Being There

by David Malouf

  What Kosky does most significantly is to accept the theatricality of the work, even those nineteenth-century aspects of it that seem most tawdry. He does this by keeping things playful, drawing them always into the scheme of his production but also into his own nightmare world of disruption.

  When a bald and white-faced Nabucco, as much clown as deranged tyrant and blasphemer, needs to be restrained in a fit of madness, he is crammed here into a children’s theatre which contains the painted scene from the first act, his arms and head sticking out beyond the frame like a figure monstrously swollen, grown too big for his own sphere of action. It is a startling image that holds the character to his nineteenth-century setting then makes something new of it.

  So too with Abigaille. With no apology for what she represents, either as real woman or inflated stereotype, Elizabeth Connell glories in her own outrageousness. She swaggers, raves, weeps, strides drunkenly up and down with the schoolboy unhappily in tow, and is at once steely and big-doll like – a doll whose machinery is out of whack. Terrible, but also oddly endearing (she seems to be having so much fun), she is isolated by her desire to belong, consumed in the end by her own energy; which is all noise and glitter, as if she were unable to make contact with the very action of which she is one of the major protagonists. A nice comment on the opera’s difficulty in getting its characters to interconnect.

  What we are dealing with here is an intelligent and critical recreation of a work that, while it is often effective in performance, is also, by the highest standards, and I mean Verdi’s own, embarrassing, in that it represents a taste, naïve and popular, that we can no longer take seriously. That, fifteen years after it was written, was how Verdi himself saw it, and perhaps, by then, his audience too. After all it was he who had educated them.

  It is easy to mock the tawdry sensationalism of Nabucco and the cardboard monsters of its plot. Kosky, without being uncritical, does something different. He acknowledges the sinister power even such cardboard monsters may exert. However debased they may be as theatrical stereotypes, they have their roots in a popular mythology that is continuous. He accepts that what we have is an early work of a master who has not yet fully come into himself; does not yet know, as we do, the range of his gift. Whatever hints the work may offer of what is to come, Kosky does not pretend that this is Aida or condescend to Verdi because it is not.

  We need this sort of openness of response whenever we approach a work of the past that is half-subsumed in the now dead (or at least difficult) conventions of its period; and even more when its interest, as here, in the context of the composer’s final genius, for all its ‘flashes’, is not entirely free of the historical.

  Australian Book Review

  GROWING UP WITH THE STARS

  WE GREW UP WITH the pictures, we little Australians of the 1930s and forties. We grew up with the stars. Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart, and Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, were still youthful, like our fresh-faced uncles and aunts. Later we grew old with them. In no other art do we retain this lifelong relationship with its practitioners, this close, almost family affection for figures who are bonded to us in a special intimacy because they belong not to our public lives of industry and duty but to that other life we live in our senses, in our imagination, which is irresponsible and free.

  As the members of a new and popular audience, we were educated, like all popular audiences, by the medium itself. No one was there to guide us or tell us how it was done. We picked that up on our own; the movies themselves taught us. And we did not have, afterwards, to describe or account for what we had discovered there; it was just for us. There in the dark, with just ourselves to please, with those evocative images to tempt us, and so many ‘situations’ to slip into and identify with, we were off the hook; no one was watching. We were watching. This was another sort of education altogether, and if we learned something from it, it was on our own terms.

  The movies were where we discovered our innocence – which means, of course, the capacity to lose it. It was where we learned about heroic action, the elation and the risk of it; about honour, including honour amongst thieves. Wisecracking girls answered back there and got away with it, and their wit, their determination to say the unsayable, made us laugh outright. Or they got slapped and some of them slapped back. All this was news. Most of all, the movies taught us to look more closely, to search out, to penetrate. To accept the voyeuristic invitation to linger, and the appeal – because from the beginning we understood that what was up there on the screen was sexy – to the erotic.

  Eroticism on the screen arises naturally from the glamorising effect of light, its tendency to make flesh luminous and to give hair, especially blonde hair, the dazzling effulgence of a halo. Think of what movies did to create that entirely new phenomenon, the peroxide, later the platinum blonde. There’s a key moment here, when in a line of apes in a cabaret act, one of them removes its animal head to reveal a radiant Dietrich, the Blonde Venus of the film’s title.

  Then there was the camera’s capacity to get in close and isolate, and eroticise body parts by making a fetish of them: cheekbones, eyes, mouths, bare backs, the male torso, women’s legs, and even to draw our eye to some of them for the first time. Like the cleft above the upper lip that can make the line of a mouth so sexy. I remember a review in the early seventies that spoke of Richard Beymer’s philtrum, as it is called, up there on the big screen in West Side Story, as being so deep that you felt you could slide down it. And it wasn’t just body parts that could be eroticised in this way. It was also shoes, gloves, cigarettes, cocktail glasses. Watch the scene in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve where the young millionaire zoologist, Henry Fonda, back in Barbara Stanwyck’s cabin on a luxury liner, is seduced into restoring to her foot the high-heeled sandal she has tripped him with in the ship’s dining-room, and whose heel she has accused him of breaking. On the floor at her feet, as she sprawls on a low sofa, Fonda keeps himself swooningly on hold through long minutes of fetishistic foreplay.

  Then there is the moment in Gilda, 1946, when Rita Hayworth, in a strapless evening-gown that barely contains her, and long dark gloves, sings ‘Amado Mio’ and does a slow strip, though all she takes off in fact is a single glove. It is a classic piece of Hollywood erotica, which works because of the audience’s long history of reading round the strict code of Hays Office censorship to endow a glove with a charge so potent that a partial strip becomes more suggestive than the full strip it stands in for. The sensation it caused was global. We get some notion of the shock it created in conservative, Catholic, post-war Italy from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel, Amadio Mio, an early work that was published only after the writer-filmmaker’s death in 1984.

  Set in provincial Friuli, it deals with a young high-school teacher’s obsession with one of his students. The boy yields at last to a long process of seduction at a late-night outdoor screening of Gilda. In the rising excitement of the all-male audience as the historic moment approaches and Hayworth and ‘Amado Mio’ begins, the boy guides the teacher’s hand and times his own moment to the coming off at last of the glove.

  Acting in Hollywood movies, being a star, is not at all like acting on the stage. Actors in the theatre give up their individual personality, step out of their real selves and become a character that uses their form, their voice, their energy, but is not them. A Hollywood actor is always just himself. What he offers is a guarantee that he will be that wholly and completely, and just for us. It is his gift to be glowingly himself to the full pitch of his being; and it is our gift too, his gift to us.

  Star quality as it developed in twenties and thirties Hollywood has to do with an actor’s ability to give himself (or herself of course) to the camera; to collude with it narcissistically as with a mirror; and the mirror is us. We are fascinated. We fall in love with the stars because we believe we are being offered, there in the personal dark, the privilege of a special intimacy.

  A star is someone whose presence, whose immediacy and glow,
we instantly recognise and want contact with, over and over again. A Fred Astaire, a Judy Garland, a Robert Redford does not change from film to film or take on other selves. That is not what we want. What engages and charms us is the consistency of their being just what they are. The performance they give is only possible with our collusion, our interest, attention, love. When we are no longer interested they disappear. If a star’s performance is layered, or develops complexity, it is because he can refer back to his roles in previous movies and use them to complicate the present one – but only if we recall them, have them clearly in mind. A player who has real wit and a sense of the absurd, Bette Davis for example, or Cary Grant, uses this trick over and over, and this is flattering to us because it assumes our being able to ‘read’ what they are doing, our being in on the act. This is something quite new in the history of performance, because it is so widespread, though something like it must have been at work in the Elizabethan theatre, as its audience followed the resident clown of the Chamberlain’s Men, Will Kemp, through the various roles that Shakespeare wrote for him: from Lancelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice and Peter in Romeo and Juliet, through Bottom, and the Falstaff of the History Plays to Dogberry in Much Ado.

  The actor’s performance in a Hollywood film depends on the continuity of our movie-going and on his capacity to sustain his persona from role to role.

  The decency and shy, country boy charm of a Henry Fonda for instance is a constant; it is available to be exploited, variously but passively, for comedy, as in The Lady Eve, or seriously in The Grapes of Wrath. Its usefulness lies in the fact that it is immediately recognisable and does not change. When Fonda, later on in his career, appears as the grim and dedicated US president of Fail Safe, 1964, we trust him because he has been the young Mr Lincoln, 1939, and because we know his quiet integrity from Immortal Sergeant, 1942 and The Ox-Bow Incident, 1943. When Sergio Leone, in 1969, in a European director’s highly self-conscious challenge to film history and to audience expectation, cast him as the sadistic villain of Once Upon a Time in the West, we saw it as an insult to our capacity to see what was plainly before our eyes and did not allow the thing even a moment’s suspension of disbelief. In these matters, belief is everything.

  A good deal of our enjoyment of Some Like It Hot, a film that, like Once Upon a Time in the West, comes late in Hollywood history, lies in its virtuoso play with what we have already seen and know. Our fullest pleasure in it comes from our own history of film-going.

  There is the appearance (the reappearance in some cases) of familiar figures from old Hollywood comedies and gangster movies of the thirties – Joe E. Brown, Pat O’Brien, George Raft, and others too whom we recognise but whose names we never did know. Then there is our experience of the main actors.

  When Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis get into drag, part of the joke is that the reputation they have established in earlier films is that of the aggressively lecherous male; comic in Lemmon’s case, because he is overeager and incompetent, softer in Curtis, but intensified because he is such a pretty-boy; but their sexuality, its integrity and appeal, is not in question. Their transvestism works because they are so utterly committed to it. Their lives depend, quite literally, on their being convincing.

  There is nothing in their performance of the English pantomime tradition that we see in Charley’s Aunt for example, where the comedy is in the ineffectiveness of the disguise and our astonishment that others do not see through it. It comes instead from the actors’ practical difficulty in dealing with their feminine props, high heels for example, and in managing their mouths; but even more in our watching these male icons search for what is feminine in their image. The illusion is for us, but it is also for themselves, as well as the need to fool their pursuers.

  Lemmon loses all contact with reality. Curtis has to explain to him why he cannot marry his millionaire, and the film’s most famous moment, right at the end, is suspended on its ambiguity. Having offered Joe E. Brown every reasonable explanation why he cannot accept his proposal, Lemmon, in desperation, tears off his wig and declares, ‘But I’m a man.’ To which Joe E. Brown, at his most comically wide-mouthed and leering, makes the answer, ‘Well, no one’s perfect’ – with the clear suggestion that he knew it all along.

  Billy Wilder was a Berliner and one of the things he brought to films like Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, but also to comedies such as this one, was a darker and more perverse notion of what was going on in the sex game; something ‘European’. Not the Lubitsch touch, which was light and Viennese, but something that belonged to the same world as Dr Hirschfeld’s book of anomalies and perversions, Victor Victoria, and Franz Lehar’s 1927 Berlin operetta The Tsarevitch, in which a pretty girl disguised as a male athlete is used to seduce the hero from what, till then, has been an attraction only to the sturdier members of his imperial guard.

  The most daring scenes in Some Like It Hot are not the drag scenes but the ones between Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe.

  Here Curtis is out of drag but in a new disguise, that of a playboy yachtsman like Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story, but with the flat tones of a comic player of a previous generation, Cary Grant. He also has a psychological disguise. He seduces a cautious Monroe by pretending he has a ‘problem’: he is incapable of responding to women. The joke here is that the screen’s most potent sex symbol, the woman every man wants in his bed, has to parody her own screen image by using every seductive device on a man who frustrates her by pretending, under pressure, that he feels nothing at all, in a parody of those scenes in film after film in which Grant, with a pretence of laid-back indifference, allows himself to be pursued by Katharine Hepburn or, in the most famous example of all, Notorious, an intense and insistent Ingrid Bergman. All this works only because the audience is so alert to what is going on. We have prepared ourselves for this scene with twenty years of picture-going.

  I called Some Like It Hot ‘late’ because it comes at the very end of the classic Hollywood period, at a point where movies had already begun to lose their audience to television. That audience, its unity and cohesion, the history of picture-going it brought with it, was essential to what could be done up there on the screen. The mystery implicit in illusion remains a potent source of a movie’s appeal and can still be played with in ways that are both diverting and genuinely liberating, but the play between innocence and knowingness is long gone. When a contemporary film tackles this subject, Peter Weir’s masterly The Truman Show for example, it is to blow the gaff on the whole enterprise.

  For all the engaging nature of its comedy, and the affecting vulnerability of Truman himself, the fact that we know something that Truman does not (that he is on film, and that at every point of his life someone is watching; that what to him is reality is someone else’s play with illusion), raises doubts that are not easily dismissed about our participation as an audience and what we are getting out of all this.

  Truman is a star but an unwilling one, the victim of our addiction to figures whose presence, whose energy and attractiveness, up there on the screen, are just for us; who exist only for the pleasure it gives us to watch them exert their being, for what it can show us that is familiar, or surprising, and holds our interest. Somewhere behind Truman are the stars that our excessive love and eager interest – or the sudden removal of it – destroyed: the James Deans and Marilyn Monroes, but also the Gloria Jeans and Veronica Lakes and Margaret O’Briens.

  The Truman Show is Kafkaesque, and to say that is to emphasise the extent to which the game between player and audience is compromised now by self-consciousness and doubt, by guilt about our own cannibalistic role as consumers, our exploitation of the star as disposable product. The Truman Show puts its audience, or part of it, right up there on the screen where we can see its hunger to look, and to participate in a fictitious life. When Truman hits the wall and discovers the exit, and, with a bow, ends his show by going out into the dark, the screen audience cheers as if it too has been set free from someth
ing, the need to watch, the addiction to watching, and can also go.

  We’ve come a long way. Having grown up and grown old with the stars, we have now grown old with the medium itself and can accept some difficult truths about what it meant to us, what we were doing with it, which was both innocent and not so innocent, and what conjuring with illusion, for all the joy and freedom it gives us, might cost. We are no longer joyfully, innocently, off the hook. Perhaps that is why so many films these days have a note of elegy. Not just for earlier times or earlier genres, but for movies themselves.

  Lecture at the Seymour Centre, March 1999

  THE SOUTH

  ON A SOFT SUNLIT MORNING in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky, and after a five-weeks sea-voyage that had taken me via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden and Port Said, saw the Bay of Naples open before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had always imagined it, like the breaking of a dream.