“I didn’t think then, and I still don’t, that I was actually sick.” — Frances Farmer

Posted on September 19, 2024 by sheila

“She’ll come back as fire
To burn all the liars
And leave a blanket of ash on the ground.”
— Nirvana, “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle”

It’s her birthday today.

When Nirvana’s album In Utero came out in 1993, I couldn’t believe my eyes: the 5th track was called “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle.” I was already well-versed in Frances Farmer. I saw as many of her movies as I could get my hands on, and watched the Jessica Lange movie many times. I read her autobiography Will There Really Be a Morning? I read Real-Life Drama, Wendy Smith’s exhaustive history of The Group Theatre (which everyone should read: it’s such an important part of our shared cultural past, particularly what happened with all of these individuals as the 20th century limped on). Seattle was Farmer’s hometown, but I hadn’t considered the connection, that she would be on Kurt Cobain’s radar … but of course it makes perfect sense. Seattle, the small-minded unforgiving community, ran the teenage Frances out of town on a rail for having the AUDACITY to write an essay about atheism, and for being a TRAITOR to her country by traveling to Communist Russia. Hollywood wasn’t the first to ostracize her. Seattle was the first. Hollywood was the LAST, And here Kurt Cobain was, the biggest rock star in the world at the time, resurrecting her as an avenging angel. She was coming back to Seattle and she was PISSED.

The year before In Utero came out, Cobain and Courtney Love had a daughter. They named her Frances.

Immortalized by Jessica Lange in the 1982 film Frances, the real actress deserves to be remembered in her own right. She never got the chance to really show her stuff … and was frustrated with both the roles she was given and how Hollywood soft-pedaled or white-washed reality.

Frances Farmer cared deeply about reality. After all, when she was a teenager she won a contest by writing an essay about how God was dead. The prize was a trip to Russia. Even as a kid, Frances Farmer did not give a fuck what people thought. She was a rebel and an outlaw.

People like that are often labeled mentally ill, are often marginalized, stigmatized, outright punished. The rumors and speculations around Farmer’s mental diagnosis have clouded the conversation for decades. In the film, she is shown getting a lobotomy. This “fact” has been called into question. So. It would be great if it could be cleared up – just so “lobotomy” is not the first damn thing you think of when you hear Frances Farmer’s name. But the fact remains: she was hounded and persecuted and dragged naked out of hotel rooms and thrown in jail and put into institutions – horrifying places – where all kinds of shit was done to her. The “treatment” of mental illness was often worse than the illness itself.

Farmer was such a talented actress (watch Come and Get It, if you haven’t already), but she wasn’t a people-pleaser. This brought her a lot of problems. She was well-read, tough, thought for herself. Her temper was ferocious and often terrifying. She was an alcoholic. A witches’ brew of volatility. Considering all this, her belief in reality – her insistence on it – may seem like a contradiction.

An important side bar about this “reality” thing, because if we want to de-stigmatize mental illness, like “we” keep saying we have to do, then “we” have to actually do some work to understand it. (Well, I don’t. I already know.) Trust me: it is often the “mad” who have a better grip on what is REALLY going on than so-called sane stable people. The “mad” KNOW reality’s solidity because they have experienced solidity’s dissolution. They don’t take solidity for granted. Mental suffering can lead to a willingness to look reality head-on and face harsh truths. Those muscles are well-flexed in the “mad,” not as much in the “well.” This is one of the great observations of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Justine, incapacitated by mental illness, is not afraid when the end of the world comes. She stares at it dead-on. Her sister, so stable, so sane, falls apart.

I have always sensed this dynamic was true, just from my own life. People called me pessimistic or fatalistic. Nah. I’m a realist. I am better equipped for actual reality because I have no illusions. Thank you, Lars von Trier: I have never seen this portrayed. So many narratives about mental illness have the ill person working their way back to sanity, finding the ability to feel joy again, to live in the moment, to blah blah zzzzzzzz. How about we look at what the SANE can learn from the INSANE?

This is not to say that Frances Farmer didn’t have challenges and that she didn’t put other people through hell. Her self-medicating was advanced, her drunkenness was acute. The more trapped she felt, the worse she got. If you are trapped, you will try to escape. The more you “misbehave”, the more people treat you like you’re bad and “crazy” and the cycle continues.

Farmer believed strongly in Left causes (consider her teenage visit to Russia). She questioned authority, she questioned consensus. Seen in this light, her involvement in the Group Theatre – taking Broadway by storm in the 1930s – makes perfect sense. She wanted to be a part of that dynamic: art that meant something, art that reflected people’s actual lives and hardships. She got cast as Lorna Moon in the Broadway premiere of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy, opposite Luther Adler as Joe, the boxer/violinist. Elia Kazan played Eddie Fuselli, the gangster who sucks Joe into the criminal underworld, for probably homoerotic reasons (Kazan played it that way, at any rate). Farmer loved being a part of something she believed in, being part of a collective. She was so isolated in Hollywood. Nobody understood her out there. Nobody liked her (and sometimes they disliked her for very good reasons!) Lorna Moon is a dream role, particularly for someone like Farmer, hungry to show her stuff. Lorna is a tough-as-nails “kept” woman, a gangster’s moll, who – when she does fall in love – experiences it as PAIN, since it is so unfamiliar and her life has been so harsh, particularly in regards to men who have used her, probably from the moment she developed breasts. She was prey. She grew up fast. This is Lorna Moon. Lorna Moon was a realist too. No illusions. Farmer understood this woman. She got good reviews. I wish I could have seen her in it.


Luther Adler and Frances Farmer, “Golden Boy”, 1938

The Group Theatre was well up and running when Farmer joined the cast of Golden Boy. Its successes changed the course of American theatre, introducing new voices and structures and styles, making everything else seem outmoded and stuffy, but, sadly, it had only two more years left in its existence at the time of Golden Boy. Farmer stepped into a well-oiled and extremely complicated group dynamic, filled with rivalries, hatreds even, disillusionments, bruised egos, ideological/political disagreements … These entanglements would follow the Group Theatre members through the decades, when they went their separate ways, many of them becoming the legendary acting teachers who brought “the Method” – and its offshoots – to American acting training. People like Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg.


Elia Kazan and Frances Farmer, “Golden Boy”, 1938

My sense from what I’ve read is that Farmer adored the process, loved every second of it – collaboration, in-depth rehearsals, a feeling of camaraderie – but also … she wasn’t quite a “part” of it. The group was so much a group, it didn’t do well with outsiders. All of this was complicated by her hot and heavy love affair with Clifford Odets.

My deep thanks to Benjamin Dreyer (author of Dreyer’s English) who sent me this screengrab of a book which Odets inscribed to Farmer, in 1937, thanking her for her work in Golden Boy. I gasped when I saw this.

Odets was a womanizer. I think Farmer thought their relationship was more than it was. And I think she harbored somewhat reasonable hopes that she would continue on with the Group Theatre, becoming a company member for real. This is not how it played out. Odets dumped her. The Group dropped her after the closing of Golden Boy in New York, and chose another actress for the London run. Farmer was crushed. The company was in death throes at the time … And of course there was some resentment among long-time company members at Farmer’s presence, an “outsider” brought in to play a plumb lead role. They were supposed to be a repertory company, they were supposed to cast plays from their ranks. It was the whole POINT. Maybe Farmer felt a little bit used, like they only “let her in” because she was a movie actress who could bring in an audience. I don’t blame Farmer for feeling used and hurt.

Whatever was really going on (and everyone has a different story), Farmer was devastated twofold: by the end of the affair with Odets as well as losing the opportunity to take Lorna to London. She did a couple more plays in New York with the Group, directed by Kazan, but the plays didn’t go over well (The Group folded in 1940) and her alcoholism was pretty severe by this time. She was not reliable. She was losing control.

I love this portrait of her by the great Edward Steichen. It captures something about her, her essence, her spirit.

Things went downhill at a rapid pace. Back in Los Angeles, the arrests piled up, for driving drunk, for disorderly conduct, for assault even, for resisting arrest. There is the infamous story of her being dragged out of the Knickerbocker Hotel kicking and screaming, hauled off to jail, all as the paparazzi snapped pics. When asked at the police station to state her profession, she said, “Cocksucker” and then winked at the cameras. She laughed. In the photos, her hair is wild, uncombed. She looks feral, furious, formidable.

Dammit, I LIKE that woman, seething, staring at the camera dead-on. Unrepentant. Trapped. Furious. I fucking get it.

These pictures of Farmer went everywhere, and they are still the first images in Google results. This event was the end of her career, really, and the beginning of her harrowing race to the bottom.

If you don’t know her story, and you haven’t seen the film Frances, then of course you should go and see the film – just to witness Lange’s tremendous performance – but go into it with the understanding that it takes liberties with the facts (as most biopics do).

The best thing you can do is seek out Farmer’s actual work in film, and see what she was like onscreen. She was luminous. She was an adult woman, not an ingenue. Watch her in Come and Get It, her best role (half directed by Howard Hawks – the better half – and half directed by William Wellman). In it, her toughness was present, and you get the sense of a woman who can take care of herself, a woman with a sense of humor. A Howard Hawks woman, in other words. It’s a very attractive mix. This is a Lorna Moon kind of character, so Come and Get It is a glimpse of what she must have been like in Golden Boy.

I came across a poem Farmer wrote in 1957 called “The Journey”. The quotes heading each section add up to Philippians 4:11.

The Journey

NORTH
“Not that I speak of want…”
If in Seattle then, the rain still
Mingles in the trees mixed with the dank and dearly loved grey spume off Puget Sound
Who will remember?
I feel the source but I long since have torn myself away
Against the rock and rain of other shores
My roots are breaking
Oh mother who closely clung and fiercely fought the native years, How can it be that only in defeat you found your strength?
Retreat, retreat in peace and grieve
The gray sky covers all and still it rains on Puget Sound and still the tree lies shattered.

SOUTH
“But I have learned..”
Along the rim of Hawks Nest Bay
A growth of trees drop shade
The red ant swarms green water hisses over reef
And I walk naked on the shore
As smooth as white as snow
The sand stretched under the sun
Black aching shoulders of rock rise in silence
Where is the island of peace?
The green hill with grasses?
Deep in the dangerous sea the shark fin passes.

EAST
“in whatsoever state I am..”
Now richly droops wisteria bloom
While elegant bugs on separate flourishing leaf
Luxuriously maneuver
If we are silent while we feel
How quiet is the night with jasmine
If we but hold our breaths one second
while the wind is busy out to sea
How sharp will seem the sting
Of slug and ant attacking blossoms.

WEST
“there with to be content…”
The day breaks out of infinity
And across the stunning fire blue sunrise
Death approaches
Now I deny the dream
Now I see how pitifully I fail
Let the earth rising up to greet this landing
Reject me
Let the winds move in and out of space
And claim me
Let it cease let it finish
let me not face this mystery
But the plane landed
Goodbye she said
into the day’s brightness
The plane departed.

Frances Farmer’s story is one of the most tragic in Hollywood history because the bare bones of it suggest so strongly it didn’t HAVE to go that way. If everyone just calmed down and took a BREATH … if she quit drinking, if she had a little bit more support, if, if, if … she might not have been so wild, her career might have been more fulfilling, she could have been spared demonization, ostracization. There’s something haunting about her. Kurt Cobain knew the score. Frances Farmer lived many years after the terrible period of the 30s-40s. She continued to work, albeit sporadically – television, theater … although she was mostly forgotten by that point. She stayed busy with hobbies. But … what if?

She was difficult, brazen, she acted out, she was not always in control. I wonder though: who the hell IS? Rigid people are always in control! No thank you! Social media turned up the heat under the control-requirement. You must perform yourself perfectly at all times. You must always watch what you say. You must be completely packaged. This is not a normal way for human beings to live. (Not for celebrities and not for normal people, and social media blends those categories.) People crack under the pressure. When people crack under the pressure, onlookers bust out their pitchforks, ready to drive the cracking person out of town. (I always think of the South Park episode, where Britney Spears, clearly in the midst of a full-blown psychotic break at the time, is offered up as a human sacrifice. The South Park episode – and Craig Ferguson’s heartfelt monologue about Britney were two of the most biting critiques of not just the media’s feeding frenzy, but the public’s. (And listen to how the audience starts laughing when Ferguson brings up Britney. A mental crack-up is FUNNY, get it?) This is why I give a side-eye to a lot of the platitudinous “we need to de-stigmatize mental illness” commentary. I have gone on about this for years, most recently in the wake of Sinead O’Connor’s death. Okay. If you say shit like “let’s de-stigmatize mental illness”, good for you, and if you back it up with commentary showing you know what you’re talking about: I am all for it. But you best believe I will be watching you very very closely for what you say and do during a public crack-up like Britney – or Amanda Bynes – or Elizabeth Wurtzel – or etc. What happens when people behave badly? Or do you only de-stigmatize mental illness when someone DOESN’T behave badly? Do you factor in mental illness’ tendency to “present” in bad erratic behavior? Like, this is what it looks like. It’s not pretty. Do you de-stigmatize it THEN? Or are you being judgey about bad behavior? Are you making fun? I’ll be watching. Not sure what these people think a crack-up looks like. Do they think it looks socially acceptable? I always say, if I was world-famous in 2009, I would have been made fun of relentlessly, mocked, hounded, criticized, for my outrageous behavior, when what was happening was … I should have been in a hospital, not wandering the streets. This is not an EXCUSE for terrible behavior, but it is an EXPLANATION. De-stigmatizing mental illness means knowing what it looks like when someone goes off the rails.

The more you are required to be in control, the more you are dominated by society/peer pressure/intersecting pressures – the harder it is to stay within the lines.

The more you are required to follow a given script, the more irresistible it is to say “Cocksucker” when some judgmental bitch asks you what you do for a living. And you say it just to see the shocked look on her face. And her shocked expression makes you laugh. You light a cigarette and grin at the camera. Just to remind everyone – and to remind yourself – that you are free.

That’s Frances Farmer.

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“I think I’m a character actress in a leading lady’s body, but the industry doesn’t really see me that way.” — Sanaa Lathan

Posted on September 19, 2024 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

Sanaa Lathan is a wonderful actress: fluid,funny, unconventional in some of her responses, and with deep wells of emotion that you can feel- in a visceral way, coming off the screen. You don’t catch her working. If she had a “type” I would say: Leading Lady, End-Stop. She’s in the Julia Roberts category level. She has that whatever-it-is something that makes an audience invest powerfully in her character’s happiness, a requirement for a romantic lead. Why do some people have this and some people don’t? Who knows. It probably has to do with vulnerability. The current generation of actors have a tendency to see vulnerability as weakness. (Lest you think I’m generalizing: seek out acting teachers. Ask them what they think.) If you play a character without vulnerability, or a character where vulnerability is only paid lip service to (painful backstory, moments of stress or fear), then you don’t get audience identification with staying power. If you only want to be an inspirational “badass”, then you forget to be human. Sanaa Lathan is DEEPLY human.

I’ve been a fan for some time, ever since I first saw (and fell in love with) Love and Basketball.

Recently, in my piece on “Tomboys in Cinema”, I wrote about Lathan’s performance in that film, and how she represents the tomboy coming out of adolescence – something that few “tomboy films” address. It’s one of the missing pieces.

And then came Something New.

Something New kind of came and went, barely making a ripple. This is such a shame. People bemoan the lack of rom-coms, or, hell, romances, period. But here’s one. And it’s a good one. Take notice! It’s a conventional romance with the added interest of the potentially explosive interracial theme, all beautifully and sensitively portrayed, peppered with insider details. It feels inhabited, rather than described from the outside. The scene where Lathan and her new boyfriend ( Simon Baker), get caught out in the rain and she freaks out about her hair – and he has no idea why – is a particularly good example. Something New does not re-invent the wheel. As a matter of fact, it leans on the cliche, on the expected tropes, all while reversing and revising the so-called “norm”: A workaholic Black woman, groomed by her family to be a success, falls in love with her white gardener, the “help”, essentially. It’s the typical rich-lady-falls-in-lust-with-the-groundskeeper storyline, except for the obvious: minority actors are often used in these cliched storylines as objects of lust and/or agents of sexual freedom. Those with brown/black skin are seen, in the cliche, as more “connected” to their sexuality, to the earth, whatever, and they are there to help the white woman/man loosen up – teach them how to dance, in a particularly tired example. Condescending though this cliche may be, Something New acknowledges it, while turning it inside out. Here, the woman is Black, a nose-to-the-grindstone former debutante, sexually conservative, uptight even. Her world is populated by the wealthy Black elite, and when the hot sweaty WHITE gardener shows up, she is unprepared for her primal response to him. Innocent lust has had no place in her life before this. She doesn’t know what to do with it or how to handle it. Watch Lathan navigate these minefields. She is our “way in”. She’s an amazing guide: messy and emotional and flawed and lovable.

The thing about Sanaa Lathan as an actress is … and it’s important, although it may sound simplistic or even silly: your heart goes out to her. Not every young actress has this. You want Lathan to be happy. All great romantic female leads have this, from Irene Dunne to Natalie Wood to Kate Winslet. You worry about these people a little bit. They aren’t superwomen “badasses”. They may be strong, but they are conscious of a LACK. They have yearnings and feelings and are capable of feeling pain and disappointment, and so your heart goes out to them, you hope for them, you invest in their happiness. Investment draws you into relationship with them. It is a rare contract between an audience and an actress, and not all actresses have it. You can’t try to foster this contract (although people of course try). When you are an actress in a romantic film, and you are the lead, the audience must be on your side, must want what you want. They ROOT for you. A romantic film is basically a sports film. The triumph of love is like winning the playoffs, and the audience must feel this. Sanaa Lathan has it.

The character in Love and Basketball, a fiery-tempered tomboy, is nothing like the uptight, vaguely sad and lonely career woman in Something New. Not the same person at all. This shows her range.

I also have to mention Nappily Ever After, which I reviewed for Ebert. I wrote about her work in one of the scenes – it’s next-level kind of work and it should have gotten more attention, and it would have if people paid more attention to acting.

Her face, even with that faint scar on her right cheek, maybe even because of the scar, is made for the movies. It’s a very beautiful face, but it’s also very human, open, itself. Emotions are not strived for, or sought after by the actress, they are experienced, and every fluid moment of thought and unspoken feelings flicker across her face in waves. You don’t catch her pushing. Ever. She goes through all the peaks and valleys of emotions in Something New. The scenework between Lathan and Baker is moving, surprising, and, at times, powerful. The script is intelligent, and treats both its characters with respect. This is a movie for grownups, about grownups.

Lathan’s vulnerability in Something New is that much more touching because of the mask she feels she must put over it (the same is true in Love & Basketball, although the mask has different qualities there). She has a moment in Something New where she is given a long-sought-after important promotion, and as she struggles to keep her cool, she can no longer do so, and a smile explodes across her face, and it’s a smile that has so much in it I find myself in tears every time I watch. This is what being accessible as an actress means. That smile reaches out of my television and grabs me … and by that point in the movie, I already want what she wants. I hope her hopes. I yearn for what she yearns. I want her to have it all. I feel the triumph of that moment with her.

If this were a just and fair world, Lathan would be one of America’s premiere leading ladies. But as it is, she’s a great asset to the industry, and a counterpoint to the Hollywood star-making machine, which has a tendency to churn out or push forward generic “types”.

Sanaa Lathan is not generic. She has in her all of the qualities of the great leading ladies through the ages, but – just like them – she is herself. She is an original.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged | 5 Comments

“I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is all the difference.” — Greta Garbo

Posted on September 18, 2024 by sheila

It’s her birthday today. She is a difficult subject, not just because she was a private woman, but because her onscreen persona was so fluid, mercurial, hard to grasp. Her gestures could be operatic and swanlike (watch Grand Hotel), but she could also be tough-minded, certain, literal (see Ninotchka). She could swagger across the screen like an androgynous pirate (see Queen Christina), and she could also collapse in floating feminine anguish (see Camille). It’s neverending. You could go on forever. Her face is one of the most famous in cinema. I think because it compels you to lean forward while at the very same moment repels you into leaning back. She beckons you but she won’t let you in. I have said this many times: it is that “come-hither-and-yet-stay-away” thing that really makes a great movie star – and is something almost entirely missing in today’s brightly-smiling conventional world of celebrity, where actresses obediently list “what they are wearing” on red carpets, and/or overshare about their lives, to the extent that there’s no mystery at all. (Kristen Stewart – one of Garbo’s heirs – said once that she stays out of politics, she is not on social media, she does not Tweet, she does not rally for causes – although I’m sure she has many strongly held beliefs. She has said that she watches actors flipping out on Twitter about this or that, and she said – and I paraphrase, “I do take those things into consideration when I see the person in a movie. I want to get lost in the performance.”)

Garbo’s time in Hollywood was initially quite disorienting. She barely spoke English, she didn’t know anybody. She was a star in Europe, but it was extremely difficult to cast her in things. It took a while for people to figure it out. This is because she wasn’t a “type”. She clearly wasn’t an ingenue. She wasn’t conventional in the slightest, and Hollywood loves conventional.

Salka Viertel’s excellent memoir The Kindness of Strangers provides an amazing portrait of Garbo through those years, from Sweden to Germany to California. Viertel was also a celebrated actress, in many different important hubs, with her husband, the theatre collectives she worked with, with Bertolt Brecht, with the vibrant Weimar world, with Murnau, etc. She and her husband moved to California. Like so many others, they fled Hitler in the early days of his rise. The couple settled in Santa Monica, where they quickly established their home as a “salon” for displaced and lonely refugee-artists. She organized fund raisers to get people out of Europe, she helped open the pathway into Hollywood for many many people. Beyond that, she was under contract at MGM, where she worked as a screenwriter. She and Garbo went way way back. She wrote the scripts (or at least heavily worked on them) for many of Garbo’s films – Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, and Two-Faced Woman. Viertel was thought to have a “line” on Garbo, a level of understanding completely missing in the studio executives. (At least the execs were cognizant of it).


Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel

Garbo could either shine or vanish. If she was mis-cast, she could barely be perceived. But when cast well, she was unforgettable. I highly recommend Viertel’s memoir as a personal story, very well told, but also a portrait of many different worlds: the final days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Berlin, Weimar, Santa Monica when Hollywood was still a small town.

I thought I hadn’t written about Garbo, but a quick search shows me I have. I’ll link to a couple of those pieces.

I interviewed Dan Callahan about his amazing book The Art of American Screen Acting, Volume 1. The chapter on Garbo is essential reading for anyone who wants to dig into what exactly it was that made this actress so unforgettable, someone who could never be replaced. A true individual. Dan and I discussed her – and many others – in our interview.

I’ve written a couple of times about the Garbo-Kristen Stewart connection. First off, here, on my own site, and then later, in a piece I wrote for Film Comment on Stewart. It’s the simultaneous “come closer and yet not too close” thing that connects them, not to mention their extraordinary unique beauty.

This is a really old piece, over 10 years old (wow), but back in the day, when Iron Lady came out, I wrote a piece about “Iron Ladies in Cinema“, all of the movies where women played heads of state. I wrote it for Capital New York, which was eventually bought by Politico, hence the URL. Anyway, in this piece – which I just re-read (it’s been years) – I include Garbo’s butch-as-hell performance in the indelible Queen Christina, with one of the most famous final shots in cinema.

And finally, the last piece I wrote for Film Comment – the print magazine – before it closed its doors in 2020, was a piece on the poet H.D.’s cinephilia, and Close Up, the film magazine she founded in 1927. H.D. was launched into a passion for this brand new artform through the work of director G.W. Pabst, in particular the film Joyless Street, starring a young green Garbo (I reference Joyless Street in both Kristen Stewart pieces). HD wrote an entire piece bemoaning what had been done to HER Garbo after Garbo’s move to Hollywood.

Before I leave you to your reading assignments ^^, here are some thoughts on Flesh and the Devil (1926), particularly the famous kiss between Garbo and John Gilbert. See here:

The kiss is famous, but it’s the buildup that makes it all so crazy. The two of them put it off … and put it off … and tease … and smolder … and smolder more … and there’s all this business with a cigarette (which goes from her mouth to his: SIZZLE) … and the erotic flare of a match … but still … no kiss … These people have the patience of Job. The buildup is worth it.

Garbo and Gilbert had true chemistry. His eyes burn when he looks at her (he was known as “The Great Lover” onscreen: his story is a tragic one, but here he is at the top of his game). Gilbert’s eyes don’t burn like, “I am a movie actor and I burn with passion because this is a love scene”. It’s something else. Something very true, and you can see it in the clip. Nobody fell in love onscreen like Garbo. With her, love was always a full-bodied response, closer to a death swoon than a love swoon. She quivers with orgasmic shudders, she throws back her head revealing her neck but – as Dan observes in his book – in her most famous love scenes, Garbo is the “top” in the relationship. Always. The man is always the “bottom”.

What Garbo does in Camille is some kind of high watermark in film acting never surpassed since. But it couldn’t be surpassed or even replicated because it is its own thing. It’s the Garbo Thing. There’s a tremendously emotional scene at the doorway of the country cottage where her young lover’s father (Lionel Barrymore) insists that she – the woman of the world party girl – give up his son so that he can have a chance at a good and honorable life. The scene is a gigantic one, for both characters. They start out one way – defensive, angry – but then it shifts, and she starts to realize she must make her great sacrifice and give up her lover, she must give him up to save him. This devastates her, and Lionel Barrymore sees it, and his energy shifts in response. Camille is not a “good” woman, but her love for his son is clearly authentic, and he suddenly understands what it is that is happening to her, what she is going through. He aches with compassion for her then, and shifts into huge tenderness, almost fatherly, he’s almost comforting her. (By the end of the scene, you’re wrung dry with emotion). He slowly goes to the door, his back bent, filled with sorrow. She follows him, and reaches out her arm to him, saying gently:

Goodbye, Monsieur. Don’t reproach yourself. You’ve done only what a man’s father should have done. Only don’t let him know it. He might hate you and I don’t want that to happen. Because he will need all the courage and comfort you can give him. For a long time, I think.

In the first part of her little speech, Barrymore is looking down, saddened and distressed. Around the time she says, with that pure generosity, “I don’t want that to happen” … he looks up at her, and suddenly his face transforms. He’s getting the Full Garbo at almost point-blank range and he is overwhelmed by her, by what she is giving him, and by the emotion that floods him in response.

She was … special. “Touched,” as they say.

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It’s the birthday of Irish poet Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide (Michael Hartnett)

Posted on September 18, 2024 by sheila

“I’ll never forget reading his first short poems in the early sixties; they had a kind of hypnotic power, as if a new Orpheus had emerged from Newcastle West. He was Limerick’s Lorca.” — Seamus Heaney on Mícheál Ó hAirtnéide

Michael Hartnett grew up in Limerick. He had a tough childhood. Two of his siblings died when they were babies. He spent much time with his Irish-speaking grandmother. He grew up in a section of Ireland rich with the language and folk traditions. He always knew he had to escape, but there was a part of him always turning back to this place where he came from.

He moved to London as a young man, and took odd jobs here and there. He started getting published regularly. His poems are haunting and beautiful (I love Heaney’s quote above), but in the 1970s, he decided to devote himself to writing only in the Irish language. He wrote an entire book called Farewell to English. At the time, it was a very unpopular move. It was seen as a decision to isolate himself, to limit himself to one small circle. It was seen as turning his back on the wider world. I don’t think he would have disagreed with these characterizations. Obviously, it was a conscious choice on his part, and a rebellious choice. He would devote himself to the Irish language. And he did.

Since he grew up as a child hearing Irish all the time, conversational casual Irish, not used as a political or cultural weapon, he saw the language as … you know, a valid way to express oneself, regardless of the fact that the language was quickly-disappearing. In other words: There was nothing nostalgic about why he did what he did. He wasn’t trying to prop up something “dead”. In its way, of course, as is so often the case with all things Irish, there was a political element to his decision to only write in Irish (especially since this happened in the mid-1970s when things were terrible, to completely understate the situation on the ground in Ireland at that time).

Eventually, he did write in English again. He was always experimenting. For example, he experimented for quite some time with haiku, a form he found fascinating. Many critics found this strange, and pushed back. Critics: please stop doing this. Be more open. You are not the boss of culture. Let the man write some haikus, please. It’s not up to you what he does, it’s not up to you to say “Hey. Go back to what you were doing before.” God bless the critics who are curious about what an artist is doing, even when it’s risky (see Brooks Atkinsons and Tennessee Williams), who don’t bluster around showing their “disapproval” of an artist making choices they don’t understand.

Hartnett’s response to the world was intense. Memories of his grandmother and his Newcastle childhood informed everything he wrote. He was a heavy drinker (he died of it in 1999), but his work continues to grow in stature.

I admire him. I’ll post one of his Irish-language poems today, with a translation in English below it. I am not fluent in Irish (although I have magic moments of near-comprehension). But I know the sounds, and his work “sounds” better in Irish, that’s for sure. The rhymes are mellifluous, effortless. Also, Sullivan is my mother’s maiden name. So that’s why I’m choosing this one.

Something is always lost in translation. I suppose that was Michael Hartnett’s point.

Fís Dheireanach Eoghain Rua Uí Shúilleabháin

Do thál bó na maidine
ceo bainne ar gach gleann
is tháinig glór cos anall
ó shleasa bána na mbeann.

Chonaic mé, mar scáileanna,
mo spailpíní fánacha,
is in ionad sleán nó rámhainn acu
bhí rós ar ghualainn chách.

The Last Vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin

The cow of morning spurted
milk-mist on each glen
and the noise of feet came
from the hill’ white sides.
I saw like phantoms
my fellow-workers
and instead of spades and shovels
they had roses on their shoulders.

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“I was a pretty good imitator of Roy Acuff, but then I found out they already had a Roy Acuff, so I started singin’ like myself.” — Hank Williams

Posted on September 17, 2024 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

He came to Nashville and he just set this whole world on fire. He was the first one to go to Las Vegas as a country singer, he was the first one in a major hotel in New York City to work. He opened a lot of doors for us. Of course he closed a lot of them for us later on in his career when he really got into trouble with his boozing and his personal life and all. When Hank got into his own personal problems later on, it completely ruined him, in a way, in the industry. It didn’t ruin the love that people had for him but it hurt him from the booking – bookers wouldn’t take chances on him because they knew if they booked him they might have an auditorium full and Hank, 1 time out of 10, might show up. He was in so much trouble personally. They had made an addict of him anyway when he fell off that horse and hurt his back and they gave him morphine. So Hank suffered. I know I’ve seen him on the floor on his back, tears running out of his eyes it was hurting so bad. It’s a sad thing. People that don’t know say, ‘Oh, he died a dope addict.’ Well, that ain’t really true. He died a sick man.
– Faron Young, singer/songwriter

Unforgettable tributes by two country giants:

One of my favorite moments – in my life, in general – happened a year ago when I went to go see Wanda Jackson play at a big hall out in New Jersey. Wanda plays Hank’s “I Saw the Light” every show, as a tribute to her Christian faith. Joan Jett had shown up at the hall, to see Wanda’s show. There was no assigned seating so the crowd just clustered up against the stage. During Wanda’s rousing version of “I Saw the Light” a couple of blazingly emotional things happened:

1. Everyone sang along. This was a song written almost a century ago. Goosebumps.

2. I was standing near Joan Jett in the crowd. Everyone respectfully let her alone, but of course we all were WELL AWARE of her presence. I glanced over during “I Saw the Light” and there she was, deadpan face (of course), but moving around to the beat, singing along.

Hank Williams, man. White hats off.

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“I’ve been very lucky, considering what I look like and what I do.” — James Gandolfini

Posted on September 17, 2024 by sheila

It’s his birthday today. The piece below was originally published on Capital New York, June 20, 2013, the day after Gandolfini died.

James Gandolfini suddenly stood up, walked across the stage in a wild and raging manner, going nowhere in particular but needing to move, all as he impatiently removed his jacket, throwing it off to the side, a violent burst of movement which brought a gasp of excited and terrified laughter from the standing-room-only audience.

It was 2009. I was in the third row at the Bernard Jacobs Theater in New York City. God of Carnage, written by Yasmina Reza, and starring Gandolfini, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, and Jeff Daniels, had opened a month earlier to rave reviews. It very quickly became the show to see that season. An ensemble piece played like a bat out of hell without intermission, God of Carnage was Gandolfini’s return to the New York stage, and the first big thing he did after “The Sopranos” closed up shop. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of Michael, the domesticated blue-collar guy who finally can no longer hold his temper. “You’ve dressed me up as a liberal!” he screams at his wife.

Today, reeling from the news that Gandolfini died after a suspected heart attack at the terribly young age of 51, it is the image of him charging across that big Broadway stage, ripping off his jacket, barreling forward randomly and clumsily, that comes to my mind. It was like being attacked. Judging from the reaction of the rest of the packed house, the sudden electric gasp of over 1,000 people, the burst of frightened laughter through the crowd, I was not alone. His presence could not be contained on that stage, it threatened to overflow and overwhelm us all.

There are personalities so visceral, so honest and so present, it is hard to comprehend their absence. How could he be gone? Where did he go? Even if we only knew him at a distance, through his performances on television or on screen or stage, he seemed so with us, he played his characters with such transparency. He was that rare actor whose work actually illuminated dark corners of the human spirit. Not every actor is willing to “go there”.

Gandolfini had a knack for showing us the underlying psychologies of un-expressive un-self-aware violent men. (Glenn Kenny, in his beautiful elegy, compares Gandolfini to Warren Oates. Oates also made a career out of playing violent outlaws or lonely outsiders in the films of Sam Peckinpah and Monte Hellman. Violent and unpleasant his characters may be, they crack your heart open. Oates also died of a heart attack, at the age of 53.)

Gandolfini added a complex and unexpected harmony line to the tough guys he specialized in. He let us see the emotional fragility of men who only understand violence. He did so without making a bid for us to pity these often reprehensible characters.

While he had been acting on the New York stage for some time, it was in Tony Scott’s True Romance, with a script by Quentin Tarantino, that he first came to the attention of a wide audience.

Gandolfini played hired killer Virgil, who has an unforgettable pas-de-deux of violence with Patricia Arquette’s Alabama. The two beat one another to a pulp in a scene gruesome, terrifying, and relentless. In the middle of the action, exhausted, the adversaries take what is essentially a break. Alabama lies on the floor, Virgil sits in a nearby chair. Virgil then has a monologue about what it is like to kill someone for the first time.

Now the first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest. I don’t give a shit if you’re fuckin’ Wyatt Earp or Jack the Ripper. Remember that guy in Texas? The guy up in that fuckin’ tower that killed all them people? I’ll bet you green money that first little black dot he took a bead on, that was the bitch of the bunch. First one is tough, no fuckin’ foolin’. The second one… the second one ain’t no fuckin’ Mardis Gras either, but it’s better than the first one ’cause you still feel the same thing, y’know… except it’s more diluted, y’know it’s… it’s better. I threw up on the first one, you believe that? Then the third one… the third one is easy, you level right off. It’s no problem. Now… shit… now I do it just to watch their fuckin’ expression change.

I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

Patricia Arquette, in an interview around the time True Romance came out, talked about that scene. Her interpretation of the moment is fascinating: Virgil knows that either he or she was going to die that day, and he had more experience with what it was like to kill someone, and so, in a spirit of “helping her,” should she be the victor, he shares some advice. If you watch the scene again, keeping this in mind, you can see the complicated levels on which Gandolfini could be working. His monologue is terrifying, and the way Gandolfini does it is bone-chilling, but listen to it through Arquette’s interpretation and an entire new feeling is created. Virgil doesn’t value life, and he includes his own. Maybe she’ll win this fight because she actually values life. Virgil doesn’t exclude the possibility. This interpretation goes perfectly with the shame-faced smile that bursts unexpectedly on his face after he punches her in the face for the first time (I think this is one of Gandolfini’s most brilliant acting moments, in a career of great moments). Even for guys like Virgil, killing a woman is a pretty dirty job. The smile is maybe the last vestige of shame a guy like Virgil could feel. Arquette’s interpretation is also there in the almost-fond smile he gives her when she brandishes the cork-screw at him. He takes in her pathetic weapon, he feels her ferocious desire to live, something he does not share, if he ever did. Listen to how he says, “You got a lotta heart, kid, you know that?”

That’s Jim Gandolfini.

Others will talk – and rightfully so – about James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, the richness of his portrayal, the depth of the characterization, how compulsively watchable he always was in the role. Gandolfini was making a fine – if uneven – living in movies. The Sopranos changed his life, and ours.

But I am thinking now of Gandolfini standing up in God of Carnage, and charging across the stage, ripping off his jacket, and I am thinking of the sound of 1,000 people gasping as one at the sheer force of his movement and gesture, at the sheer power of his personality and intention. You just did not know what would happen next. It seemed like anything could happen next. This guy was capable of anything.

Arthur Miller wrote the following about Clark Gable:

Great actor-personalities, I have come to think, are like trained bears in that they attract us with their discipline while their powerful claws threaten us; a great star implies he is his own person and can be mean and even dangerous, like a great leader.

He could have been talking about James Gandolfini.

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“The purpose of an artist, whatever it is, is to take the life, whatever he sees, and to raise it up to an elevated position where it has dignity.” — William Carlos Williams

Posted on September 17, 2024 by sheila

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“No ideas but in things.” – from “Paterson”, by William Carlos Williams

The first poems I read of William Carlos Williams, in high school English class, were the red wheelbarrow one and the one about the plums. I imagine that’s the case for most of us.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Who could ever have predicted the poem would become a Twitter meme? Life is strange.

More beneath the jump.

Continue reading →

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“I swear my next project is going to be something really simple and focused and minimal.” — Baz Luhrmann

Posted on September 17, 2024 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

“I think what I’m saying is, when you get to where I am in your journey, you just have to start to accept that there’s something inside you that you’ve been trying to get out and will try to get out for the rest of your life, and you don’t even understand it yourself. For some reason, I am compelled towards these tragic romances, the issue of love and all its variances, and also in a kind of cinematic language that now even I have to accept. I’ve tried to get rid of it but I can’t.” — Baz Luhrmann

I know, I know, Elvis is the elephant in the room. 2022 was the summer of the Elvis movie – it opened in June and it was still in many theatres in September. Almost unheard of now. Aside from Top Gun, I can’t think of any other movie still around months after it was released. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore – or it rarely happens – and it happened with Elvis. For the month of July it was playing at the 100-year-old movie palace literally a 20-minute walk from my old apartment. Just down the street. Soooo … I’d be bored and be like “Yeah whatever, let’s go see it again.”

I’m a fan of Baz Luhrmann, and I recognize – and acknowledge – the reasons why people are put off by him. That’s fine. Critical consensus doesn’t exist for Luhrmann. I, however, think this is a good thing. I distrust consensus. Many critics snark and complain about him – and they complain about the things that are his main strengths. This is so often the case! They want him to NOT be Luhrmann. They use terms like “excess” and “over the top” and “bloated”, etc. But it’s his EXCESS that makes him HIM, and – newsflash – excess is not utilized carefully and cautiously. Otherwise it wouldn’t be excess, now would it.

It’s fine if he’s not your cuppa, but not being your cuppa is … not indicative of anything. Would you “give it to him” if he directed a quiet family drama? Would you then tip your hat to him and acknowledge he knows what he’s doing? It’s ridiculous. At a certain point, personal taste is irrelevant – particularly when you’re a critic. I include myself in this, of course. I have to set my own SELF aside sometimes to see what a movie is doing and why it might be doing it. I still might not LIKE it but I gotta give it up. (Then, of course, there are things that are objectively bad/incompetent. I’ll call it out.) At a certain point you have to just admit, “People get a lot out of this, but it’s not my thing.” Baz, though, gets all this weird commentary … it’s like critics think he should be doing something OTHER than what he is doing with his talent. Why should he try to please YOU, personally? Artists have to please themselves, first and foremost, do I have to do everything around here? On a side note: Baz Luhrmann comes from theatre and opera and it SHOWS. I am speaking as a former Drama Club Nerd, and Theatre Kid, who took tap dance lessons and did jazz hands wearing dorky costumes while performing some horrible “revue” in the high school gym. And then jumped up and down with excitement and adrenaline with all my fellow Drama Club Nerds afterwards. People like this are always mocked – because pure enthusiasm is so embarrassing (and not just in Teenage Land, adults pull the same shit).

If you think of Baz Luhrmann as a grown-up Drama Nerd, it all makes sense. I completely recognize his kind. Stop wanting him to be a different kind of artist.

Moulin Rouge had a huge impact on me, so huge that I distrust my response to the movie. I watched it – on VHS – over and over and over. I can’t even remember what year. 2002? A bad year. I watched it every day. Sometimes twice a day. I don’t know what I saw in it, I don’t know why I clung to it. I did find this really REALLY old piece where I tried to express it. 2005! Damn, I’ve been writing here a long time. It might be interesting to revisit Moulin Rouge – now that the fever passed – and attempt, again, to put into words what I “got” from it, and how it may or may not have changed. I have a feeling it wouldn’t have the same impact. A lot has changed.

Critics pooh-poohed The Great Gatsby. Again, there were complaints about Luhrmann’s “excesses.” Did these people not read the damn book? The whole book is about the excesses of the Jazz Age. We saw where a respectful “non-excess” approach got us with the 1974 version (i.e. NOWHERE). Gatsby is NOT a realistic novel, OR a melodrama. It’s a fever dream of excess. So again: you may not like Luhrmann’s style, but if you complain about his “excesses” then you need to ask yourself: Is the excess in the service of something equally excessive? Critics always talk about form and content. Well, in the case of Gatsby, (and in the case of Elvis), Luhrmann married form to content. It’s the same damn thing.

I was so irritated by the critical dismissal of The Great Gatsby. Fine, don’t like it. But don’t DISMISS it, or pooh-pooh someone for having their own style. You sitting behind a desk who’ve never created something from your guts/heart. Try to understand what he’s doing and why. At the very LEAST. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?

So I did what you’re supposed to do when you’re irritated: I wrote a huge piece about Gatsby for Bright Wall/Dark Room:

Riotous Excursions: Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby

I think the movie makes some mistakes, which I also get into (Luhrmann loves framing devices. Sometimes they work – sometimes they do not) – but in general Luhrmann’s film is a far more “faithful” adaptation to the book than the 1970s film.

Interestingly enough, my Gatsby piece was completely ignored by the majority of critics, if judging by the Subtweets on Twitter, and the lack of ANY engagement with what I actually wrote. Crickets, in other words. I am not ashamed to say I am proud of the piece: I laid out an argument – just like I was taught to do in 10th grade English when we learned how to write a term paper – and I backed it up with examples from the book and from the movie. I would have loved to have discussions about the piece, people actually reading it, and maybe even entertaining the possibility that I was onto something. If someone I think is a good writer makes an argument, I entertain it. I don’t take it on blindly, but I like playing around with ideas, if they are compelling, or if they hit a blind spot. I don’t like complaining about this stuff – in general I don’t – but the Crickets response to the Gatsby piece was an extremely instructive moment for me. Oh. Okay. Discussion isn’t actually a part of “the discourse”. The consensus has been formed: Gatsby is bad and Luhrmann is ridiculous – and me “sticking up for him” just revealed how credulous and susceptible I was.

Luhrmann understood Fitzgerald’s book on a deep level. He understood its symbolism, and he MAGNIFIED the symbolism as opposed to try to present it in a subtle way. It’s not subtle in the book. The “green light” is not subtle. AT ALL.

Here’s a wonderful quote from Luhrmann’s interview with Interview magazine:

“When I was very young, I grew up in a totally isolated place, in a very small town. I always win the bet with anyone who says, “I lived in a small town”—I grew up in a town with 11 houses, and that was the big part of town. We lived on the outskirts. But the thing is, my dad ran a cinema for a short time and I went to a tiny little Catholic school. There were only three rooms in the school and there were nuns, and I would go up to the library and there would be a bookshelf with about 10 books on it. One of them was called The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, and I opened it and went, “I will never be able to understand that as long as I live.” And a nun named Sister DeChantl said something like, “Oh, he’s one of the greatest writers of all time!” I sort of struggled with Shakespeare for a bit, but when eventually I ran away to the city, there was a guy called Neil Armfield [the Australian film and theater director], who is one of our living treasures. He did a production of Twelfth Night. People were giving out drinks and it was like we were in a Club Med in the Caribbean. There was music and dancing and there was a flash of light, and an actor called Robert Grubb came on in a white suit and said, “If music be the food of love, play on!” The band struck up again and I don’t remember what happened, except I understood every single word of it, and the lights came up and I went, “What was that?” So someone did that for me with Shakespeare and I became a mad Shakespeare nut and quite a bit of an academic on it. I studied it very, very heavily at drama school, and I worked with the greats. But I wanted to do that for a cinematic audience. How would Shakespeare go about making a movie? That’s how Romeo + Juliet was born.”

I actually just wrote something about him again, in my piece on Marion Keisker.

 
 
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.

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Substack: some thoughts on “voice” and other things

Posted on September 17, 2024 by sheila

New newsletter out: some thoughts on what I am trying to do in my writing, at Liberties mostly, but elsewhere, always. No paywall for this one.

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“When you lose everything, and I mean everything, you sit there in this empty room in the dark, and the only person who can get you out is you.” — Mickey Rourke

Posted on September 16, 2024 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

It’s hard to express what he meant to actors coming up at a certain time. It’s hard to express it without sounding hyperbolic. But he was an enormously meaningful figure. His work was so exciting we all just wondered what he would do next. I was obsessed with him, his gestures, the subtlety of his emotions, his soft voice, the ways he found to dig into scenes (the sugar in Diner!), his devotion to the things we all cared about: truth, story, living believably in imaginary circumstances. There were other figures who came up at around the same time, people who also brought with them excitement. River Phoenix comes to mind. But River was a child. Rourke was a man.

When word of The Wrestler started percolating, I felt an almost unbearable mix of longing, anxiety, and excitement. Listen, you don’t get into acting by being an apathetic person. And the people who mean something to you, mean something to you in the deepest most personal sense. He was one of those guys.

I wrote about Mickey Rourke at House Next Door, right before The Wrestler came out. This is the first piece I wrote that got real attention. Real journalists linked to it, shared it. Real film critics reached out to compliment me. IMDB put a link to it on its homepage, and it stayed there for weeks, until The Wrestler hype died down. The piece took on a life of its own. I still get emails about it. That kind of attention has happened to me since (hello, Elvis), but Mickey Rourke was the first. Which seems appropriate, since my love of him goes back to the moment he emerged, and we watched him unfold in real time. All of those feelings are in the essay – which is why I think it hit people so hard.

Gone Away, Come Back: Mickey Rourke

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece literally years in the making, about movie scenes where men look at themselves in the mirror. If you’ve been around here since the beginning, you will remember me posting in, say, 2005, 2006, “I should write about this one day!” Well, I finally did, for Oscilloscope Laboratories. Mickey Rourke’s “mirror moment” in Johnny Handsome is included – it’s not only a great example of the device, but it’s one of Rourke’s finest moments.

Posted in Actors, On This Day | Tagged | 6 Comments