Odd Jobs (9 page)

Let’s hear it for filmmakers. They bring their visions to market through a welter of props and egos, actors and bankers that a mere wordmonger would be overwhelmed by. Considering the vast number of fingers in the pot, and the amount of financial concern that haunts the sound stage, it’s
a wonder any motion picture comes out halfway coherent. Lack of coherence—the inner coherence works of art should have, the ultimate simplicity of one voice speaking—is surely a failing especially of today’s films, in the absence of studio control and of the adult, bourgeois audience that filled the movie palaces in the palmy Depression days. Now only adolescents have strong and recurrent reason to get out of the house with its lulling television sets, and films are inexorably juvenile. Maybe they always were, and I was too juvenile to notice. In the backward glance there is a dignity—a rather religious stateliness and intensity—to the Gary Cooper–Rita Hayworth–Fred Astaire black-and-white movies that seems oddly lost in videotape rerun. Those barking men, those vaudeville gags, those plainly fake backdrops—weren’t we pained by them the first time around? Still, there was not that jittery prurience, that messy something-for-everybody grabbiness which reaches out now from the curtainless screens of the shopping-mall complexes, where, as I write,
Creepshow II
is competing with
Meatballs III
.

Even a very lame movie tends to crush a book. When I try to think of
The Great Gatsby
, I get Robert Redford in a white suit, handsomely sweating in a pre-air-conditioning room at the Plaza, and Mia Farrow in a floppy pastel hat, or Alan Ladd floating dead in an endless swimming pool, before I recover, via Fitzgerald’s delicate phrasing, Daisy’s little blue light or the hair in the gangster Wolfsheim’s nostrils.
Ulysses
, which one might have thought impervious to non-verbal invasion, is blighted for me by the pious film adaptation and its disconcertingly specific and youthful Bloom. Who can now read
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and not visualize its fellow-travelling hero as an avatar of Sergeant York, or its Spanish virgin as a Swedish beauty? Once I had a dream in which I was sitting high in the balcony of a vast movie theatre watching the film adaptation of
Remembrance of Things Past;
it consisted of, on a wide screen, Proust’s pale fastidious face, his eyelids closed as if in sleep. I prefer my version to the Harold Pinter script for Joseph Losey, which was written and published but never produced.

Successful movies tend to take off from the book, rather than take it too seriously.
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, for example, or the impudent version, in which Faulkner had a hand, of
To Have and Have Not
. When the author gets too involved, and out of proprietary anxiety or love of the cinematic art strives to assert too much control, the result may be merely an unshot script and a batch of threatened lawsuits. What ever happened to the film adaptations of
Fear of Flying
and
The Confessions
of Nat Turner
? On the other hand, it must be admitted that Jerzy Kosinski, with some help from Peter Sellers, did succeed in making
Being There
a better movie than it was a book. But, then, Kosinski, as he showed in
Reds
, is a natural film performer. He gets, over Norman Mailer in
Ragtime
and George Plimpton in
Volunteers
, the Eighties Authorial Cinemacting Prize.

In a novel, the prose is the hero, the human thing; the author’s voice is our foremost point of contact and upholds one side of the shifting, teasing relationship we as readers are invited into. In a movie, the actors and actresses are what win us—these giant faces, all but impassive, like the faces of gods. As Wolcott Gibbs wrote some forty years ago, the movies are “an art form fundamentally based on the slow, relentless approach and final passionate collision of two enormous faces.” The mounting of these faces and their collision can be more or less elaborate, and more or less impressive, as directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, grips, costumers, and set designers labor at it, but a bad mounting will not altogether defeat the box-office magic of, say, Marilyn Monroe or Eddie Murphy, and no amount of skillful mounting will make Meryl Streep as winning as Diane Keaton. This visceral simplicity of the cinema embarrasses criticism: Gibbs, in his definitive if unabashedly class-conscious essay, “The Country of the Blind,” described his short-term stint as a film critic as attempting “to write … for the information of my friends about something that was plainly designed for the entertainment of their cooks.”

Now and then, in watching a movie, we are troubled by awareness of something caught inside and trying to get out, trying to make more sense than the colliding faces that we see. On a recent evening while visiting New York, I walked up Fifth Avenue to view, at the convenient Paris Theatre, a French film called
L’Année des méduses
, starring Valérie Kaprisky. The frisky, risqué picture, located on the French Riviera, devoted itself almost exclusively to the photography of young women’s bare breasts and, when the plot needed thickening, their buttocks. But toward the end, the characters abruptly began to speak in lengthy speeches, and there was a sudden ugly splash of attempted resolution, and I realized that the movie had been based upon a book, and that the book was still in there, still fighting to impose a plot and a moral and even a twist of suave irony upon this pageant of Gallic bathing beauties, which we of the audience had been gazing at in blissful ignorance of any such darkly clever, print-inspired designs. It turns out that the director
of the film was also the author of the book. He did not feel free; he felt he owed himself something. Seeing the movie made me, with an impulse of pity such as all tourists must learn to resist as they thread their way among the importunities of Fifth Avenue, want to read the book.

T
HE
N
AME OF THE
R
OSE
was an unlikely book to adapt for the cinema—intensely literary, bleak in mood and moral, and loaded with in-jokes only a semiotician who was also a medievalist could love. Yet the film’s makers, a mix of European names, have done an honorable and at moments moving job of converting one thing—an obdurately textual text, abstruse and challenging—into another, a succession of filmed images ultimately conforming to a moviegoer’s conventional expectations.

Movie and novel alike boldly ask us to conceive of the Middle Ages
intellectually
, as an arena of contesting ideas rather than the hackneyed site of tourney and Crusade, of flying pennants and glinting armor, of picturesque battles clouding the sky with arrows and colorfully gowned beauties exciting the clash of heraldry-laden combatants. The motion-picture version of
The Name of the Rose
, but for a recurrent splash of blood, is relentlessly dull in color, all gray and brown. The cast, but for a single besmudged and silent young female, is all male, and most of the men are ugly. The scene is a masterpiece of desolation, an abbey in the wintry remoteness of mountains in the North of Italy; the opening and closing shots panoramically establish something we tend to forget about the Middle Ages—how relatively empty their Europe was, a continent of populated islands connected by thin and perilous paths. Desolation without, desolation within: the stony walls and slanting courtyards of the abbey look cold, and as the actors speak their breath is white. Only the wandering Franciscan William of Baskerville and his accompanying novice, Adso, do not appear grotesque; the rest are robed, eye-rolling residents of a frosty hell claiming to be a path to heaven. Such a gloomy, almost sardonic bleakness lifts the film into the realm of intellectual enterprise.

One of the pleasant surprises of the picture is how Sean Connery, the swashbuckling 007 of the James Bond soft-porn thrillers, carries off the
difficult lead part, bodying forth our detective-hero’s necessary dignity and trustworthiness while conveying also the something troubled and flawed about him, a rational man in a century, the fourteenth, dominated by murderous superstition and a tortuous church-state rivalry. Eco’s fascinating and sometimes fatiguing explication of late-medieval theological debates—the wild heresies, the incipient rebellion against a totalitarian church, the precarious position of the Franciscan movement itself—is necessarily skimped, but not ignored. The shudder of a rotten world on the verge of upheaval is felt. The extravagant costuming of the Pope’s emissaries, when they erupt upon the bleak monastic scene, constitutes visual farce worthy of Brecht.

Umberto Eco’s text is full of ironies, and motion pictures do not have leisure, generally, to be ironical. What in the novel is mandarin parody—two travelling monks as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, the isolated abbey as a closed “country house” for a classic murder mystery—the movie takes more or less straight; the clichés simply excite us, as they often have before. The plot is rather clearer than in the novel, because less surrounded by exposition and Latinate discourse, and the book’s central irony—a succession of murders that do not link up but turn out to be, like the Godless universe itself, the work of many chancy happenings—is lost in the visual tumble, one fright after another, that we as moviegoers expect. The movie makes less sense than only the most artful of suspense films, and we do not begrudge it its strain of incoherence, even to the miraculous escape of William from the burning library; he must have used the secret stairway carefully diagrammed in the novel but scarcely mentioned in the film, whose makers must have concluded that one secret passageway—the one leading from the chapel altar, with a carved skull’s eyes as its door latch—was enough. In place of diagrams and deductive brilliance, we have the brilliance of the set designers who constructed the labyrinthine library with its big pale vellum-bound volumes, its musty angled surfaces, and its Piranesiesque tangle of staircases. The set is splendid but its conflagration is relatively perfunctory; the scholarly Eco’s vision of a massive and sickening loss of historic texts cannot be shared by the makers of films, for whom waste—of “takes,” of abandoned and ruthlessly revised scripts, of time, of money—is inextricable from the artistic process. A movie is itself a flickering flame, a piece of visible consumption.

Yet movies have their rigors: in a book, with its negligible budget, the author’s wishes dominate; but in a motion picture the wishes of the audience
shape the product. What we wish to happen, will happen. As film-goers we know that the abbey must burn, because it is hopelessly polluted, and its confusions can be satisfyingly dealt with only through destruction. The primitive ethical logic of film demands, too, that the villain of the piece, in this case the inquisitor Bernard Gui, be dealt a bloody death. The torturer falls from a great height and is many times pierced by a hay rake. The book, on the other hand, merely lets Gui sink back into the morass of history, which is so replete with villains that none can be dignified with punishment.

Movie logic demands as well that the nameless peasant girl who impulsively and wordlessly (for she speaks a dialect remote from Latin) bestows herself upon young Adso be spared the death on the pyre to which Eco, with historically correct heartlessness, casually and irrevocably consigns her. But in the rigid ethical system, based upon wish-fulfillment, that controls the myth-making operations of the cinematic art, she must be saved and glorified, not just because Adso loves her. It is
we
who love her: how, once she has, in the movie’s one sex scene, so charmingly shown us her breasts and buttocks, can we watch her burn, or think of her burning? Even the ferocity of Bergman’s films, wherein animals and fish are killed before the camera, balks at the sacred inviolacy of the bared female form; in
The Seventh Seal
, the condemned young witch survives. Further, Adso prays to the Madonna that the girl be spared, and in our cinematic universe not only is sexual energy always conserved but prayers are always answered. We viewers of
The Name of the Rose
can scarcely withhold tears of gratitude and religious hysteria at the sight, appropriately phallic, of the deserted stake where the movie’s lone heroine has been somehow saved. Saved, the movie tentatively suggests, by a peasant uprising, in behalf of lovely young witches and the chthonian fertility they represent.

After touch, the visual is the supreme erotic sense, and there is no keeping sex marginal in a motion picture. If it is there at all, it will overflow the screen, and demand to rule the plot. An erotic incident minor (and pedantically overwritten) in the novel irresistibly becomes central in the movie, and though Adso in the end rejects the live girl in favor of monkish celibacy, this is movie logic also, for thus he enshrines her forever in his memory. He even, in the most surprising twist given the novel by the moviemakers, makes her illiterate silence the point of the title: she is the rose who never acquired a name. And perhaps Adso’s typical romantic deferral of perishing actuality, this heretical (according
to Denis de Rougemont) act of eternalization through denial, is not unfairly read into the novel’s title, taken from the Latin “stat rosa pristine nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.” The rose remains pristine in name; we hold (keep) her name (the idea of her) naked (pure).

I
SAW A NUMBER
of last season’s well-reviewed movies, and some, like
Moonstruck
and
The Last Emperor
, lived up to their notices, and others, like
Broadcast News
and
My Life as a Dog
, seemed to me to misfire, though their good intentions were obvious. But the motion picture I liked best was one I went to impulsively, at the local second-run house, with no memory of its reviews save the dismissive observation, somewhere, that Goldie Hawn should pick her material better. I went to
Overboard
expecting only that it would contain Goldie Hawn and would attempt to be funny and at least wouldn’t depress me. In the event, it moved me, and I feel I should, apologetically, try to explain why.