’t famous though, she was famous just as the Looked at object of a genius. Another example of this: in 1930, Miller appeared in Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film The Blood of a Poet, where she played a marble statue which – creepily – comes to life, freaking out its creator. The Blood of a Poet is a beloved piece of Surrealist art (released on Criterion, played at festivals, Cocteau a cinema darling). And so there she is, again, immortalized by another genius – and this time in motion – and yet still … Miller, the woman, was in the shadows when she died. It occurs to me that her performance as the statue (her only experience in cinema) is an apt metaphor for her life. Cocteau knew what he was doing in casting her: The marble statue doesn’t behave like a proper statue. The marble statue is disobedient and comes to life. If Miller was a muse, she was a very unruly one.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Part of the fascination for me is going through her life chronologically and not leaping ahead.
By the time Conde Nast “rescued” her and put her on the cover of Vogue, Miller had already lived about four lifetimes. Her childhood was extremely dark. She was raped when she was 7 years old and contracted gonorrhea. The treatments for this were brutal and extremely traumatizing. Her father was a photographer and took nude photographs of her (as a child, yes, but also as a teenager and into adulthood). So I am comfortable saying that Miller was raised in an extremely sick atmosphere. She took the secret of her childhood to her grave, she never told anyone, not even her two husbands. She was blessed – or cursed – with extreme beauty, a chilly golden beauty – which drew people to her, but also made men want to control her, own her, pin her down in some way. Her education was erratic. She got expelled from schools left and right. She was a rebel. When she was a teenager, she upped and moved to Paris to study stage lighting and costume design. When she came back to New York, she joined an experimental theatre program at Vassar, and also enrolled in an arts program, studying drawing. Then along came modeling, and she was very successful. Photographers adored her, and loved shooting her. Many high-fashion photographers of the time listed her as one of their favorite subjects. People like Edward Steichen, no less.
Lee Miller. Photographer: Edward Steichen
One of Steichen’s fashion photographs of Miller was used in an ad for Kotex menstruation products, and the controversy ended her modeling career, which had only just begun. Probably a blessing in disguise. It got her to Europe, where she needed to be, where she found “her people”.
I mean … Periods are still controversial to this day. It’s so ridiculous. It’s a normal bodily function experienced by half the planet. Get over it.
Miller’s restlessness meant she wouldn’t have been satisfied with modeling for long, anyway. From the jump, she took self-portraits, experimenting with lighting, framing, and placing figures in the frame (an important element of her later work). This woman who had been “looked at” constantly from the moment she appeared on this planet turned the camera on herself.
Self Portrait, New York, 1932
Miller arrived in Europe in 1929, when Modernism was busy knocking over the pillars of the 19th century, and the work of Freud and Jung had made such major inroads that the Surrealists flourished in its wake. Miller’s childhood was a literal nightmare. One doesn’t wonder at Surrealism’s draw: reality was a pale shadow, a lie, really. In Paris, she knew where she wanted to be: with Man Ray. His work spoke to her. She approached him, out of the blue, and basically informed him that she was his new assistant, apprentice, and lover. He had no choice, really.
Let’s go back to the “muse” thing: To call her a Muse for Man Ray is incorrect. She collaborated with him, yes, and he took many photographs of her, photos that are now famous, but in they influenced each other. She finished his projects sometimes if he was too busy, and she had her own studio where she did her own thing. Because of the enmeshment of these two, and because of the erasure of Miller’s place in the history of Surrealist art, oftentimes you’ll come across one of Miller’s photos and it will be credited to Man Ray. This has really got to stop. The two of them developed “solarisation” together – one of the visual “tics” by which Man Ray is known. One of his portraits of Miller is a “solarised” one, making her look epic and mythic, like she’s on a Roman coin from antiquity.
Solarised Portrait of Lee Miller, Man Ray, 1929
Man Ray gets the credit for this. But Miller was just as instrumental in developing solarisation and exploring its eerie almost dystopian-like possibilities, abstracting the human form into Pure Image. Here is one of Miller’s solarised portraits of silent film star Lilian Harvey:
Atomization was a big concept in Surrealism, isolating parts out from the whole, so much so that you can’t even tell what you’re looking at. The human form is chopped up into pieces. Man Ray’s nudes are beautiful, and Miller was often the model. You can see the atomization concept writ large in Miller’s photography as well (this creates a fascinating queasy dovetail with her photos from the concentration camps – where atomization took a genocidal form). Here’s Miller’s “exploding hand” from 1930.
Then there is Miller’s photograph of an actual severed breast, “rescued” from a hospital, and served up for dinner.
That’s atomization to the extreme. She wasn’t kidding around.
Consider also Miller’s “Nude Bent Forward”:
Surrealism was often quite chilly, in its treatment of the human form.
Miller herself was very very CHILLY.
And she drove men MAD.
Here are some of the (many) photographs Man Ray took of his lover and collaborator:
In 1923, Man Ray created something he called “Object to be Destroyed”, a metronome with an eye attached to the swinging arm. He found metronomes tormenting and he did, eventually, destroy said “object.” But people remembered it and in 1933, for an exhibition of his work, he re-created it, only this time he attached a photograph of Miller’s eye. He updated the title, too: “Indestructible Object.”
This was a very fruitful time for Miller…
Pablo Picasso and Lee Miller
… but of course she had to move on eventually. Never stay in one place for too long. She moved back to New York and opened her own photography studio. I wasn’t really aware of this period in her life and I have had fun digging into it. She had many clients, corporate, high-fashion, she did advertising jobs, fashion spreads – using all her modeling contacts – but also was well-known in Surrealist circles, and was in demand as a portrait photographer. She did portraits of many famous people, in art, in cinema. I had no idea she did this very well-known and striking portrait of Joseph Cornell:
Then she gave it all up, married an Egyptian businessman, and moved to Egypt. Because that’s how Miller rolled.
She didn’t work as a photographer during this (brief) marriage, but she did take a number of photographs during her time there, striking visuals showing her abstract eye. She never looked at things head-on – she always had a point of view – the world was Art to her:
She also took one photograph of the desert, seen through a ripped piece of netting, that I would classify as a piece of Surrealist art. It is called “Portrait of Space.”
Magritte spoke about how inspired he was in his own work by “Portrait of Space.”
Unsurprisingly, Miller kicked her Egyptian husband – and Egypt – to the curb and moved to England, hooking up with the Surrealist crowd there. She was well-known. She participated in a couple of Surrealist group shows, all as the war clouds gathered over Europe. I mention this only because it’s weird how history is erased. It wasn’t THAT long ago and there’s no reason that she should have vanished so suddenly. She burned a lot of bridges in her later years, and Conde Nast – who owned many of her photos since she was a war correspondent for Vogue – did not take care of the archive, did not highlight the major work she did for them, literally capturing “breaking news” from Germany to Poland to Hungary. Maybe, too, her reputation didn’t travel because her work had been done for Vogue and not, say, Time or Life. Everyone knows Robert Capa’s name.
When war broke out, Miller was dating a photographer named David Scherman (his name will come up again). She was living out in the country, but when the Blitz began, she pulled up stakes and moved to London, to document the Blitz for Vogue.
With no background at all, she became a photojournalist, training her eye on the devastation of London. If you’ve ever looked into the Blitz, some of her photos will be instantly recognizable. Now you know who took them.
Fire Masks, 1941.
Air raid.
To me, her photos don’t look like anyone else’s. She found the small moment, the unique moment. Maybe her work seems too frivolous to her critics. Like: this is war, not a fashion shoot. These don’t strike me as frivolous at all. A Surrealist mindset is often better equipped to look at reality, to react to the insanity. She didn’t have any emotional distance.
Her friendship with Scherman was important. He was a photographer with Life, and he had the contacts necessary to get her hooked up with the War Department. She was desperate to get to the heart of the action. She had no fear. Years later, Scherman said that “being left out of the biggest story of the decade almost drove poor Lee Miller mad.” So instead of just going mad, she made it happen. Condé Nast Publications hired her as a war correspondent, which led to her accreditation with the War Department. This allowed her to join up with the U.S. Army just a month after D-Day.
Miller in 1943 with other female war correspondents in Europe: from left to right: Mary Welsh, Dixie Tighe, Kathleen Harriman, Helen Kirkpatrick, Lee Miller, and Tania Long
She was there to capture the liberation of Paris from Nazi control. This is her most famous photograph from that event:
But there are others:
And this one, from later:
She then accompanied the Army into the Axis territories, where the real horrors began. In Vienna, which was almost completely destroyed, she captured German soprano Irmgard Seefried, singing an aria from ‘Madame Butterfly’ in the ruins of the Vienna Opera House.
Lee Miller, amirite?
Mark Haworth-Booth, who curated a show of her war photography, said: “Her photographs shocked people out of their comfort zone. She had a chip of ice in her heart. She got very close to things. Margaret Bourke-White was far away from the fighting, but Lee was close. That’s what makes the difference–Lee was prepared to shock.”
In early April, the Army reached Buchenwald and Dachau. Lee Miller was there.
The remaining SS guards at Buchenwald had been beaten to a pulp by the liberated prisoners. Miller got right up close to take pictures of them.
Klaus Hornig, kapo in Buchenwald, also beaten by the prisoners, does the Nazi salute as Miller snaps his picture.
When the Army arrived, the remaining SS guards tried to fight them off. They were killed, lying crumpled all over the camp. Miller saw a dead SS guard floating in the canal and took the photo:
In advance of the Allies’ entry into Leipzig on April 20, the Nazi deputy mayor committed suicide with his wife and daughter, biting into cyanide pills. The bodies were discovered by the Army in the mayor’s office. Miller, of course, was there, and took numerous photographs of the scene but the most famous one is of the daughter, sprawled dead on the couch, head flung back.
I can see why people may object to this. It looks like a fashion shoot. But, remember, Lee Miller didn’t pose the dead Nazi daughter in this position. It’s not Lee Miller’s fault the daughter is beautiful. Miller just captured what was in front of her.
On April 30, they reached Munich, and arrived at Hitler’s secret apartment. Hitler, of course, wasn’t there. He had been in the bunker in Berlin for weeks. Coincidentally, although they had no way of knowing it at the time, Hitler committed suicide on the very same day Miller and Scherman wandered around through Hitler’s apartment – I think a couple of hours before. The two photographers were still covered in the mud of the camps. And because Lee Miller never played by the rules, and because she could not resist, she wiped her muddy boots on Hitler’s immaculate bath towel, took off her clothes, and climbed into his tub. Scherman snapped.
Miller said later, “I took some pictures of the place and I also got a good night’s sleep in Hitler’s bed. I even washed the dirt of Dachau in his tub.” She also curled up in Eva Braun’s bed (there’s a picture of that too). It’s ghoulish in the extreme, “not done” in any way, but also weirdly cathartic. Defiling the monster’s abode. The man had a picture of himself IN his bathtub. Miller witnessed what this man had wrought. The piles of bodies, the ground-up bones, the emaciated men. Fuck his clean bath towel. She was lolling about in his tub as he and Eva Braun are being set on fire in a ditch.
After the liberations of the camps, she sent an urgent telegram to Vogue:
“No question that German civilians knew what went on. Railway into Dachau camp runs past villa, with trains of dead or semi-dead deportees. I usually don’t take pictures of horrors. But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel it can publish these pictures.” — Lee Miller, May, 1945
Vogue published huge spreads in the June 1945 issue, with Miller’s commentary. The headlines, written by Miller, speak to the horrified reaction at the time. Everyone knew shit was bad in Germany, but … this bad?
Headline: “Germans Are Like This”, June 1945 Vogue
Headline: “Believe It”, June 1945 Vogue
Imagine flipping through Vogue in June, looking at spreads of summer bathing suits and spring hats, and coming across that. Miller’s fury comes off the page, particularly “ordinary” Germans considering themselves “a liberated, not a conquered people.” She also writes of all the fur coats (this was Vogue, after all), but with a war-time spin: every German woman, including prostitutes, wore fur coats, all of them “stolen from Paris”.
One of her scariest photos was taken the following year, as the consequences of German war crimes continued to unfold in an unstoppable wave: László Bardossy, the fascist ex-Prime Minister of Hungary, had been extradited to Hungary from Germany in October 1945, and faced the firing squad in Budapest. Leave it to Lee Miller to find such a unique position, where she could capture the whole scene in a birds’ eye view.
Schermer, years later, spoke of Miller’s wartime experience, having witnessed her in action as she walked through the camps, camera to her eye:
“This was a journalist’s finest hour, a story worth crossing Europe for. If she had any emotional reaction at all, it was almost orgasmic excitement over the magnitude of the story. She was, in her quiet, methodical, practical way, in seventh heaven… When, as a journalist, do you get the chance to shoot as fast as you can, left and right, and make a horrible, exciting, historic picture? The emotional breakdown, if any, was in the subsequent let-down after the high of Dachau, and a week later, the burning of the Berghof. The let-down of ‘no more hot, fast-breaking story.'”
So that brings us to the final phase.
After the war, Miller returned to the United States, with a new husband. They had a son. But what she saw in the war altered her forever. She had what we would now call PTSD. She did not seek treatment. It was barely understood as a condition. She drank heavily. Her son had very little good memories of her. She could be monstrous. All of the things she experienced – the rape, the exploitation by her father, the concentration camps – it was a perfect storm of trauma. She was shattered. She continued to do high-fashion photo shoots, on occasion, but the love affair with photography was over. How could anything “go on” after what she saw? She couldn’t forget.
We can’t forget her, either, or the images she left behind, images that live on in the world, still with so much to tell us.
I’ll end with a great quote. Lee Miller, later in life, was asked what photography meant to her. She said:
“It’s a matter of getting out on a damn limb and sawing it off behind you.”
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Today is (supposedly, roughly) the birthday of William Shakespeare. April 23, 1564. (Title of the post from Sonnet 98.)
One of the things I think about when I think about Shakespeare, is my late great teacher Doug Moston, who died in 2003. Moston (whose father, by the way, was Murray Moston, the man who gets his hand blown off in the hallway in Taxi Driver) was one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. Moston was responsible for getting Shakespeare’s first folio from 1623 published in facsimile. It’s indispensable for actors, I think, but would also be fascinating for anyone interested in Shakespeare.
I am not a scholar. Anything I know about Shakespeare I learned by doing. This is just an actor’s perspective on language. These plays are meant to be spoken, not read. I speak with authority but hopefully not arrogantly, or like a know-it-all. Again, I learned by doing, by trying to SPEAK those words and ACT them. Just so we know this going in.
In more modern versions of Shakespeare, many editors have ironed out or “modernized” his punctuation. Some of the additions are defensible. But, less defensibly, many editors have added punctuation, sometimes to the detriment of the meaning of the lines. Huge no-no! Here’s what I mean: modern editors look at these plays as academic texts, works of literature, as opposed to scripts meant for actors to play. If you have the plays in facsimile (ie: how they looked in the first folio), you can see the uncorrected unmodernized English. Modern editors have sometimes added exclamation points, which I find not only insulting but wrong. An exclamation mark is an extremely important – and evocative – punctuation mark and actors pay very close attention. An exclamation mark is directorial, in other words. An exclamation mark says “The emotion behind the line should be THIS.” It’s the difference between “Oh my God.” and “Oh my God!” Shakespeare used very little “emotional” punctuation marks in his work. It’s mostly just straightforward periods and commas and question marks. Actors are sponges. Actors delve into a text in ways that leave scholars in the dust. They analyze everything, everything is meaningful. There’s a reason why most actors, upon getting a role, cross out the emotional stage directions put there by the playwright/editor – “haughtily”, “sternly”, etc. Actors want to make their own choices, and once something like “sternly” or “haughtily” or an exclamation mark !!! – is imprinted in the brain, it is very hard to get rid of it. You don’t want to LIMIT your choices at the very start of the process. In the end, you may very well choose to say the line “haughtily” or “sternly” or with three exclamation marks in your line-reading, but you want to get there on your own. So actors see something like an exclamation mark, and they play it. But once you learn it was some crusty professor in 1946 ADDING a punctuation mark to Shakespeare’s text, thinking to himself, “Well, this line obviously should be shouted, or said with intensity”, it changes the game a little bit. I don’t want some editor to tell me how to play Lady Macbeth.
“Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn’t time for it.” – George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896
The good thing about the first folio is that it is the earliest evidence of a Shakespearean text put together (apparently) by his peers, people who knew him or worked with him. It’s the closest we’ve got. The first folio bears close studying (I recommend every actor having at least a copy of it, so you can compare with the modern versions. Compare/contrast can be very revealing.)
First folio page of Romeo and Juliet:
Years ago I wrote about working on a monologue from Cymbeline for some audition. Michael was staying with me and we were talking about it. We were in my little one-room apartment, and I did the monologue for him. (Because of one mess-up I made with one word I now call it the “twixt clock and cock” monologue. We couldn’t stop saying “clock and cock”.) As I was working on the monologue, I wanted to compare the modern text in my little paperback with what was in the folio.
Here is the comparison. Line by line. (All the “s”s in the folio are “f”s. You get used to it.)
Riverside Shakespeare:
False to his bed! What is it to be false?
To lie in watch there and to think on him?
To weep ‘twixt clock and clock? if sleep charge nature,
To break it with a fearful dream of him
And cry myself awake? that’s false to’s bed, is it?
Folio version:
Falfe to his Bed? What is it to be falfe?
To lye in watch there, and to thinke on him?
To weepe ‘twixt clock and clock? If fleep charge Nature,
To breake it with a fearfull dreame of him
And cry my felfe awake? That’s falfe to’s bed? Is it?
Let’s look at the differences. In the Riverside, the first “false to his bed” is presented as an exclamation. But in the folio, it is a QUESTION. I cannot even tell you what a huge difference this makes in the playing of the moment. But it also makes a huge difference in terms of the monologue’s MEANING. What is Imogen DOING here? What is she actually saying?
My interpretation: when it’s a question, she, after reading his letter, is still trying to process what her husband just said to her. She is in a state of shock when she says it, where she repeats what she just heard. “False to his bed?” She’s stunned, disoriented. She can’t believe this has happened. Whereas, with an exclamation mark, like in the Riverside, she immediately jumps to anger and hurt. She is pissed, defending herself. “False to his bed!” (Subtext: the NERVE of that guy!)
Like I said, this is how actors read a text. You’re looking for how to play it, how to lift it off the page.
Also, let’s look at the last line:
In the Riverside, it’s all one sentence, with commas added by an editor: “that’s false to his bed, is it?” It’s all one thing, one thought, with a small hiccup at the final, “is it?”. But in the folio, it’s chopped up by a question mark. “That’s false to his bed? Is it?”
Read both versions out loud.
In the folio version, her thought process is still erratic (Olivier was right: the thought is IN THE LINE), so she’s asking one question: “That’s false to his bed?” Then she realizes she is not done, and questions again: “Is it?” You can feel Imogen processing the betrayal IN the punctuation. This is how we, as humans, actually speak. In the Riverside, it’s ironed out, and in the ironing process the thought itself has changed.
In the same way Shakespeare does not overdo the use of exclamation points and emotional punctuation, there are also almost no stage-directions in his plays (as written, at least) except for: Enter and Exeunt. (Of course there is a notable exception from Winters Tale, which my sister Siobhan has called “the funniest stage direction ever”: the famous Exeunt pursued by bear.) Shakespeare put all of the stage directions INTO the language. If the scene is supposed to be at night, Shakespeare will have the character ask for a torch, or talk about how he can’t see. In this way, he gets multiple things done at the same time, especially for his era, where lighting effects weren’t a possibility. The action, the props, the setting, the motivation, everything, is in the language.
Modern playwrights would add a stage direction to fill in the blanks: Horatio picks up a torch and squints through the darkness. I knew a wonderful playwright once who took the cue from Shakespeare, merely because she had been burned so many times with productions of her plays not being true to her intent. She said, “I have learned that if you want a character to be drinking a cup of coffee during a scene, if you think it is crucial to your plot that your character drinks coffee, you have to have the character say, ‘I am going to have a cup of coffee.’ It has to be in the language, not in the stage directions.”
Back in the day, there weren’t extensive rehearsals for Shakespeare’s plays. And because paper was expensive and scarce, often they wouldn’t be given the whole script, they would be given only their part. (That’s where the word “role” comes from: each part was printed on a “roll” of paper, and so you would be handed your “roll” to learn.)
Doug Moston made his students play scenes that way. He would have parts written out on “rolls” of paper and you would have to get up with other actors, and try to make the scene happen, only having your part in front of you, the other actor only having his part in front of him. It was so fun!
People make jokes about lines like “O! I am slain!”, but if you think about it: that is a stage direction placed in the language. That line tells the actor (who might not have the whole play at his disposal): “Okay. Die now.” Shakespeare doesn’t put into the text: Elaborate sword fight. Macbeth dies. (If you see something like that in a modern version, 9 times out of 10 it was added by an editor.)
Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets is a book I adore, even though I read it only because I was MADLY!!! IN. LOVE. with a poet at the time, and he recommended it, and so now the book still has a wafting atmosphere of heartbreak, because I lost my freakin’ mind when that thing ended. I grieved like an Italian widow. But still: if that guy gave me one thing, it’s this book – which has become an essential part of my library, one I refer to so often the book has literally fallen apart.
Lives of the Poets is a survey of English-language poets, from Richard Rolle of Hampole to Les Murray. What makes this book unique and also accessible to someone like me is that Michael Schmidt is not an academic (Academics make me feel dumb. I stay away!) He is a publisher and a reviewer, a poetry fan. He does not use the distancing and incomprehensible language of literary theory, or postmodern lit-crit or any of that. His style is clear, concise, readable.
How he deals with Shakespeare is especially interesting. Because Lives of the Poets spans so much time, Shakespeare is just another name on a long long list … and yet of course he overshadows pretty much everything before he arrives and also after. His shadow stretches backwards, so that the poets who came just before him don’t stand a chance. Their role in life was to be a prelude. It is hard to get Shakespeare out of the damn way to see what else might have been going on. James Joyce is a similar figure.
Here’s what Schmidt has to say about Shakespeare, and Poems vs. The Plays:
The greatest poet of the age — the greatest poet of all time, for all his corruptions — inspires in publishers and in other writers a kind of vertigo. For Donald Davie Shakespeare represents “a vast area of the English language and the English imagination which is as it were ‘charged’, radio-active: a territory where we dare not travel at all often or at all extensively, for fear of being mortally infected, in the sense of being overborne, so that we cease to speak with our own voices and produce only puny echoes of the great voice which long ago took over that whole terrain for its own.” This is true of the plays. But had Shakespeare produced only the epyllia, the Sonnets and the occasional poems, we’d have a much more proportioned view of him, smaller in scale than Jonson, Donne, Spencer and Marlowe. The poems are excellent, but it is the language and vision of the plays that dazzles. The slightly absurd scenario of Venus and Adonis, the excesses of Lucree and the unevent brilliance of the Sonnets would not by themselves have changed the world. Venus and Adonis was, it’s true, Shakespeare’s most successful poem. By the time he died, ten editions had been published, and six followed in the two decades after his death. There was money in that large, bossy, blowsy goddess almost eating alive the pretty lad. Nowadays it is read because it is by Shakespeare. And Lucree, with its cruel eloquence, its harsh tracing of one of the most brutal tales of rape in the classical repertory, while better balanced and constructed, touches unreflectingly on matters that require a less restrained psychology than the poet can provide…
This is a story about poetry, not drama or literal prostitution; the plays I’ll leave to someone else. I’m concerned with “the rest”, a handful of works that the poet took most seriously; the epyllia Richard Field published, the 154 Sonnets and “The Phoenix and the Turtle”. I could add songs from the plays, but once you dip into a drama, where do you stop? A monologue is like an aria, a description can be like a whole pastoral or satire. And which songs are Shakespeare’s, which did he pull out of Anon.’s bran tub? Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Lavours Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venic, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest all include detachable songs, but the plays snared them and that’s where they belong.
Shakespeare is so much at the heart — is the heart — of this story that even by skirting around him we take his measure. Apart from his genius, Shakespeare had some real advantages. The world for him was new, as it had been for Chaucer. There were the navigators’ discoveries, there was the rising power of the monarch, new industry, new learning.
And now (you can sense reluctantly) Schmidt talks about the plays.
Drama could be profitable: this discovery coincided with “the coming into the field of the first pupils of the new grammar schools of Edward VI”, men who did not resent or distrust commerce and entrepreneurship. A new class of “mental adventurers”, the classically educated sons of merchants, made the running. Marlowe was the son of a cobbler, Shakespeare of a prosperous glove maker of Stratford-on-Avon, where the poet was born in 1564. Both were provincials, one educated at the grammar school at Stratford, the other at King’s School, Canterbury. They were harbingers of the social change that would culminate in the Commonwealth.
One of Shakespeare’s advantages was an apparent disadvantage. He was not university-trained. “When Shakespeare attempts to be learned like Marlowe, he is not very clever.” That is part of the problem with his epyllia. But Ford Madox Ford reminds us that he had “another world to which he could retire; because of that he was a greater poet than either Jonson or Marlowe, whose minds were limited by their university-training to find illustrations, telles quelles, from illustrations already used in the Greek or Latin classics. It was the difference between founding a drawing on a lay figure and drawing or painting from a keen and delighting memory.”
Sidney advises: “Look in thy heart and write.” In the Sonnets, Shakespeare takes Sidney’s counsel without the platonizing the great courtier intended. The heart he looks into is singularly complex and troubled, and the poems he writes from this impure “I” are as full of life as the plays.
I’ll let Puck’s words that end Midsummer close this post.
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
Came across a very fun article which lets you know only a couple of the phrases invented (or co-opted) by Shakespeare :
Eaten out of house and home
Pomp and circumstance
Foregone conclusion
Full circle
The makings of
Method in the madness
Neither rhyme nor reason
One fell swoop
Seen better days
It smells to heaven
A sorry sight
A spotless reputation
Strange bedfellows
The world’s (my) oyster
Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
Maybe you were born to greatness, Will. Maybe you achieved it. Maybe it was thrust upon you. Or maybe Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere wrote all the plays, and you just get all the credit. I’m with my dad who said, in regards to the authorship controversy, “It doesn’t matter to me at all.”
What matters is the work. We have the plays and poems. They’re ours.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
“I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time. I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.” — Bettie Page
It’s her birthday today.
There are probably as many photographs of Bettie Page as there are of Marilyn Monroe. In the pin-up world, there is no one who even comes close. What was it about Bettie Page that elevated her above others? Why the myths, why the decades-long (and counting) adoration and fascination? This gets into one of my primary obsessions, and that is: charisma, star power, the blend of exhibitionism and withholding that all the great stars had (and have, although it’s rarer today, in our more literal and explicit era). When you blend “come and get me” with “you’ll never have me totally” – and both of these are organic and true to the person exuding them – that’s star power.
Bettie Page’s comfort with nudity (she often said she considered joining a nudist colony) is part of her appeal, because there is no shame in it. We don’t feel like she was being exploited. We don’t worry about her, and so we can just relax and enjoy her. There’s a famous story about Page getting arrested, along with a little camera crew, during an outdoor photo shoot. The charge was “indecent exposure.” Page protested. Not the fact of her arrest – she knew that was a risk she always took – but the word “indecent.” There was nothing “indecent” about nudity. One of her most famous quotes was the one in this post’s title. It was the DEVIL who made nudity sinful, not God. So why in God’s name (literally) was humanity taking the Devil’s side? THINK about it.
This question still needs asking.
Page said, “I want to be remembered as I was when I was young and in my golden times. I want to be remembered as a woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”
She experienced many traumatic events in her life, including rape. There were the photographers who loved and valued her (who stood in line to photograph her: she was the perfect subject), and those who were assholes. Page came up rough. She knew there were good appreciative men and bad mean men. She did her best to avoid the latter. The bondage shoots she did were not her thing, but they paid well, which meant she had a little bit more freedom to do the kinds of photos she liked doing.
Page got out of modeling when she was in her 30s, and then proceeded to have a harrowing time of it for many decades, including 10 years in a mental institution. Her life as a model was a Paradise on Earth compared to what came after. She then had a conversion experience and became very religious. Her newfound spiritual devotion did not lead her to renounce her past (as often happens). She accepted her past, and felt gratified that she still had so many fans across so many generations. But she chose almost-total seclusion in her later years. She didn’t want her fans’ fantasies of her to be ruined. She understood the power of fantasy, and how fantasy can actually be life-giving, life-affirming, a positive thing.
Her collaboration with pin-up photographer and pin-up model Bunny Yeager resulted in some of the most famous photographs of Page: the ones with the cheetah, the ostrich, the ones of Page splashing in the ocean, her gorgeous shapely legs kicking up into the air.
You can almost hear her laughing. I wrote about Bunny Yeager here. Here they are, Bettie Page totally chill, bookended by cheetahs. She’s like Snow White.
More of Yeager’s photos of Page:
It was through Bunny Yeager that Bettie Page got the 1955 Playboy centerfold. A major moment, but it was the moment right before Page stepped away.
Back to my initial point:
The secret of her enduring appeal is that – despite her obvious charms and beauty and vividness of expression – there is still a secret about it. Charisma is never easily explained. It’s like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous 1964 definition of pornography (speaking of which): You know it when you see it. Charisma is natural. It exists. Cats have charisma, for example. Cats have perfected the “come hither + yet also stay away” alchemy. But charisma can also be cultivated. Cultivated charisma can only exist in someone who, to some degree, knows who they are, knows what they have to give, and knows how to give it. There are those who would wish Bettie Page could have found other ways to give it, and unfortunately some of these people call themselves progressive. Look out when progressives join hands with conservatives to condemn something as immoral/amoral. This attitude casts women as victims who need to be “saved”. Bettie Page did not need to be saved because she saved herself. She did what she did because she wanted to do it and then she stopped doing it when she no longer wanted to do it. The word “agency” is so overused I no longer use it myself. But here it applies. Page had it. You can SEE it in the photos.
To hear Page’s voice – after only becoming acquainted with her through photographs – is a revelation. It’s a cynical voice, a humorous tell-it-like-it-is voice, an unsentimental voice, a voice that knows the world, recognizes its sins, a voice that still – even after everything – refuses to feel ashamed.
“I was just myself,” she said.
That’s really the secret, isn’t it. So few people manage it.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
It’s Charles Grodin’s birthday today. Here is a re-post of the piece I wrote when Charles Grodin died last year (a day after his birthday!)
Heartbreak Kid. Ishtar. Heaven Can Wait. Midnight Run. Muppet Caper. Rosemary’s Baby. Seems Like Old Times (not as well-known, but I loved it as a kid.) Charles Grodin was so cranky, so anti-social (his talk-show guest spots were legendary … was he putting it on? Was he “acting”? Why was he being so RUDE and surly? It didn’t matter, because it was so funny.) Why he was so funny is difficult to quantify or even explain. He came from a comic/improv background (mixed with Actors Studio): it’s a killer combo. Maybe even THE killer combo. (I wrote about this in my piece on female comedians, i.e. why actors who start out in “comedy” often make the best dramatic actors.) It’s why Grodin was able to not only go “toe to toe” with Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, but was so spontaneous he seemed to even surprise De Niro. The film was a true two-hander. Grodin was so good at being off the cuff. With Grodin, everything important happened between the lines. There was always a certain amount of SEETHING happening beneath the surface. It gave him his edge, his honesty.
Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, “Midnight Run”
Please please read my friend Dan Callahan’s beautiful and insightful tribute to Grodin up on Ebert. His analysis of Heartbreak Kid is spot on. (The film has been unavailable forever. You can’t find it. It’s infuriating. Someone uploaded it to YouTube. Go see it while you can, particularly if you haven’t seen it.) Dan makes this essential point :
Grodin is a figure of and for the cinema of the 1970s. Like Alan Arkin and the recently departed George Segal, Grodin had a manner that matched the neuroticism and self-obsession of that decade and also the breaking down of limits and prejudices that could allow an unambiguously Jewish sensibility to be the center of films without any softening for the WASP masses.
Michael Davitt, born in Cork on this day, didn’t grow up speaking Irish at home. He learned it at school. Munster Irish! His academic background in the Irish language gave him a different perspective than a person who grew up bilingual from the beginning, hearing Irish spoken in the home, etc. Irish was a language to be learned and conquered, which he did.
Davitt (who sadly passed away far too young in 2005) was an Irish language poet. Unless you speak the language, you must content yourself with reading his work in translation. Luckily, some great contemporary Irish poets have done wonderful translations of his stuff (Paul Muldoon – my post about him here, Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide – my post about him here, and others), but Davitt’s work is meant to be read in the Irish. Something is always lost in translation.
To him, Irish was not a purely rural language. This set him apart from many others, who connected the Irish language with a pre-Industrial-Revolution society, untouched, rural, and pure. He used the Irish language for contemporary and urban subjects. He started writing and publishing poetry in the 70s, when a lot of Irish language poets started cropping up – a way to reclaim their history in a time of strife. The Irish language had been stomped out long ago, and these poets took it off the shelf. Michael Davitt was against “cultural McDonaldisation”, yet he also disagreed with the thought that the Irish language should be isolated, or even COULD isolate those who spoke it. It was not a “dead” language to him, not at all. Davitt was loose with his Irish, he did things with it other more traditional writers wouldn’t, he treated it like a living language, as opposed to an artifact in a museum.
Davitt founded a magazine – Innti – dedicated to Irish language poets (including Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, whom I saw read once at the The Ireland House in New York City: an unforgettable night). and was also a television producer and director at RTÉ. A vibrant man and also a huge intellect, he died suddenly and unexpectedly. His work comes out with translations attached on facing pages, but all you need to do is scan what it looks like in Irish and you can see how beautiful it is. He was a master. Those who thought of the Irish language as limited, isolated, or backwards-looking – about mud and potatoes and the Aran Islands or what have you, were surprised at how vital it became, through poets like Davitt.
I’ll post his poem Ciorrú Bóthair (Shortening the Road). First in Irish, then with the translation by Irish author Philip Casey below it. One of the tensions in his work was dealing with modern subjects in the Irish language, which had rarely been done before. Here, you can see him address some of that tension directly. Also, he incorporates English words in his Irish – which gives the humorous (if you’re Irish, anyway) impression that ENGLISH is the foreign tongue here, the tongue that “doesn’t fit”, the language that “sounds weird”. A subversion there. Of course I can’t read it, but I do get excited, though, when I recognize words. As my sister Jean said as we drove around the outskirts of Áth Cliath (ie: Dublin), reading the dual-language street signs as we whizzed by them, “Well as long as we’re headed an lár …” (“city center”, “downtown”). She said it so casually, so over it. We still laugh about that. Yes, Jean, we are headed an lár.
Ciorrú Bóthair
Dúirt sé liom gur dhuine é
A bhí ag plé le diantalmhaíocht,
A d’oibrigh riamh faoin spéir;
Bhí an chuma sin ar an stróinséir
Ó dhubh a iongan is ó bholadh an fhéir ghearrtha
Ar a Bhéarla deisceartach.
Cith eile flichshneachta;
Ansin do las an ghrian
An bóthar romhainn trí an Uarán Mór
Soir go Béal Átha na Sluaighe
Is bhí an carr ina tigín gloine
Ar tinneall lena scéalta garraíodóireachta.
Bhí roinnt leathanta caite aige
La gaolta taobh thiar den Spidéal:
‘Tá Gaelige agat, mar sin?’
‘Níl ná Gaeilge acg Gaolainn…’
Múscraíoch siúrálta, mheasas; ach níorbh ea,
‘Corcaíoch ó lár Chorcaí amach.’
Ghin san splanc; phléase comhrá Gaeilge
Gur chíoramar dúchas
Is tabhairt suas a chéile,
Is a Ghia nach cúng í Éire
Go raibh na bóithríní céanna canúna
Curtha dínn araon:
Coláiste Samhraidh i mBéal Átha an Ghaorthaigh,
Graiméar na mBráithre Críostaí,
Tithe tábhairne Chorca Dhuibhne,
Is an caolú, ansin, an géilleadh,
Toradh cúig nó sé de bhlianta
I gcathair Bhaile Átha Cliath.
‘Caithfidh gur breá an jab sa tsamhradh é?’
‘Sea mhuis ach b’fhearr liom féin an tEarrach,
Tráth fáis, tá misniú ann,
Agus tá míorúiltí datha sa bhFómhar
A choimeádfadh duine ón ól…’
D’éalaigh an splanc as a ghlór.
Ach bhí an ghráin aige ar an Nollaig,
Mar a bhí ag gach deoraí singil
Trí bliana is dhá scór ag déanamh
A bhuilín i bparthas cleasach an tí óil.
‘A bhfuil de thithe gloine á ndúnadh síos…
Táim bliain go leith díomhaoin …’
Níor chodail sé néal le seachtain,
Bhí sruthán truaillithe ag caismirneach
Trína cheann, ba dhóbair dó bá.
Bhí air teitheadh arís ón bpéin
Is filleadh ar Chamden Town,
Bhí pub beag ag baintreach uaigneach ann.
Thai Sionainn soir trí scrabhanna
Faoi áirsí na gcrann méarach,
Dár gcaidreamh comhchuimhní
Dhein faoistin alcólaigh:
Mise im choinfeasóir drogallach
Faoi gheasa na gcuimleoirí.
Stopas ag droichead Shráid Bhagóid.
Dúirt sé gur thugas uchtach dó,
Go lorgódh sé jab i dtuaisceart an chontae,
Go mba bhreá leis a bheith
Chomh socair liom féin,
Go bhfeicfeadh sé arís mé, le cúnamh Dé.
Ar imeacht uaim sa cheobhrán dó
Taibhríodh dom athchaidreamh leis an stróinséir
Ar imeall mórbhealaigh san imigéin:
Ach go mba mise fear na hordóige
Is go mb’eisean an coinfeasóir –
É chomh socair liom féin,
Chomh socair liom féin.
Shortening the Road
He told me he had spent
His life in horticulture,
Had always worked in the open air;
That was clear about the stranger
From his black nails and the smell of cut grass
Off his southern English.
Another sleet-shower;
Then the sun lit up
The road before us through Oranmore
East to Ballinasloe
And the car was a glasshouse
Warming to his gardening lore.
He had been spending a few days
With relatives west of Spiddal:
‘You have Irish then, I suppose?’
‘Not Irish, but Munster Irish … !’
A Muskerry man definitely, I thought; but no:
‘A Corkman out of the heart of Cork.’
That lit a spark, exploding into Irish
And we combed through our backgrounds
And upbringings,
And God it’s a small world
That we both could have travelled
The same backroads of dialect:
A Summer College in Ballingeary,
The Christian Brothers’ Grammar,
The pubs of the Dingle Peninsula,
Then the compromise and watering down
Of five or six years
In the city of Dublin.
‘It must be a great job in the summertime?’
‘Yes indeed, but I prefer the Spring,
A time of growth, it’s reassuring,
And there are miracles of colour in Autumn
That would keep a man off the booze …’
The spark had left his voice.
But he hated Christmas,
As would any single exile
Reaching forty-three
Loafing in the deluded paradise of the pub.
‘They’re closing the glasshouses down …
I’m a year and a half on the dole … ‘
He hadn’t slept for a week,
A polluted stream was meandering
Through his brain, he had nearly drowned,
He was running from the pain again
Going back to Camden Town
Where a lonely widow had a small pub of her own.
East across the Shannon through squally showers
Under the arches of fingery trees,
What had become an exchange of memories
Had become an alcoholic’s confession:
I the reluctant confessor
Under the spell of the windscreen wipers.
I stopped at Baggot Street bridge.
He said I’d given him hope,
That he would look for a job
In the north of the county,
That he’d love to be as steady as me,
That he’d see me again, please God, someday.
As he walked away into the fog
I imagined meeting the stranger again
On the verge of a foreign motorway
But I was the hitch-hiker
And he the confessor –
As steady as me,
As steady as me.
Conspiracy (2001; d. Frank Pierson)
I went down a little Wannsee Conference rabbit hole so figured I’d re-watch this chilling nasty little movie.
Lured (1947; d. Douglas Sirk)
I had never seen this. I love discovering new Douglas Sirks! This one stars Lucille Ball as a “dancer” (quotation marks since it’s really a “ten cents a dance” situation), who goes to work undercover for the police to hunt down a serial killer. Boris Karloff shows up at one point. George Sanders is in it.
Bless Their Little Hearts (1983; d. Billy Woodberry)
Billy Woodberry directed and produced, and the film was shot by the great Charles Burnett (whom I met at Ebertfest, when his To Sleep with Anger screened). The cast is made up of mostly non-professional actors, and is very honest and raw in its approach. Shot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on an obvious shoe-string, it tells the story of a family, a man who should be looking for a job – and is, kind of – but he still finds time to mess around with his friends, as his increasingly distressed wife tries to keep things going at home.
Cane River (1982; d. Horace B. Jenkins)
I had never seen this one either. Horace B. Jenkins wrote, directed, produced. Everyone behind the camera, the entire crew – and everyone acting FOR the camera – was Black, something unheard of in the mainstream industry, especially in 1982. It’s a fascinating story about Black land ownership, and the community of Natchitoches, which has an interesting history. The lead character – Peter (a hunky Richard Romain) – comes home to fight for his family land, which has slowly been taken away from him. He meets a local girl (Tommye Myrick), who’s feisty and smart and about to go off to college. The two of them hit it off. There’s a clear power-differential: he’s from a well-known family, she’s struggling to get the hell out of there. The script contains layers, the intersections of class and race, the tensions of family history and generational trauma (and unfairness). The film has a sad history. There was one screening of it down in New Orleans, where it was shot, but before it could got any kind of distribution deal, Jenkins died. It was a real passion project for him. The film was actually considered lost – until it was eventually “re-discovered” 30 years later. Cane River was re-released in 2013, and just a couple years ago it played on the Criterion Channel, where it got everybody talking – like it should have back in 1982. Very happy I saw it.
Glitter and Doom (2024; d. Tom Gustafson)
A jukebox musical featuring the music of the Indigo Girls. I reviewed for Ebert.
The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping (2024; d. Katherine Kubler)
Kubler has done something rather extraordinary with this docu-series. I watched another series recently about one of those tough-love desert schools for “bad kids” – the school Paris Hilton went to – but it was conventionally done. This one is different. Kubler found herself at Ivy Ridge Academy, a “behavior modification” school run by a bunch of lunatics and predators. The school is now an abandoned cluster of buildings and Kubler and many of her class-mates return there, talking about what they went through in this eerie setting. They find all of their personal files in the moldering dust. It’s a very bold approach and … possibly illegal? Like, who owns that land now? Kubler is a film-maker. She doesn’t just say she is a film-maker. This docu-series proves she IS a film-maker. This is a personal and painful story and she has taken a very bold approach.
Club Zero (2024; d. Jessica Hausner)
Creepy and gross. Fascinating. I reviewed for Ebert.
A Question of Silence (1982; d. Marleen Gorris)
When I hear people calling Barbie “subversive” – including the film’s director – I wonder if words have meaning anymore. A Question of Silence is subversive in the truest sense of the word, as all of Gorris’ films are. This one is probably the most well-known.
You’ll Never Find Me (2024; d. Josiah Allen, Indianna Bell)
What a strong directorial debut! Mood so thick you can barely move. The sound design, the lighting, the performances, just every single detail was so on point. It wasn’t just style for the sake of style. Every choice had meaning, every choice was there for a reason. I was super impressed. I reviewed for Ebert.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024; d. Radu Jude)
Radu Jude is one of the most exciting – and relevant (horrible word: but I mean it specifically) – filmmakers working today. I’ve seen as much of his stuff as I can get my hands on, including his shorts. I was introduced to him, like a lot of people were, with his 2021 film Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. It was in my Top 10 for that year. It’s an exhilarating break-neck chatter-box film, a lampoon of every single thing that is stupid and/or absurd going on in our world right now. It was filmed during the pandemic. A lot of Right Now movies take a self-serious or “here is the trouble we are facing” solemnity, which … ages like milk. Those movies will date by next week. Bad Lucky Banging or Loony Porn may as well date too: I’m reading a collection of George Orwell’s weekly “As I Please” columns, which he maintained for 4 or 5 years, during WWII and after. In them, he talks about all of the big issues of the day (including the bombs raining down on London, where he actually was), but he also talks about things that were relevant in the moment but lost to history: the tempests in a teapot, the off-the-cuff comment of an MP, the letters to the editor expressing annoyance – etc. But they are all fascinating as snapshots of a time. Bad Luck Banging is that, as is his 2018 film I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians. His films are often about confronting the more unsavory and/or evil aspects of Romania’s past. Barbarians is explicitly about that. Bad Luck Banging is a bit more universal, because of the pandemic and social media: things we all had to deal with. I have been waiting to see his latest for half a year now, since I missed it at NYFF. His films are almost like Dispatches from the Front of Sanity. Sanity in an insane world. Sometimes all you can do – the only appropriate response – is lampoon and caricature. I hear his stuff called “satire” all the time, but I don’t think that’s quite right. His style is one of exaggeration: he exaggerates a truth into absurdity, so we can all SEE it as absurd. Perhaps some people would say that is “satire” but I think there’s a subtle difference here. I went to go see this at IFC in New York. It’s three hours long – as most of his movies are – and you never feel it. The propulsive motion never stops, more so here than in his others, since it takes place in one day, and follows a woman around from morning to night, as she drives through Bucharest traffic to go from appointment to appointment. I can’t wait to see it again.
Scoop (2024; d. Philip Martin)
So this is a very interesting film about how BBC Newsnight, and one doggedly determined junior producer, got Prince Andrew to agree to sit down for an interview. And we all know how THAT went. It’s such a recent event, I wondered if it could be effective, we don’t have any distance yet. But it was really good! I didn’t know the backstage story. I reviewed for Ebert.
Wicked Little Letters (2024; d. Thea Sharrock)
This was a hoot. I adored it. I reviewed for Ebert.
My Man Godfrey (1936; d. Gregory La Cava)
I love it so much. I zoom in on different people in different viewings. This time I couldn’t get over the dad (the hilarious Eugene Pallette). He is completely overrun by in the insane females in his family. He just walks into the room, looks around, and can’t believe what he is seeing, and what he – a nice responsible man – has done to deserve this.
Man of the World (1931; d. Richard Wallace)
If I’m not mistaken, this is the first film Lombard did with her future first husband, William Powell. The chemistry is apparent. I had never seen this one. I was surprised by how tender/heart-breaking the ending was. This is the pre-Code vibe. You expect at the last minute for every wrong to be righted, and everything is going to be okay. But here, that doesn’t happen. And it’s not a TRAGEDY, it’s just very realistic and adult. We aren’t in screwball territory yet.
Hands Across the Table (1935; d. Mitchell Leisen)
Just adorable and pleasing. Maybe the first pairing of Lombard and Fred MacMurray (writing without notes). Great energy. Mitchell Leisen is a lovely director.
Love Before Breakfast (1936; d. Walter Lang)
I’ve written about this one before. This is the one where Carole Lombard gets a black eye (the image of which is the poster, one of the most striking posters in Hollywood history. It’s been my avatar on Twitter since I first signed up).
The Princess Comes Across (1936; d. William K. Howard)
Hilarious. Carole Lombard plays a con artist, really, pretending to be a Swedish princess, and she is clearly aping Garbo. Fred MacMurray again!
True Confession (1937; d. Wesley Ruggles)
Lombard and MacMurray are married – seemingly happily – but there’s one little problem. She is a compulsive liar.
Nothing Sacred (1937; d. William A. Wellman)
This was Lombard’s only outing with Wellman and it’s a very fortunate pairing. Now THIS is a satire. It’s about the public’s hunger for “tragic yet inspiring” news stories, where the public gets to display how good they feel about themselves when they care about others – even if it’s fake. Emotion like this is the essence of performative. Nothing Sacred shows that very familiar situation – we all know it, we all participate in it – on steroids. Beware the inspiring story! Interrogate your responses, just so you know you’re keeping yourself honest.
Twentieth Century (1934; d. Howard Hawks)
Insane. Start to finish.
Ladies Man (1931; d. Lothar Mendes)
Early stuff, fairly rough, sound-wise, but fascinating. A gigolo (William Powell) “dates” a mother and a daughter, simultaneously. It’s pretty wild. Kay Francis and Carole Lombard in stunning gowns. What more can you want?
One Day (2024; d. Created by Nicole Taylor)
I am so busy right now but I got sucked in and watched the whole thing in a 48-hour period. I am so impressed with these two young actors.
In a career of famous roles in famous films, I think his best – and perhaps most characterstic and essence-driven – of his roles is Sgt. J.J. Sefton in Stalag 17. Sefton has not just a hardness to him, but a sharp edge, an essence many call cynical but I call realistic.
Director Billy Wilder said in his interview with Cameron Crowe that Sefton was the closest stand-in to himself in all of his films. Sefton, in essence, was Wilder saying: “This is who I am. This is how I see the world.”
Sefton’s parting shot before he disappears into the tunnel underneath the prison camp – “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we’ve never met before” – sums it all up, sums up the movie’s unsentimental mood. Does Sefton mean it? Is he being ironic? I don’t think so. There is no romanticism in Sefton, and his memory of the prison camp – and what humanity becomes under such circumstances – will not be something he wishes to dwell on, and any later encounter will just be a reminder. No good-byes. No looking back. If I see you, I’ll pretend I never know you. And finally, to take the edge off, he pokes his head back up, and gives a little toss of the hand and a cocky grin. Aaaaand scene. What a movie star. What an actor.
Wilder:
“I liked having him around … The idea of making him a braggart … then we find out slowly that he is really a hero. As he pleads there with that lieutenant at the end, he tucks his head out again, from the hole they have there in the barracks, and says, ‘If I ever see any of you mugs again, let’s just pretend that we don’t know each other.’ And off he goes. And he only does it because the mother of the lieutenant who is captured is a rich woman, and he’s gonna get ten thousand dollars. He’s no hero, he’s a black-market dealer—-a good character, and wonderfully played by Holden.”
Playing Sefton required an almost stern resistance to expanding the role into the self-consciously heroic. One can see the traps for that kind of “commentary” all throughout the role. Holden resists. It’s a performance of great control. But within that control there is a jaundiced and knowing acceptance of the ugliness of human nature – the accusations tossed around and the willingness to throw people under the bus – Sefton is not at all surprised by these things. In a way, it’s a relief: civilization has broken down in the camp, and so now people can show themselves in their true form.
Obviously Stalag 17 is also a comedy, but it’s a black-hearted one, just like Wilder liked it.
Wilder worked with Holden numerous times. He loved him as a leading man. He loved Jack Lemmon too, for his “everyman” qualities, but Holden was not – was never – an “everyman”. He had stature and scope. Just watch Stalag 17. Sunset Boulevard may be more famous, more quotable – but Stalag 17 cuts to the heart of Holden’s essence. Because … Sefton is tough, does not suffer fools, but … my God, don’t you just ADORE him?
Sefton is intelligent; that’s why he acts as he does. For the first time in films the philosophy of the solitary man is elaborated; this film is an apologia for individualism. (Certainly, the solitary man has been a theme in films, as with Charlie Chaplin and many other comedians. But he has usually been an inept person whose only desire was to fit into society.) Sefton is alone because he wants to be alone. He has the qualities of leadership, and everything would tend to establish him as the barracks’ trusted leader. After the deception has been uncovered by Sefton himself, and the leader the man trusted has been unmasked and convicted, we may wonder if Sefton escapes in order to avoid being named to take his place, knowing his fellow prisoners would do exactly that, both to exonerate themselves and because they finally recognize him as their only possible leader.
What’s sure is that Sefton escapes to get away from the companions whom he despises rather than from a regime he has come to terms with and guards he’s been able to bend to his needs.
Sefton needs those whom he despises to despise him in turn. If he remains, he will be a hero – a role he rejects no matter what the cost. Having lost his moral solitude, he hastens to regain it by becoming an escapee, with all the risk that entails.
Years ago, I wrote a long essay about William Holden for Slant, which focused a lot on his physicality (he was so athletic and he had great control). I really like that piece.
Since that piece was so long ago, I didn’t feel bad about reiterating my thoughts on Holden – and his physicality – and how he was able to use his body – in one of the most popular columns I ever wrote for Film Comment, on the art of the death scene. Because William Holden’s death scene in Sunset Boulevard is my #1 favorite. I do go on and on about it – and I broke it down here once, moment by moment – mainly because I just want people to GET how amazing it is, what he does with his body there.
One final word about Sunset Boulevard: not too many actors would have submitted to the requirements of that role, to the mere suggestion of that role: to be a pretty-boy sex-toy. Paul Newman could – and would – do it. In Sweet Bird of Youth. Roles like that put the man in the stereotypically female position: of being owned, of being objectified, used for sex, trapped. It could be seen as emasculating. It IS emasculating, that’s the whole point.
Montgomery Clift was originally cast in the role Holden ended up playing, but Clift backed out (igniting Wilder’s wrath). Clift was, at that point, in a similar position in his real life, with a much older woman, AND he claimed he didn’t want to repeat himself, and the role was so close to the one he played in The Heiress. (Although … it wasn’t really that close. I mean, sort of, but not really.) Some friends of Clift’s wondered if Clift’s underlying torment about being gay, and being closeted had something to do with him backing out: to play an “emasculated” role might be too revealing. All of that being said: Holden, a golden boy (literally: he had played the role in the movie of the same name), an athlete, a stereotypical leading man – gorgeous, manly, strong – did not balk at taking on the role, at using his handsomeness in this subverted perverted way: that he could be “had”, he could be “bought.”
I am haunted by William Holden’s end.
I try to focus on his career, his work, how good he was, how controlled, how intelligent in his process and approach.
It’s difficult because to so many – including myself – she does represent something. Maybe you’d have to be Gen X to get it. I think of David Lynch’s comment on Elvis, something like “He wasn’t there and then suddenly he was there.” Liz Phair’s “arrival” was like that. And the second she arrived – with a double album, no less – and no touring history, no bar band phase, nothing – it was like you couldn’t imagine how you had lived without her. Who WAS this woman, growling and murmuring in a flat-affect monotone about her life, her men – with such specificity that you feel like you were IN those rooms, meeting those people? Who WAS she?
It’s her birthday today.
Liz Phair emerged at a time when the traditional music industry had exploded. All bets were off. New voices emerged, blazing not just out of the Pacific Northwest, but everywhere. There was always an indie scene, a punk scene, an underground scene, but in the early-mid 90s indie went mainstream. It was amazing to experience it, we didn’t know how good we had it. People like PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco were very big in my crowd, but then this new crowd burst on the scene and blazed out into stadium tours in a matter of months and it had to have been very surreal. Liz Phair is a Midwesterner but she was also a Chicagoan. So there’s a difference there in context, a subtlety.
Exile in Guyville seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
The album – a track by track “retort” to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street) – sounded like it was recorded in her basement apartment at 3 a.m. And indeed much of it was. So authentic it was almost frightening. The album still freaks me out – and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since it was first released. The album is never far from me. I could not fucking BELIEVE it when I first listened to it, front to back. Song after song after song … I had never before had the experience of hearing my own life, exactly what I was going through at that very moment – and in Chicago, no less! – reflected in a contemporary musician. That first listen was almost embarrassing. She was saying shit I was going through, but afraid to say in such a blunt way. It’s an album where the track listing is woven into my consciousness. Back when albums were listened to in their entirety. Back when track listing had meaning, when an album told a story. So I listen to “Help Me Mary” and I know what comes next.
published in facsimile. It’s indispensable for actors, I think, but would also be fascinating for anyone interested in Shakespeare.
is a book I adore, even though I read it only because I was MADLY!!! IN. LOVE. with a poet at the time, and he recommended it, and so now the book still has a wafting atmosphere of heartbreak, because I lost my freakin’ mind when that thing ended. I grieved like an Italian widow. But still: if that guy gave me one thing, it’s this book – which has become an essential part of my library, one I refer to so often the book has literally fallen apart. 
