When it’s party time
Like 1999
I’ll party by myself because I’m such a special guy5
In this one important respect, the new Rivers is not that different to the old Rivers. Because whether he’s living in a black box, hiding in the garage, meditating, or just partying by himself, Cuomo needs solitude. But it’s not just because he enjoys it, and it’s not even because he needs the angst. The success of The Red Album shows that meditation wasn’t so bad for his art after all. Turns out it wasn’t the angst he needed so much as the isolation that produced it. It took him fifteen years to figure this out — Cuomo might have saved himself some trouble by reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet.
Rilke was a Czech-born poet whose first mature work was produced at a time when Nietzsche’s influence was virtually inescapable. Rilke’s poetry is steeped in Nietzsche’s proto-existentialism — his insistence on life over thought, his search for redemption in this world rather than the next. Rilke also inherited Nietzsche’s supreme subjectivity — his belief that the artist creates truth rather than merely recording or revealing it.
In 1903 Rilke received an unsolicited book of poems from a young soldier named Franz Kappus, with a note asking whether the poet would mind reading them and sharing his thoughts with the author in the form of a critique. Rilke politely refused, but he and Kappus struck up a correspondence in which Rilke, while never dealing specifically with Kappus’s poems, offered the young man a lifetime’s worth of advice on the subject of being a poet. First of all, Rilke advised, you should stop asking for advice.
You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself.6
Rilke returns to the theme in his sixth letter, sent shortly before Christmas. Knowing that Kappus would be alone for the holiday season, Rilke urged him not to be frightened of loneliness, but to embrace it.
What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours — that is what you must be able to attain.7
Over and over in the course of the ten letters, Rilke returns to this theme. ‘Love your loneliness,’ he says. This is not an easy thing to do. But Rilke suggests to his protégé that if he’s really a poet, he’ll find that solitude suits him, that he’d rather be there than anywhere else.
We already have an idea why. Being weird and lonely at school was a blessing in disguise for Rivers Cuomo (as it was for Billy Corgan and Gerard Way) because it gave him the experience and the insight to write his earliest songs. He made use of his melancholy by writing profoundly affecting music about his condition. But just when it seemed like he’d broken through his loneliness and connected to the world, he went out of his way to make sure that he stayed lonely — moved out of the big world, and back into the garage. Now he’s triumphantly solitary — indeed, he insists on aloneness as a condition of his existence. That’s because Cuomo feels that being lonely is an important part of his job, and Rilke would agree.
Rilke insists that for a good poet there is no poor subject matter since all his experience is filtered through the unique prism of his own sensibility. That’s why he advises the young man to look inside himself to find out whether or not he is a poet. Cuomo insists in ‘Troublemaker’ that he doesn’t need books because he learns by studying the lessons of his dreams, and Rilke confirms this. The outside world is overrated, he says: learn to do without it.
…even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds — wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not.8
It’s exactly this self-reliance that Cuomo developed during his long and painful apprenticeship in the garage. In ‘Troublemaker’ he realises it was this, and not any of the dumb stuff they tried to teach him at school, that made him an artist. At school, they’d tried to teach him arts and crafts; in his garage, he taught himself to shred on his axe guitar while gazing up at his posters of Kiss and reflecting on his emotions. Who looks stupid now? ‘You wanted arts and crafts?’ sings Cuomo. ‘How’s this for arts and crafts!’ He unleashes a face-melting guitar break, and the world is put in its place.9 This, he explains in ‘The Greatest Man…’ is how it’s going to be from now on.
If you don’t like it — you can shove it,
But you don’t like it — you love it10
Cuomo knows he is a great artist because…he knows he is a great artist. Society’s pronouncements on his worth have proven to be consistently unreliable — why should he care what we have to say about him or what he does? He is expressing himself authentically. What could be more important than that?
Conrad Veidt: The notions of sick brains.
Expressionism
THE AUSTRIAN PAINTER Oskar Kokoschka had an intense admiration for children’s art. When children draw people, they don’t worry overly much about details — unless the details are emotionally important to them. An aunt’s curly hair will be obsessively laboured over if that’s what the artist loves about the aunt — who cares how many fingers she’s got or whether or not she has a nose? Kokoschka would maintain this attitude to portraiture all his life. ‘When I paint a portrait,’ he declared in his autobiography, ‘I am not conerned with the externals of a person.’1 For Kokoschka, such things were the business of the photographer, or the lawyer drawing up a will.
In his autobiography, he admits he may have given one of his portrait subjects only four fingers on one hand: ‘Did I forget to paint the fifth? In any case, I don’t miss it. To me it was more important to cast light on my sitter’s psyche than to enumerate details like five fingers, two ears, one nose.’2
Kokoschka was a truth-teller — as Viennese painters were expected to be. But his truth was internal, not external, and was celebrated as such. ‘I am proud of a Kokoschka’s testimony,’ wrote the poet Karl Kraus, ‘because the truth of a genius that distorts is higher than the truth of anatomy, and because in the presence of art reality is only an optical illusion.’3
Kokoschka first made a name for himself as an artist in 1907 with a book of poems and woodcuts called The Dreaming Boys. This highly symbolic little book, which the artist dedicated to his mentor Gustav Klimt, was inspired by Kokoschka’s life as a teenage monster. To his horror, at the age of thirteen, the artist had grown freakishly tall, sprouted hair in obscene places, given voice to guttural growls and bat-like squeaks, and felt overcome by unspeakable longings. In his verses Kokoschka described:
A hesitant
desire/the unfounded
feeling of shame before
what is growing/and the
stripling state/the over-
flowing and solitude4
Just as he dispensed with traditional rhyme schemes in his poems, in the wood-cut illustrations that accompanied The Dreaming Boys Kokoschka took gross liberties with the proportions of the human body to give his readers a sense of how isolated he felt, and how freakish and unwieldy his new body seemed to him. Inspired by Van Gogh’s portraits, and by his own training as a children’s art teacher, he simplified his drawing into brutal, expressive shapes and thick black lines.
In ‘The dreaming boys’, Kokoschka warned polite Viennese society that a monster had grown up in its midst, and was even now staring hungrily at those well-fed children through the gap in the hedge:
When the evening bell dies away
I steal into your garden into your pastures
I break into your peaceful corral5
&n
bsp; The teenage Tim Burton also expressed his alienation from society by imagining himself as a monster — first in his sketch for the character who would become Edward Scissorhands, and later in the character of Vincent. Vincent, as Burton’s poem reminds us, only looks like a normal seven-year old boy — inside, he’s a diabolical fiend, obsessed with visions of madness, death and despair. Actually, Vincent doesn’t really look that normal either, with his sharp, angular cheekbones, deathly pallor and sunken eyes. But it’s hard to tell, because there is no objective reality in Vincent — everything — including our image of Vincent himself, is distorted through the prism of Vincent’s sensibility. And whatever there was of external ‘reality’ at the start has disintegrated by the end, as Vincent’s torments overtake him. In the ‘nightmare’ sequence in his Tower of Doom, Vincent’s psychic stress expands out from his head to warp the architecture of his little room. As he struggles to get to the door, the walls and ceiling become horribly distended, and the door itself looms up like a crooked tombstone.6 Here, as always, Burton insists on showing us how things feel rather than how they look. In Edward Scissorhands, the castle’s lurching architecture is impractical — if not impossible. In his previous film, Batman, the city belches steam and the buildings loom threateningly over the populace. Elsewhere, trees curl up their branches like Art-Nouveau latticework, and hallways disappear into infinity — in Tim Burton’s world, reality does not conform to the evidence of photographic records. But this approach is not without precendence.
Burton rejected the idea that art could be taught or learned. But he learned that he didn’t need to be taught — that he should trust the peculiar visions in his own mind — by watching old horror movies. In the classic horror films of the 1920s and 30s, extreme emotions — fear, paranoia, madness — tend to be expressed in ‘stressed out’ visual forms. In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr Praetorius’s laboratory is architecturally insane, but perfectly expressive of the mood in which he works. And as his efforts to create a mate for the monster reach fever pitch, the walls themselves seem to pull back in horror at his perversion of nature.
The roots of this approach can be traced back to one of the very first horror films, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Almost sixty years separate Wiene’s silent classic and Burton’s first films — but the family resemblance is so strong that, looking at stills from Caligari, with its lurching cityscapes and gothic curlicues, we half expect to see Winona Ryder peering out of the shot. Conrad Veidt as Cesare, dressed from head to foot in black, his face a white mask slashed with black marks, looks uncannily like Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, and the pasty, shabby-looking Dr Caligari seems to be the not-too distant ancestor of Danny DeVito’s Penguin in Batman Returns. Burton, with his intensely subjective approach to movie making and his artist’s flair for visual interest, was always going to be susceptible to the idea contained within Caligari, that form can — and should — be altered by feeling. Of course, they never showed old German silent films at the drive-in in Burbank where Burton grew up. But they did show Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein — both of which owe a considerable debt to Caligari. And considering that these two films are the foundation upon which the whole monster/horror film genre is based, it’s no wonder Burton should end up showing the influence of Caligari in his films — even if he didn’t actually see it until much later.
The story of Caligari is presented to us in the film by the mentally deranged Francis — and Francis’s world, acccordingly, looks completely deranged on the screen. When the mysterious Caligari makes his way through the city, the city itself seems to close in on him — the houses and shopfronts behave more like trees in fairy-tale forest than buildings. In the background, staircases disappear at impossible angles, and windows curl upwards into crooked smiles. Later, we catch Caligari’s sleepwalking servant Cesare in the act of committing a horrible crime. He steals into a woman’s bedroom and stabs her with a knife. But even before he does, it looks as though the whole room is conspiring to murder the hapless victim, shadows point threateningly to the corner of the room where she sleeps, even the crazy angle at which the window frame bisects the glass suggests violence.7
In Caligari, as in Kokoschka’s portraits, ‘correct’ appearances are pushed out of shape by intense feelings. This is no coincidence — the artists who created Caligari’s striking backdrops moved in the same circles as Kokoschka. Weine commissioned designs from three artists: Hermann Warm, Walter Rohrig and Walter Reimann, all of whom were associated with a Berlin art magazine called Der Sturm. Der Sturm was the brainchild of Herwath Walden, a tireless promoter of modern art in Germany, whose Cologne Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 had introduced many German painters for the first time to the works of Gaugin and Van Gogh. He also organised and promoted Oskar Kokoschka’s first exhibition in Germany.8
The artists associated with Der Sturm could be said to have one important idea in common — all were trying to find a way of expressing intense psychic or emotional states using paint on canvas. And by 1911, people had started calling this kind of art Expressionism. It was never a movement as such, but the term now serves to cover a number of ‘mini-movements’ active in Germany before, during and after the First World War. These included the group centred around Walden’s gallery and publishing house — including Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as another group from Dresden known as Die Brücke (‘The Bridge’).
For the founding members of Die Brücke, extreme emotion was the only place left to go in art. Objective reality, which had already been undermined by the Impressionists, had been completely discredited by Munch and Van Gogh. Now, the artist must turn inward in search of truth. Art teachers could teach them nothing — as Fritz Schumacher, who instructed many of the early Die Brücke artists in drawing, would discover. Schumacher recalls a particularly heated exchange with a young Erich Heckel:
When I criticized the drawing for its carelessness he invoked his right to stylise. I put it that a person must be able to draw correctly before going on to stylisation…but I did not convince him. He said that the only important thing so far as he was concerned was the seizure of a total expression.9
Heckel’s colleague, Emil Nolde agreed. ‘The art of an artist,’ wrote Nolde, who joined Die Brücke in 1906, ‘must be his own art.’10 In their paintings, Kirchner and Nolde took the lessons they’d learned from Klimt, Munch, Gaugin, African and Islander art and Gothic prints, and synthesised them into terrifying visions of the human soul under stress. Early Expressionist painting takes a crucial extra step away from so-called ‘objective’ reality. Where in Van Gogh and Munch reality is strained, but remains recognisable, in Kirchner and Nolde the world of appearances seems fatally cracked. Perspective collapses, shadows abruptly reverse direction, human faces are sawn off into primitive masks or stripped of their flesh to reveal grinning skulls.
This decisive move from outer appearance to inner truth opened up exciting new vistas for artists, but it lead to enormous problems when it came time for these painters to meet their public. Expressionism precipitated what the art historians like to call ‘a crisis of subjectivity’ — which in layman’s terms means that viewers, by and large, thought Expressionist art looked horrible, and that the artists who made it were incompetent — if not actually insane. Who looks at a beautiful woman’s face and sees a flat mask with a stripe for a nose? What kind of degenerate is this painter if he can’t even put a wall at a right angle to the floor?
That Expressionist art was generally thought to represent the visions of madmen made it the perfect visual language for Caligari, which, after all, is a story told to us by a madman. This made its radical designs acceptable to the public, in the same way that atonal noise, while deemed inappropriate for the dinner table or the nightclub, is regularly used to indicate warped mental states in thrillers and horror movies to this day, where it goes by virtually unnoticed — at least on a conscious level. One reviewer of Caligari not
ed that:
The idea of rendering the notions of sick brains…through expressionist pictures is not only well conceived but also well realised. Here this style has a right to exist…11
But Wiene let his expressionist scene painters have the last laugh. As Siegfried Kracauer points out, the final episode of Caligari is not told from Francis’s point of view. So, since we’re no longer seeing the world through the eyes of a mental patient, the wonky chimneys of Caligari, should — in theory — straighten themselves out in accordance with the laws of ‘correct’ visual perception.12 But this is not what happens. Expressionism, Weine seems to be saying, has a right to exist in any case, because this is what life in the early twentieth century feels like — and if it looks horrible or insane, that’s because modern life is horrible and insane.
The Pain Threshold
It is hard to live in the age of psychoanalysis and feel oneself detached from the dominant public savagery. In this way, at least, the makers of horror films are more in tune with contemporary anxiety than most poets.1
A ALVAREZ WROTE those words in 1962, the same year A Clockwork Orange was published. In Burgess’s novel, when Alex likes something a lot, he says it’s ‘real horrorshow’, and Alvarez, too, had the feeling that horror might be closer to modern truth — and therefore beauty — than what we usually think of as beautiful.
This is an idea that was unthinkable in 1750, already in sight by 1850 and artist’s gospel by 1900. When Gustav Klimt was accused of flinging filth in the faces of Vienna’s youth with his philosophy mural, his defenders argued that the vision of horror in Klimt’s painting was simply the truth, and that a society can only ignore the strong and bitter realities presented by artists at its own risk.2 This kind of argument was guaranteed to hit the late nineteenth century bourgeois where it hurt. Thanks to Wagner, the Viennese middle classes had come to accept as gospel the idea that art is a form of spiritual instruction, and the artist a kind of prophet, whose dire warnings the populace ignore at their peril.
Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone Page 27