The Saddest Music in the World: Two Possibilities

1. Combining the raw intensity of Vincent Price and the aristocratic flair of Rowan Atkinson, Ross McMillan provides the truest embodiment of an Edgar Allen Poe hero ever captured on film.

   Oh, the other stars "play it straight," but for them it remains play. Such distance is far from fatal to Guy Maddin's films, any more than it is to the work of John Waters or Jean-Luc Godard, or the non-series diversions of Eric Rohmer. But only with McMillan does acting become this film's life; only there do we see cinematography document the mechanics of the soul. The sincerity of his melancholy seems bottomless — completely depthless, in fact, yet as inarguable as the black matte circle a Warner Brothers character slaps onto a mountainside.

   Oscars™ all round! All round Ross McMillan, that is, closing in while he shrinks, shuddering, transfixed in anticipation of their chill, hairless, gentle but unyielding press against his fleshy calf!

2. One of the creators of Lady Port-Huntly has been acquainted with the creator of Lady Port-Huntlady.

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Close Traduction

A plot only tells so much about its telling. And where better to exhibit the gap between narrative line and narrative effect than the cinema, at twenty-four gaps a second?

The most horrifying such exhibitions are start-to-finish misreadings like Adrian Lyne's Lolita and Joseph Strick's Ulysses. The most satisfying are burlesques like Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, Altman's The Long Goodbye, Fields's Fatal Glass of Beer, Rohmer's Dangerous Liaisons (AKA Claire's Knee), and Gilligan's Island's Hamlet. Most alienating are the mob actions.

But as a connoisseur of closure, my favorites reverse the end's polarity.

They do so within the small back wiggle room between fabula and reflector, that magical space in which we drop our cake and eat it too. A favorite hangout of Howard Hawks, who suffered from a morbid fear of unhappy endings — for example, in Come and Get It, which has all the makings of a Greek tragedy and follows through on most of them, only to have the tragic lead decide, "Fuck this shit, I'm Edward Arnold!" It's as if Oedipus Rex closed on a shot of the retired monarch shrugging, twirling his cane, and shuffling a jaunty soft-shoe while being led down that lonesome road.

For conceptual purity, however, nothing beats Powell-&-Pressburger's reversal of The Small Back Room.

Midlist middlebrow mainstream novels don't win the twilit immortality of other genres, and Nigel Balchin never tipped into academic respectability. But I'm fond of this novel, and I suspect it might find fellow admirers among the Better Sort of science fiction readers — it's the depressive alcoholic reclusive grandfather that Carter Scholz's Radiance never met.

You'll find it over there on the left, courtesy of Perkus Tooth's garage sale. Ah, the glory days of paperback publishing, when even impotence was titillating.

The come-on is, as always, a rip-off. Any attempted fucking in Sammy's and Susan's illicit cohabitation takes place offscreen and near-as-damn-it to unconsciousness. The come-on is understandable, though, insofar as our hero has had one foot cut off, has an aching stump, is relentlessly defeatist and drunk, and was authored by a psychologist.

So far, so midcentury mainstream. But these are just the generic handholds one sets to let oneself finish or publish a story. Try to focus past them, as you focus past the talking squids in a Margaret Atwood novel, and you find something very special: a novel about work. (The text excerpted on the paperback's front cover actually concerns career strategy.)

And not gangster work or cop work, but intellectual work, done with skill and for a good cause — yes, even a better cause than Google, perhaps even better than open-source software for institutions of higher education! It's the appropriate day job that was denied to poor Denard and his poor president.

And it still sucks, because at the end of the day it's still a day job. The book's real titillation is having been published by an Army researcher during World War II, in the same year Churchill wanted to ban Powell-&-Pressburger's sentimentalized Colonel Blimp. It's a home-front geek's "Willie & Joe." If you thrill to this selected-at-random scene, you may be among the intended audience:

I was busy with the report for the progress meeting. Not that anybody would read it properly. No one ever did. But it kept things straight for me.

I said to Joe, "This colour filter thing. It's been on the books for about six months and nothing ever happens to it."

"There are four other outfits messing about with it anyhow," said Joe.

"Who?"

"Passingham. The doctors. Rea. The Staines Lab. And I think the R.A.F. are doing something themselves."

"Where did we get it?"

"God knows. The Old Man came back from a meeting full of it. The whole place was chucked on to it for about half a day, and then he got bored and it's never been touched since."

"Think we might write it off?"

Joe said, "I should think we might write off about two-thirds of the stuff you've got there."

I said, "I think I'll go through and do a grand scrap."

Till said, "That's a most extraordinary thing."

"What is?"

"According to this," said Till, peering at his figures, "the seventh round had a negative muzzle velocity."

"Oh come!" said Joe.

"Was there anything funny about the seventh round?" said Tilly to me.

"Not as funny as all that," I said.

In such fashion Balchin keeps the pages staggering downhill to a deservedly celebrated finale: Sammy somewhat arbitarily sets himself a near impossible goal which should conclusively decide his worth, most likely by erasing him utterly at the moment of failure, and then we watch him work it.

And god damn it all to hell, he doesn't quite meet his arbitrary goal and it doesn't kill him:

The facts were that Dick was dead, and Stuart was dead, and the Old Man was gone, and Waring was Deputy Director, and I was just where I had always been. The good chaps went and were killed, and the crooks got away with it. But I just stayed put. I tried to think of something concrete to do — resigning and going to the Old Man, or something like that. But it wouldn't fire. I knew it really didn't make any difference where I went, or who I worked for. And I was too tired, anyway. I didn't like what I was, and couldn't be what I liked, and it would always be like that.

It'll be all right with Susan. She'll take it and make it into what she wants, just as Strang did. We shall all know, but I'm the only one who'll mind.

(Those who accuse Susan of fantastic saintliness might want to review Balchin's 1955 screenplay for Josephine and Men, which instead suggests a diagnosis of "perversity." Misery loves company, and Balchin's kind of woman loves misery.)

So how were Powell-&-Pressburger able to turn this downer into a tale of redemption and optimism? Their solution was elegant: don't include a voiceover. Because without Sammy's whine, the producer and the director and the cinematographer and the composer and the audience can, just as Susan and Strang did, take it and make it into what they want.

"Women are lame, dude." - Some fool at a dot-com, c. 1998

The last good newish novel I read and the last good newish movie I saw both reprised Death Comes for the Comically Awkward Maiden. The novel, O Caledonia, was distinguished by Scottishness, lavish attention to immediate experience, and a jackdaw. The movie, The Forest for the Trees, was distinguished by mounting as its suicide method the most bizarre and least analyzed of all massively shared nightmares.

I'd call this a coincidence but distinguished examples are too quotidian to count. Male writers in a self-pitying or self-loathing mode find the effort of tragic narration magically ease once they change the sex of their protagonist — no producer has to worry about Blanche Dubois being told to man-up. And, should the writer happen to have been a comically awkward maiden herself, she'll find acceptable closure so wonderfully close to hand. What was it Michelangelo said? Take a block and chip away anything that doesn't look like a story?

Thank the BVM for las locas of Barbara Comyns, of Ernst Lubitsch and Eric Rohmer.

Four Freedoms by John Crowley

Historical fiction with no magical props (and no lack of unlikelihood). Like Buster Keaton entering the Civil War, like Abbott & Costello meeting Frankenstein, the John Crowley Novel transplants to a new setting and thrives.

There's a feckless horndog protagonist, of course, under the entirely characteristic name of Prosper Olander, but here his fecklessness carries an objective correlative: crippled legs in a world without ramps or lifts. The home front compensates him with the sexual access American heterosexuals later came to associate with college, and Prosper may be the least embittered disabled hero ever to visit high-mainstream fiction.

Four Freedoms is a rare bird, a war-industry pastoral, and the task of raising Arcadia from the dry and Dry state of Oklahoma lies far beyond the means of a John Crowley Hero. Playing Prospero is an airplane manufacturer who combines the benign shrewdness of George Arliss, the bulk of Eugene Pallette, and the ideals of Charles Fourier. (I suppose it reflects the prejudices of my own notoriously not-so-great generation that I find this throwback more acceptable than the Superhippie who killed Ægypt's buzz.)

And to end all, an All-American Tempest.... The John Crowley Novel intends (and this time achieves) the effect produced in some by Shakespeare's romances, the effect Pericles had on Louis Zukofsky and The Winter's Tale had on Eric Rohmer. (I'm left untouched by both plays, but not by Rohmer and not by Crowley.) A comic cast in a tragic set-up with a comic resolution, unpleasantries drowned in mellow amber, a happy ending from a lost world. Opened, close, closer, and closed.

A note on Eric Rohmer's "Comédies et Proverbes"

There are fourteen of these light and pleasant proverb-comedies in the volume. As their editor states, they were played in Parisian social circles fifty years ago, the idea being to guess the proverb from the stage representation and from the language of the actors.

- W. S. E., "Longfellow's First Volumes", The Literary World, Nov. 18, 1882

A dramatic proverb is a playlet, usually comic, intended to be performed in private homes, that illustrates a well-known proverb without using that proverb in the text.... it became enormously popular during the last third of the eighteenth century, and it achieved recognition as a serious literary form in the nineteenth century, thanks to the genius of Musset.

- Perry Gethner, "Catherine Durand: Proverbes dramatiques (1699)",
Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women: Volume 2