Let It Come Down

In 1823, Thomas De Quincey published a short essay in London Magazine called "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth." In it, De Quincey, a writer best known now for his book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and the series of long essays that are collectively known as "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," focuses on the scene in Shakespeare's play, following the murder of Duncan, the King of Scotland, by Macbeth, his heretofore loyal Thane of Glamis, then Thane of Cawdor, when, the morning after the killing, before the discovery of Duncan's corpse, there is a knock on the castle gate, and the porter noisily shuffles along to open it and let in, as it turns out, Macduff, the Thane of Fife, and the man who will eventually exact vengeance upon the vile Macbeth. De Quincey begins this way:

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth: it was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account: the effect was -- that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity: yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

The reason this scene -- the only comedic scene in the play, as the porter grumbles about the knocking, then commiserates with Macduff about the various effects of alcohol -- worked on De Quincey the way it did, he decided, is because it signaled the reaction, presence, and unavoidable continuation of regular life as it pressed right up against shocking horror. De Quincey uses as an example taking part in the funeral procession of a notable figure through city streets, which soon bustle back into life. A more everday example might be having to go out in public, perhaps to run an errand that can't be postponed, soon after hearing about the death of a loved one. People, you might notice, keep on buying beer and getting their glasses fixed. This fact bumps up against your despair, and fortifies it.

In adapting Macbeth in 1971, director and co-screenwriter (with literary critic Kenneth Tynan) Roman Polanski seems also to have adapted De Quincey's essay. If one single thing separates Polanski's Macbeth, which will be released on Blu-ray and DVD this Tuesday by Criterion, from other major film version of the play, such as those directed by Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa, it is the sometimes breathtaking savagery of the violence. Welles's wonderfully expressionist take depicts the violence in a more or less standard stab-and-fall style, whereas in Throne of Blood Kurosawa, no stranger to blood, keeps it mostly off-stage, including killings that Shakespeare kept on-stage, storing it all up for Macbeth's (Jon Finch) fate. Polanski, on the other hand, puts almost all of it on-stage, including Macbeth's murder of Duncan (Nicholas Selby), not shown by Shakespeare, and meanwhile throws in a handful of brand new deaths, splashing blood all along the way. Throats are cut, axes are buried in backs and groins, heads are severed, wounded men are beaten with spiked maces, people are lynched in groups, children die. Even the loophole to the witches promise that "none of woman born shall harm Macbeth" that leaves him vulnerable is put on the screen, even before we're told what that means.

That loophole, of course, is that Macduff (Terence Bayler) was not "born of woman" in the traditional sense, but rather for medical reasons we in the audience are not privy to but can imagine, he was surgically removed from her belly. So to dramatize that, as one of many images in the dreamy shimmer of the witches' cauldron, Polanski shows a close-up of a pregnant belly, then a knife entering the belly, and slicing. I will be far from the first and far from the last person to point out that Macbeth was Polanski's first film since his wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by Charles Manson's cult. Murdered simultaneously with Tate was Tate and Polanski's child, with whom she was eight months pregnant at the time. It's not necessary to go into what Tate's murderers did to her body, but that shot in Macbeth of a knife cutting into a pregnant belly isn't simply, in this version of the play, a bit of plot-work. It transforms the double murder of a young woman and her unborn child into an act of life-preserving surgery. Or perhaps it transforms an act of life-preserving surgery into the double murder of a young woman and her unborn child. I'm assuming this was all done unconsciously.

Hence, long story short, the film's savagery. The very existence of Polanski's Macbeth is an illustration of and comment upon De Quincey's point about the juxtaposition of murder and the "reaction," which is to say, everything that isn't the murder and has nothing whatsoever to do with it, i.e., a hungover old man opening a gate. By the murder of Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) have been "conformed to the image of devils," De Quincey writes, "and the world of devils is suddenly revealed." To show this, the world of devils must briefly go away, and so "the knocking of the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced...and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that suspended them.

Polanski's unspeakably grim film counted, for him, as "the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world" (though he has said that he consciously chose "serious" material for his return picture). The fact that, even if Polanski saw the significance of everything he was doing with completely clear eyes, none of this turns his Macbeth into some post-modern wank is a testament not only to his talent but also to the seriousness of everything involved, from the immortality of Shakespeare's language on up. Polanski's well-documented failures as a human being are deep, many, and unforgivable, but his films remain uniquely bracing dives into those failures, as well as the shocking tragedies that litter his life. Among those films, and along with his grotesquely funny horror movie The Tenant, Polanski's Macbeth, this reflection back on the "awful parenthesis," is one of the most piercing howls in film history.

Waiting for Katelbach

If I may speak very generally, I've recently noticed that Americans and Europeans, or at least the filmmaking population within each group, regard the sea -- any large body of water, really -- quite differently. In American films, the beach or the lakeside is usually a good-time destination, and while hiccups may occur along the way, such as the mass slaughter of teenagers, the land adjacent to water is never really looked at askance. It is still lovely and pure and nice, in theory. Often in actual practice, even. European films, however, often depict the land itself as homely, rocky, an obstacle. Those who would seek out this land upon retirement or even just for vacation are often doomed or damned -- at the very least, they're kidding themselves. In an American film, a divorced woman would go to the beach to drink wine and be free and eat spaghetti or whatever; the European equivalent could easily find that same woman seeking death, either by her own hand or someone else's. What might be seen as a symbol of possibilities can easily be seen by another as both symbolic, and a literal example, of sudden endings, as well as the flyspeck nature of our place beside it.
Such a film is Roman Polanski's Cul-de-Sac (pegged for a Criterion release tomorrow). In it, a surprisingly trim Donald Pleasence and his young wife, Francoise Dorleac, have recently retired to an 11th century seafront castle. They are by turns snippy and goofily affectionate with each other. Though when we first see them they are saying goodbye to visitors, it's very clear that they are basically cut off from the rest of the world, unless they choose otherwise. Or unless otherwise chooses them, as happens when two gangsters, one fit and snarling (Lionel Stander), the other weak and dying (Jack MacGowran) force their way into the couple's lives. MacGowran is hardly a factor here, and dies soon anyway, but Stander's hurricane force immediately takes over everything, and the film becomes, while ostensibly a thriller, also a kind of Beckettian comedy of manners, and a Beckettian sexual farce (of the type where sex is never had), and what would happen if Beckett ever wrote a gangster movie.

Except in this case, Beckett obviously didn't, despite a plot structured around the anticipation of the arrival of a mysterious, never-to-arrive man named Katelbach, and for all its claims to strangeness, Cul-de-Sac in fact follows some rather standard narrative lines before reaching its violent, absurdist climax. For one thing, instead of a "Magical Negro", Cul-de-Sac has a "Magical Gangster", close cousin to the "Magical Hobo" (see Boudu Saved from Drowning). There are many obvious differences between these two ideas -- the former exists in a world of sentimentality, the latter in satire and cynicism -- but both are types that exist to shake up the characters who surround them, either for the better or worse. In the case of Cul-de-Sac, it's ultimately for the worse, but that's only because Stander has helped to highlight all the faults in both the Pleasence and Dorleac's marriage, but the bourgeois (well of course) uselessness of their lives, and the lives of their friends.

The problem seems to be that they are modern, in that they live now (or in 1966, but you get my point), and that...what? The past was more honest? No...but the castle they inhabit would appear on the surface to be a haven, a dream. At the same time, this means they're living in a euphemism for excess ("This place is a castle/palace!", etc.). As if that wasn't enough, the castle endures (like the sea, come to think of it) -- 900 years old, and Pleasence and Dorleac will be as remembered within its walls as a sneeze. This despite their efforts to have some connection that medieval past -- at one point, the characters drink mead. But the last guy to drink mead in that castle's gone too. His drink is remembered better than he is.
All of this Polanski buries under an unfortunate layer of academically acceptable farce. I say "academically acceptable" because there is a strain of humor to be found in the arthouse (as well as in Literature, with the big "L") that attempts to wring laughs from the premise of a grown up person with grown up problems which are also metaphorical, doing things that would have made them laugh when they were twelve. In Cul-de-Sac, see the hotfoot Dorleac gives Stander. See also Pleasence dressing all funny, which is to say cross-dressing, and stumbling around. This is all very low level absurdism, and has never been Polanski's strong suit. There is humor in his best films, such as Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, but the jokes rarely announce themselves as jokes. In his comedies, among which this film must be counted, along with the equally and similarly problematic (and equally great-looking) The Fearless Vampire Killers, the jokes are presented as jokes, without sophistication, and as such are deadly. The idea, I guess, is that they are childish jokes in a setting where one would hardly expect a childish joke. And comedy is all about upending expectations. So there you go.

The Real, Real Truth

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In Death and the Maiden (d. Roman Polanski), Sigourney Weaver's Paulina Escobar is already angry, frustrated, and frightened when we first see her. In a dialogue-free opening, save for some radio chatter which provides plot information, we watch her as she finishes preparing dinner for her husband Gerardo (Stuart Wilson), but these are just the mechanics she needs to perform. As we learn, via the radio, that her husband has been appointed to head up a tribunal that will publicly try cases of torture and murder carried out by the recently overthrown dictatorship of the film's unnamed South American country, we can see Paulina's inner tremors and haunted desperation rise up, just under her skin. She was one of the tortured, and she considers the tribunal, whose goal is to merely name, not prosecute, the guilty, to be a whitewash. This is what her husband will oversee.

It gets worse. The short version is that one way or another, and for one reason or another, a man named Roberto Miranda (Ben Kingsley) follows Gerardo home, and Paulina recognizes the man -- or his voice, his quirks of speech, his snorting laugh -- as the man who tortured and raped her all those years ago. Soon, she's giving it back, beating Miranda, tying him up, gagging him, and putting him through any number of indignities, over Gerardo's horrified protests.

Is Miranda the man she thinks he is? This question is at the heart of Ariel Dorfman's play, on which Polanski's film is based (with a script by Dorfman and Rafael Yglesias), and it's a rather too neat way to approach questions of justice and guilt, madness and terror. The material is in danger, at every turn, of becoming schematic in its countless ambiguities, though Polanski does try to cut that with his typically perverse sense of humor ("You don't want to push him off the cliff?"), and by playing up the goofy personality of Kingsley's possible demon. It all winds up being an odd mix, but an involving one. This despite the fact that, in the end, Death and the Maiden is a filmed play, worse still a filmed modern play, which means that every five to seven minutes one character will leave the room, or ask another character to join them outside, leaving two of the three leads alone at any given time so that they can talk. Any time this happens in a filmed modern play, you can count on listening to a five to seven minute conversation -- this stuff can get as rote, structurally, as any sitcom. None of this matters if the play is especially good, or if the playwright is a master of language, but when it's only fine, as it is here, when the dialogue is merely a vehicle on which to pin bits of backstory and, I guess you'd call it characterization, well, then I think you can be excused if you choose to let the film play while you go get yourself a bowl of cereal.

Then there's the answer to it all, the real, real truth -- or not the answer, but what the characters and, rather more to the point, Dorfman and Polanski choose to do about it. The solution -- which I have to assume is Dorfman's -- is sort of insidiously gutless, and the ending is almost funny due its endless false starts. A nice shot at the very end leaves the audience something to wonder about, but the penultimate scene on the cliff is quite goony in its refusal to depict action that might have consequences. Yes, there's that shot, and those looks between characters in that shot, but we only get that because Dorfman and Polanski betray they're central character, one who betrayed not an ounce of doubt, until she was required to.

Polanski on Polanski

From an article on Roman Polanski, written by Martin Amis and found in his essay collection Visiting Mrs. Nabokov:

When I was being driven to the police station from the hotel, [Polanski said], the car radio was already talking about it. The newsmen were calling the police before I was arrested to see whether they can break the news. I couldn't believe...I thought, you know, I was going to wake up from it. I realise, if I have killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But...fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck you girls. Juries want to fuck young girls -- everyone wants to fuck young girls! No, I knew then, this is going to be another big, big thing.

Is commentary really necessary? From what I've gathered over the last few days, apparently so, as few will regard this passage as speaking for itself in the same way I do. Then again, no amount of commentary will convince anyone that if Polanski wasn't an acclaimed film director (a great one, I will acknowledge parenthetically, in much the same way that his defenders often parenthetically acknowledge that he raped a child) but rather, say, a priest, no one in Hollywood would be lining up to sign petitions demanding his release.

Same as it ever was, I suppose. It's amazing what Chinatown can do for a guy.

Writers as Actors

Actors, it would seem, very often want to be doing something else with their lives. The old joke is "What I really want to do is direct", but often what they want to also do is write, and they don't necessarily want to write screenplays. The actor-as-writer is not really a recent phenomenon -- Shakespeare was an actor, after all -- and even the idea of a movie star writing novels stretches back several decades. Robert Shaw was a respected novelist and playwright, as was Peter Ustinov. Both were prolific enough as writers, in fact, that they could reasonably be said to be both things equally.
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But being both things at once -- the modern version of being a true Renaissance Man -- is kind of a dying art (Stephen Fry, with, I think, five ten books under his belt, is the only guy I can think of who can be said to fit in the Ustinov and Shaw mold) and nowadays we have a lot of actors who dabble in writing. The most prominent of these would probably have to be Ethan Hawke, who has written two novels that apparently nobody likes (I haven't read either, and never will). Other than that, you have Hugh Laurie, whose one novel, The Gun Seller, I have read (and it was darn good, too, until the American Military showed up to play the role of "cartoonishly evil bad guys"), or Michael Palin (one novel also, called Hemingway's Chair, which I plan on reading soon), or fellow Python Eric Idle (two novels, actually, one hard-to-find novel from the 70s called Hello, Sailor, and another, Douglas Adams-esque, except supposedly far less good, SF comedy called The Road to Mars), or David Thewlis (one novel, called The Late Hector Kipling). One day, I'd like to gather up a bunch of these novels, the ones I haven't read (well, except for Hawke's), and plunge in. Maybe write them up as a kind of series. That might be interesting.

But anyway, what about the reverse? What about when writers choose to be actors? It doesn't happen often, because writers tend to be content, if that's really the word I want, with being writers. Still, it does happen, and the results are often surprising, or interesting, or maybe bad and weird. It depends.

First off, I'm going to cheat, because look below:

That still is from Alexander Mackendrick's A High Wind in Jamaica, and the blonde-headed lad is Martin Amis, world-famous and highly-respected as the author of Time's Arrow, Money, London Fields and many others. Obviously, when Amis did this film, he wasn't in the position of moving from the role of novelist to actor, but I've been a fan of Amis for quite a long time, and when I first heard that, as a boy, Amis appeared as an actor in this film, I became extremely interested. I didn't see the film until a year or so ago, after I'd read the source novel by Richard Hughes. The novel is a chilling masterpiece, and the film is, well, not. And Amis, as I remember, has almost nothing to say in the film, even though in the novel his character was pretty chatty. The film is a wash, really, and even if you're a fan of Amis, the novelty of the idea of seeing him in a film isn't actually heightened by actually seeing the film.

Above we have an image from Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu. To the right of Klaus Kinski is Roland Topor as Renfield. Topor isn't exactly a household name, but he was, among other things, a Kafka-esque, surrealist writer whose most famous novel, The Tenant, was adapted by Roman Polanski as The Roman Polanski Story (better known as The Tenant). Herzog says he cast Topor because of his laugh, but unfortunately all of Topor's dialogue had to be re-dubbed by another actor (the reasons for this escape me) so you don't even get to hear it. And as much as I love Herzog's film, Topor has always seemed like the weak link to me (well, Topor and whoever dubbed his voice), because he plays Renfield as a scampering cartoon loony, with none of the insectile creepiness that Kinski brings to his role. It always felt like a bad match, to me.

The way I remember hearing it, John Boorman agreed to cast James Dickey in the role of Sheriff Bullard in the film version of Dickey's Deliverance pretty much just to get Dickey off his back. Dickey was notoriously difficult to work with, or drink with, or sit in the same room with, or be a family member of, and it was no less difficult for the cast and crew to have him wandering around, insulting people, lying to them, and then slapping them on the back later as though they were old pals. But Boorman -- and anyone who cares to can correct me if I'm wrong in the comments -- achieved some sort of peace by casting Dickey as the sheriff who, in the last section of the film, suspects that our heroes are hiding something from him. And as it happens, Dickey is terrific in the role, the one roaring success of this kind of writer-to-actor leap I can think of. He brings a great authenticity and sharpness to a small role, and his performance is one of the most memorable in the whole film.

And then Salman Rushdie played himself in Bridget Jones' Diary. I don't remember anything about the film, or even what Rushdie did or said in his small amount of screen time, but I do remember thinking, "Well. That's kind of odd, isn't it?"

So who am I forgetting? Any other writers who made a brief foray into film acting that deserve a mention here? Let me know.

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Update:

Where do I begin? In the comments section, many, many, many other examples of writers-as-actors have been pointed out to me, many I simply didn't think of, others I had no idea about. And now I feel mighty embarrassed, but oh well. I asked, didn't I? So, from the likes of Marilyn (who's probably mad at me), Mariana, Greg F., Pat, ND, here's some more...

Sam Shepard in a whole shitload of movies, most notably The Right Stuff and Days of Heaven

Norman Mailer in Ragtime, as well as some of his own films

Marshal McLuhan in Annie Hall

Robert Benchley in a whole lot of stuff

While I'm at it, Peter Benchley in Jaws

Paul Auster in The Music of Chance (that one was mine!!)

Stephen King in Creepshow, Sleepwalkers, Knightriders, Creepshow 2, and etc.

Truman Capote in Murder by Death

William S. Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy

Colin McCabe in Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

Jerzy Kosinsky in Reds

George Plimpton in Reds, Good Will Hunting, and etc.

Antonin Artaud in The Passion of Joan of Arc

And, it just occurred to me, Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag are both in Zelig.