Everywhere I Look (29 page)

2006

The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters

THE great American journalist Janet Malcolm will turn eighty next year. This fact has hit me amidships. She is the writer who has influenced and taught me more than any other. I have never met her, or heard her speak, but I would know her written voice anywhere. It is a literary voice, composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep learning yet plain in its address, and above all fearless, though she cannot possibly be without fear, since she understands it so well in others.

The whole drive of her work is expressed, I think, in a phrase she uses in one of the essays collected in
Forty-one False Starts
: ‘the rapture of firsthand encounters with another's lived experience'.

Rapture
is not too strong a word for the experience of reading Malcolm. You can feast on these essays, as on all her work. Nothing in them is slick or shallow. Her work is always challenging, intellectually and morally complex, but it never hangs heavy. It is airy, racy, and mercilessly cut back, so that it surges along with what one critic has called ‘breathtaking rhetorical velocity'. It sparkles with deft character sketches. It bounds back and forth between straight-ahead reportage and subtle readings of documents and diaries, of photographs and paintings.

Malcolm's way of perceiving the world is deeply dyed by the psychoanalytical view of reality. She never theorises or uses jargon. She simply proceeds on the assumption that (as she puts it in another book,
The Purloined Clinic
) ‘life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour'. This approach, coupled with her natural flair for metaphor and imagery, allows her almost poetic access to meaning in the way people dress and move, speak or decline to speak—and in her most famous and disputed concern, trust and betrayal in the relations between journalists and their subjects.

You feel the intense pleasure she gets from thinking. She keeps coming at things from the most unexpected angles, undercutting the certainty she has just reasoned you into accepting, and dropping you through the floor into a realm of fruitful astonishment, and sometimes laughter.

She skates past the traditional teachings on split infinitives or the undesirability of adjectives: like Christina Stead she will string adjectives and adverbs together in sinewy strands—half-a-dozen of them, each one working hard. An art magazine, she says, has ‘an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised, yet oddly poised air'.

Her description of clothes and their meaning is deadly: ‘a tall, thin, bearded man wearing tight jeans and high-heeled clogs'. Her brisk shorthand often has a sting in its tail: ‘Wilson, who had an unhappy childhood in a mansion'; ‘the look of a place inhabited by a man who no longer lives with a woman'. A young art critic speaks, she says, ‘with the accent of that non-existent aristocratic European country from which so many bookish New York boys have emigrated'.

The longest piece in this collection, ‘A Girl of the Zeitgeist', is a study of the New York art scene of the 1980s. Nothing could interest me less, I thought; but within a few sentences I found myself drawn into a scintillating anthropological investigation that I read greedily, realising that like any other microcosm this one could be studied with both entertainment and profit, and with a thrilling degree of enlightenment about the human project.

For Malcolm, life is unruly. She is gripped by artists' struggles to get command of it, not to be abject before it. But she pulls no punches. She will observe a person and the decor of his apartment, his shoes, his clothes, his way of cooking; she will switch on her reel-to-reel, start him talking, then stand back. Her ear is so finely tuned to speech, and her nerves to the unspoken, that later, when she sits at her desk, she will recreate her subject's utterances with a lethal accuracy, unfolding his character and world view like a fan.

She maintains a perfectly judged distance between her eye and its target. She does not suck up to the people she interviews, or try to make them like her by revealing her own personal life in exchange for their confidences. Her boredom threshold is high. She gives her subjects rope. She allows herself to be charmed, at least until the subject reveals his vacuity or his phoniness, and then she snaps shut in a burst of impatience, and veers away. Although at times she draws back in distaste, or contempt, or even pity, she is not someone who deplores the way of the world or desires to change it. She merely observes it with a matchless eye. In her work there is a complete absence of hot air.

She will not be read lazily. She assumes intelligence and expects you to work, to pace along with her. Her writing turns you into a better reader. There is no temptation to skim: its texture is too rich, too worldly, too surprising. She is brilliant at revealing things in stages, so you gasp, and gasp, and gasp again. She yokes the familiar with the strange in the way that dreams do—suddenly a wall cracks open and a flood of light pours in, or perhaps a perfectly aimed, needle-like beam. Reading her is an austerely enchanting kind of
fun
.

In the closing piece of
Forty-one False Starts
, fragments from ‘an abandoned autobiography', Malcolm describes herself as ‘someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn't want to find herself alone in the room'. What are those words
probably
and
precisely
doing there, bouncing off each other, striking a little chord of uncertainty? I dare to feel a rush of comradeliness. Ms Malcolm, Janet, we cannot do without you. Live in good health and keep writing, for at least another ten years. Dear boss, shine on.

2013

Hit Me

ONE morning I walked into the kitchen and found my son-in-law standing frozen in front of the TV. On the screen a bloke in a blue singlet was manhandling an electric guitar. I had never before witnessed such a noxious exhalation of inauthenticity.

‘Who's
that
?'

‘It's Russell Crowe. And his band, 30 Odd Foot of Grunts.'

There seems no end to the cataract of copy set off by Russell Crowe's movements through the world. His name is a byword for gracelessness and self-importance. The sight of him stepping out of a building, granite-faced in aviator glasses, can reduce the onlooker to helpless laughter. He and Nicole Kidman are the twin peaks of antipodean self-creation in the Hollywood of our time. One can no longer go out in public without having an opinion about him.

What was mine? First I challenged myself to write down everything I could remember about the films I had seen him in over the past fourteen years. Free-associating; no faking. As always in such tests of memory, the results were sparse.

Proof
. Minor violence. Genevieve Picot sulking in a droopy cardigan. A camera? Hugo Weaving? No memory of Crowe.

Romper Stomper
. Violence. Crowe fucking a girl, driving her up the bed with such force that her neck is bent against the wall.

LA Confidential
. Violence. Detectives. Crowe asking Kim Basinger: ‘Why me?' Crowe slumped in the back seat of Basinger's car, broken-boned and bandaged.

Spotswood
. No violence. Worker asks boss to put drops in his eyes. Kick to kick in factory yard. No memory of Crowe.

The Sum of Us
. No violence. Crowe as a gay tradesman. Jack Thompson laughing very loudly.

A Beautiful Mind
. Crowe as a mathematical genius. Ivy. Mental illness. Codes. Think I cried. Felt worked over, irritated.

Master and Commander
. Water. Sky. Naval battles. Crowe as captain. Sea burials. A fiddle, Crowe playing it. Men, boys. No women. Amputation.
Origin of Species
?

Gladiator
. Missed it. Just lazy, nothing to do with Crowe. Annoyed at myself. Pasted into my diary a still of Crowe with huge glistening muscles and an undershirt of celestial blue.

The Insider
. Missed it. Don't know why.

That was about the size of it. ‘And wasn't there an Australian movie called
The Crossing
, way back?' said my daughter. ‘Russell Crowe stood out. I thought, he's got something.'

So I loaded up at the video shop, shut myself into the house and drew the blinds for a week. Outside the window each day my son-in-law was digging and laying out our new vegetable patch, with his eighteen-month-old son strapped to his back. Whenever I took a break I could hear them out there in the sun, singing and making silly noises and laughing quietly. I was embarrassed by the sounds of warped manliness I imagined reaching them from my closed-in room: the shatter of gunfire, the growling of wild beasts, the screams of the dismembered, the oafish grunts and curses of skinheads, the occasional staccato outbreak of foul speech. There was something perverse about it, on a clean spring morning.

George Ogilvie's
The Crossing
takes place on Anzac Day in a country town. Bugles at dawn, Crowe and girlfriend asleep in a hayshed after making love, interiors smoky with golden light. Crowe's widowed mother is a clingy, sentimental drunk. How can he be a man? A nature boy, he's got the sweat sheen, the muscles, the scowl; he juts his jaw and fires guns into the air and poses wide-legged against a fierce blue sky; but he says ‘chahnce' and wears tight white jeans, even when hunched under the open bonnet of a ute. Fast forward—but wait. Who's that playing his girlfriend? Woh! It's Danielle Spencer, the woman who's now his wife.

The most interesting thing about her, here, is that
she looks like him
. The broad forehead, the eyebrows in a permanent inverted V of earnestness. The meaty nose. The rare smile. Impertinent psychologising possessed me while the film redeemed itself with a splendidly Shakespearean car and train smash.

Proof
, written and directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose screenplay based on the novel
Eucalyptus
Crowe would years later allegedly feel competent to rewrite, is unusually inward and intense for an Australian movie—a triangle of emotional distortion and manipulation. Crowe plays a young kitchenhand in a restaurant with red-checked tablecloths. On the video case his eyes are a startling, innocent blue, something I haven't noticed on screen.

He, of course, is the Eros figure of the piece—the untutored bogan who brings a blast of freshness into the lives of a nasty Camberwell pair, a blind man played by Hugo Weaving and his spiteful housekeeper Genevieve Picot. Crowe, as a physical worker, is again covered in a sheen of sweat. While Weaving lectures him on aesthetics he gazes up intently, showing us big features, juicily indented lips, a dimpled chin, an interesting breadth of brow. There is a little quality here, some nameless thing. ‘
Everybody
lies!' he says to the neurotic Weaving, who suspects and thus meets betrayal everywhere; ‘but not all the time, and that's the point!' In Crowe's roguish company Weaving laughs for the first time, an unnervingly jerky, nasal sound.

What the hell was Crowe doing in Mark Joffe's
Spotswood
, that same year? Gee, it was a sweet movie—hopelessly old-fashioned but warm and funny. Anthony Hopkins as the time-and-motion man politely subdues his greatness, but for the first time I feel that Crowe, as the salesman, is biding his time. Technically one can't fault him, but he's not engaged. He's already somewhere else.

My daughter found a letter I'd written her in 1992 after seeing Geoffrey Wright's
Romper Stomper
. Seems I liked it. ‘Russell Crowe was the leader of the skins, the one who'd read
Mein Kampf
etc. He sounded more like a Scotch College boy than a psychopath—rounded vowels, strong inner self.' I wrote disdainfully of David Stratton's refusal even to see the movie. But now, at second viewing, I couldn't believe how much screen time is taken up with crane shots of boys running wildly in single file down narrow Footscray lanes. The brawl scenes too are interminable, adolescently gloried-in: later I noticed that the credits named five nurses. I started to fidget in my seat.

Crowe looms over the tale, unmodulated, with face of stone. He gets expression by jerking his jaw, swinging it from side to side. There's a fabulous final scene on a beach. Crowe does a grand death, twitching and spewing blood, and he leaves a pretty corpse, but the standout in
Romper Stomper
is mad-faced Daniel Pollock, who in real life died not long after. What a loss Pollock is: that delicacy, a puzzled complexity just starting to grow.

I hunted out my 1994 review of
The Sum of Us
, directed by Kevin Dowling and Geoff Burton. Crowe plays Jeff, a gay plumber. The blue singlet? A mullet? How hard it is, now, to imagine this: ‘Jeff, a sweet-natured hulking boy whose self-esteem has taken a knock from a recent broken heart, comes home from the pub late on Friday night with a young gardener in tow.' Should I scour the video shops? But ‘after a tantalising dip into a darker complexity it bounces straight back up to the surface and becomes what its provenance fates it to be—a sentimental exercise about love and family loyalty.' Okay, pass, though a small warmth lingers.

Here I skipped forward to 1997, Curtis Hanson's
LA Confidential
. Twenty minutes in and Crowe, as Officer Bud White, has beaten up a couple of creeps, torn the Christmas decorations off the house-front of a wife-bashing parole violator, and pressed money into the grateful victim's hand. Though I'm interested in detectives, I eschew them on screen; but
LA Confidential
, humming with the highly worked and disciplined craziness of the James Ellroy novel it's based on, is something else.

For a start it's beautiful. Every shot, every juxtaposition makes you gasp. The long, pale cars. The cream and white interiors of Kim Basinger's apartment, her private bedroom all sunny and embroidered. Hanson cuts away from Crowe (in a singlet) beating the shit out of a perp in a blind-dimmed room to an exterior shot of a sunlit skyscraper which is so blatantly, glowingly phallic that it's almost comical.