Sunday, July 12, 2020

Miscellany #5: French Men and Gorey Details

1. Le Redoutable (2017)




I’m a big fan of Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 films. The titular secret agent, also known as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath and played by the wonderful Jean Dujardin, is funny to us, the audience, because he is a creaking relic of a France long past (to us, the audience), a chauvinist and racist pig whose sophisticated clothes and flashy smile deceive no one but himself and other French (male) spies. The humor of the OSS 117 series comes not, as in the Pink Panther series, from the hero’s bumbling antics among competent colleagues (David Cairns: Clouseau is a "man whose idiocy is perfectly, agonizingly balanced between awareness of his own inadequacy and lack of awareness that it’s obvious to pretty well everyone around him"), but rather from the way that the hero’s antics only become bumbling when they are transplanted away from home, where everyone views him (incredibly) as normal to Cairo, Brazil, or (in the upcoming third film) Africa. When Hubert tips an Egyptian with a photograph of de Gaulle, it is not only funny because of the Egyptian’s bewilderment, but because of Hubert’s supreme confidence in the generosity of this gesture and his complete ignorance of why someone outside of France might not see it the same way. In Hubert, Hazanavicius gives us a savagely satirical picture of a certain kind of Frenchman - sexy and fashionable but reactionary and misogynist, a thoughtless and incurious supporter of empire and the status quo.

Jean-Luc Godard, of course, is unlike Hubert in many ways, especially during the years (1967-1969) examined in Le Redoutable, a fantastic film written and directed by Hazanavicius and starring Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin in virtuoso performances. Godard was an unapologetic radical and revolutionary whose efforts to disrupt and discard the status quo with his 1960 debut, À bout de souffle, were so effective in establishing a new French cinema that he had to do it all over again in the late 1960s. Godard is an artist, more specifically a director. “What is a film director?” Truffaut asks in La Nuit américaine. “Someone who’s asked questions about everything. Sometimes he knows the answers.” While Godard is Hubert de la Bath’s opposite in a thousand ways - assuredly, the Godard of Le Redoutable would be disgusted by OSS 117 - Hazanavicius presents him as simply the other side of the same coin of French masculinity, one which always knows the answers. Godard seems astonishingly incurious at every turn - about his girlfriend and then wife, Anne Wiazemsky, about his friends, about film, and ultimately about the ideologies and protests he turns to when he leaves the others behind. A scene in a cramped car, driving back from the cancelled 1968 Cannes festival, is hilarious, painful, and infuriating, as Godard systematically demolishes his friendships over the course of 800 kilometers. As in the OSS 117 films, our male hero (of sorts) exists in a narrow, male world; inside it, he is a genius, but as soon as he steps outside of this safe space, his pretensions and prejudices are thrown into high relief. For Godard, this occurs most obviously whenever he attempts to speak to protesters and students (one attempted analogy about Israel is especially hilarious and could have been lifted straight from an OSS 117 script), and more subtly in every interaction with his wife, Anne, whose novel Un an aprés was the source for the film. One masterful scene provides both the text and subtext of their relationship, with their spoken words accompanied by subtitled unspoken meaning.

Hazanavicius employs similar stylistics tours-de-force in Le Redoutable as in OSS 117 - slow motion, slick editing and effects. Here, too, he has Godard's work to play with, and his references are often both subtle and unmissable. The directing and production echoes of his work on OSS 117 only reinforces the theory that they are working with some similar ideas, that we are supposed to see them, on some level, as part of a unified oeuvre.

Hubert de la Bath is a square swinger, a playboy who, like so many playboys of the 1950s who pushed for sexual liberation in their own lives, is incredibly uncomfortable with the sexual and other liberations of everyone else in the 1960s. Godard, too, is a reactionary revolutionary, a man who believes passionately - blindly - in his cause, and yet is angry that others are better at it, and more naturally suited to it, than he is. His endless railing against his enemies and obstacles - friends, the government, actors, students, his shoes, his wife - is telling. When Anne finally tells him she doesn’t love him anymore, she chooses self-preservation over self-destruction in her struggle with Godard. Having lost his dearest foil, a woman he seemingly despises when she is anything but his shadow, a woman who helps him define himself through opposition, Godard attempts suicide. At the end of the film, Anne tells us, he has achieved his radical goal - making collective decisions with cast and crew each morning, representing important subject matter. And what is he doing? Arguing for tracking shots, for the importance of learning cinema's shared language, for form and style. Ultimately, he cannot throw out the status quo any more than can Hubert de la Bath. Without France's retrograde attitudes to shelter within, OSS 117 is exposed and vulnerable, in danger of losing his poise and sophistication; meanwhile, without an OSS 117 to despise, Godard loses his own revolutionary identity.

2. Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey


I’ve been trundling my way through Mark Dery’s biography of artist and writer Edward Gorey for several weeks now, and my stock line about it has been that I’m still reading it in spite of Dery, not because of him. In other words, Gorey’s own life and work is so fascinating to me that I am compelled to keep working my way through a book that increasingly makes me want to bang my head against a wall. I’m not the first to point this out, but Dery’s obsessive treatment of Gorey’s sexuality is a serious blight on the book. I’m all for reading texts with an aim to understand how they might inform our understanding of an author, and vice versa. I’m also all for bringing LGBTQ+ stories to the forefront. But Dery’s sin isn’t his choice to focus on this aspect of Gorey’s life and work - it’s his incompetence in actually doing so.

He often spends pages making huge leaps of analysis about Gorey’s books that are supported less by evidence and more by Dery’s own obvious question-begging. My favorite example might be when he writes about The Bug Book, a rare colorful entry in the Gorey bibliography. Describing two bugs who live in a teacup and “were frivolous, and often danced on the roof,” Dery swings between forehead-slapping obviousness and mind-bending assumption: “Are they a couple? They seem to be” - yes, Mark, they live in a teacup together - “and their matching coloring... invites us to read them as a same-sex couple” - ????? There’s a difference between there being a real possibility of two baby-blue bugs living together in a teacup being a same-sex couple, and an invitation by the text for us to see them that way, and the bugs simply being the same color is not that difference. In my mind, that invitation is only present if one has decided that everything Gorey did was intrinsically tinted by his sexuality. Here, I feel that Dery falls into a damaging trope, the same kind of trope that causes the homophobic to fear being in men’s restrooms or the transphobic to fear for women’s restrooms or the misogynistic to blame women’s clothes or bodies for rape or sexual assault - that any sexual being who is not a straight man must necessarily be completely consumed at all times with expressing an outward-facing sexuality. Perhaps Gorey was pulling a Frog and Toad with his baby-blue bugs (although Nobel actually does invite us to read his characters as a same-sex couple by not making them both the same kind of animal, and also by not making them literally related, as Gorey does with his bugs). In my personal reading of the text, in the absence of more evidence of authorial intent, there simply isn’t enough ground on which to stand Dery’s interpretation. After hundreds of pages of this kind of thing, it starts to feel like Dery came to a conclusion about Gorey’s sexuality and its role in his work and will bend the books any way he needs to to get them to fit that narrative, rather than the other way around.

This insistence on twisting the facts to fit a pre-drawn conclusion also causes Dery to miss some meaty opportunities for the exact kind of analysis he clearly wants to make, and which actually would support the conclusions he wants to make. Near the end of the book, Dery is so focused on an overwrought explanation of the Freudian concept of collecting as a transference of affection from the human to the object (including obligatory “collected object = absent phallus” mumbo-jumbo) that he speeds right past a fascinating real connection between one of Gorey’s influences and his work, one that seems to raise interesting questions about, if not sexuality, than at least traditional masculinity in Gorey’s life and art.

(It’s worth noting here that while Dery discusses Gorey’s influences at some length, he often does so in a way that still privileges the “lightning strikes from above” narrative of genius - hence the book’s subtitle, I guess. Gorey worked hard at drawing all of his life, and clearly used a variety of sources - literature, art and photography, film - intentionally to help him in creating his own books. Dery somehow lays all of this work out, and still tries to hammer home the idea of Gorey as a static, Mozart-esque Genius from Day One, the source of whose abilities is anyone’s guess.)

The section on collecting is one of Dery’s most strained - he even hedges on it himself in places, which is irritating - and plays into a tendency he has (despite his stated mission to uncover the complexity of the Real Gorey) to pigeonhole Gorey as just a weird, spooky guy (see Dick Cavett’s interview of Gorey for the prototype of this approach), so we get descriptions of a skull he owned, Day of the Dead masks, photographs of dead children, etc. Then Dery writes that “[l]ess predictable” objects in Gorey’s collection include “sandpaper drawings... pictures done in charcoal on stiff-stock paper coated with a ground of marble dust and varnish. A pastime of young ladies in the mid-nineteenth century, the work tends towards picturesque landscapes and romantic fantasies, such as moonlight shimmering on black waters.” Dery quotes Gorey: “The ones that are imaginary landscapes are kitschy, because they’re sort of castles on the Rhine and blah-ty blah-ty blah-ty.... I think people just kind of made them up, you know; you did obelisks and ruins and columns and trees.” Dery then blithely moves on from sandpaper drawings, despite the fact that this seems to be an embarrassment of riches for analysis: Gorey describes the drawings as “kitschy,” which plausibly connects them to a gay aesthetic sensibility that Dery has described at other points in the book; Gorey describes them as made up, which aligns with Gorey’s own emphasis on his imagination rather than drawing from life (a point Dery makes when describing how small Gorey’s Cape Cod studio was); the landscapes are not only full of Gorey-esque touches like ruins and obelisks (obelisks! How could Dery lump anything including obelisks into a discussion of less predictable influences?), but the whole description of these particular drawings is incredibly reminiscent of Dery’s own discussion of the landscapes in Gorey’s 1958 book The Obect-Lesson; and finally, these drawings Gorey loved were done by young women, returning again to a non-traditional conception of masculinity in Gorey’s influences and work. Indeed, the entire idea of landscapes connects to Gorey’s affinity for the artist in his family, his great-grandmother Helen St. John Garvey, who, Dery tells us, “specialized in landscapes.”

Dery’s tunnel vision about the Freudian subtext of collecting (pages and pages of which result in this incredible non-payoff: “Whether some psychic trauma drove Gorey to displace his deepest affections to cats and collections ‘rather than to people, who have proven not to reliable,’ who can say?” Thanks, Mark) are not only based on thin evidence, they’re exhausting. I almost skimmed over the passage on sandpaper drawings as I tried to hack my way through Dery’s dense psychoanalytic underbrush. Confounding. I’m still reading this, but I don’t expect my thoughts on it to change (except for the worse). Looking forward to re-reading Ascending Peculiarity after this as a palate-cleanser. Recommended for the Gorey details (har har), but not for their packaging.

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