Death and transfiguration

I love dance; I love to dance. Salsa is my dance of choice, something I do rather well, considering I only took it up a few years ago. When I was little it was ballet. I took lessons from the age of five onwards, passing through the various grades, right up to the time just before I went to prep school. Yes, I wanted to be a ballerina, every little girl’s dream. In the end I realised that I did not have the commitment, I did not have the ambition and I did not have an obsession with perfection.

Perfection, that’s what Black Swan is about, the relentless pursuit of perfection, perfection for oneself, perfection for others. This is not a great movie - there are too many clichés concerning female sexuality, psychological frigidity and breakdown for that - but it’s bold, stylish, visually seductive and highly engaging. Above all it's worth seeing for the performance of Natalie Portman, a pirouette of perfection. I don’t like making predictions –I’m invariably wrong! – but I’m guessing that she will win the Oscar for Best Actress, just as Colin Firth will win Best Actor for his part in The King’s Speech. So place your bets now!

I’m dancing too fast. Let me just pause and say that Black Swan, directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a film set around a New York ballet company’s fresh staging of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Thomas Leroy, the imperious and slightly seedy artistic director, played by Vincent Cassel, as well as planning a novel and starker production is also looking for a new swan to replace Beth Macintyre, the company’s fading and aging star, a brilliant cameo performance by Winona Ryder, echoes, one suspects, of real life. He alights on Nina Sayers (Portman), a dancer who has all of the technical accomplishment to take on a demanding part.

There is only one problem: Nina can play the virginal White Swan, indeed she might be said to have been born for the part, but there is a dark underside – for she also has to take on the role of her evil twin, the Black Swan. Leroy’s principle concern is that his new protégé lacks enough experience of life, enough sensual experience, to play the Black Swan. Here she has to do more than dance; she has to sizzle. To help her ‘loosen up’ he sets masturbation as a homework assignment!

The whole movie is about dualities, about white and black, about good and evil, about doppelgangers, real and imagined. Nina is a vulnerable character to begin with, made more vulnerable in pursuit of darkness, the shadows in her own mind. It’s particularly difficult for her because her experience of real life is almost non-existent. She has emotional and psychological problems, caused not just by her own obsessions, obsessions which steadily turn into nightmares, but by the usual suspect – mummy!

Nina, you see, lives at home with her mother, a single parent, a super performance by Barbara Hershey, chilly, manipulative and controlling. She herself was a dancer, though one who never emerged from the corps de ballet. She is clearly living vicariously through Nina, whom she keeps in a cocoon of childhood, a substitute for her own failures and inadequacies. There is also a slight undercurrent, one suspects, of resentment and jealousy.

Into this complex mix Leroy introduces a new dancer, Lily, brilliantly played by Mila Kunis. What Lily lacks in technique she makes up for in emotional sensuality and experience of life. Here, now, is the central tension of the movie, a fresh duality. Nina is both threatened by Lily and attracted to Lily. Why is she there? Is she a friend or an enemy? Is she attempting to undermine Nina, to replace her? Is Leroy using her as part of plan to make Nina less frigid, less virginal? She is eventually selected as an alternate, though if this is to encourage or to sidestep Nina is uncertain. The ambiguities here are never fully resolved.

Nina both rises to the challenge while descending deeper into isolation and madness, all accompanied by ever more alarming hallucinations. In some ways the movie is difficult to pinpoint in terms of genre. It’s billed as a psychological thriller or as psychological horror. There are certainly elements of both, a distinct gothic veneer with some pronounced creepy moments. I was reminded at points of Suspira, one of my all-time favourite movies, which also happens to be set against the background of dance. If I tell you that Aronofsky lists his influences as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella The Double, then you may very well grasp both the approach and the implied ambiguity. There are also slight David Cronenberg overtones, the sort of gross body alterations that one associates with this director!

But I read Black Swan more simply as a story of paranoia and breakdown, of delusions heightened by the pressures of reality, by betrayals real and imagined. I cannot say just how impressed I was by Portman, an actress I’ve never previously rated very highly. When she finally appears on stage as the Black Swan, having discovered her dark side - by what process I am not going to reveal – I was completely overwhelmed along with the audience in the theatre. That scene, those moments, were the highlight of the whole movie, only equalled by her death – literal – as the deceived and betrayed White Swan. This is death and transfiguration; in the end, as she says, she attained perfection.

The word of man

I mentioned last November that this year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Authorised or King James Bible, one of the great landmarks of English literature. I’ve since discovered one or two additional interesting facts about the history of a book that was never, in fact, ‘authorised’ by James or anyone else.

As Derek Wilson writes in the January issue of History Today, James may have set the translation in motion but he neither paid anything towards its publication nor did he promote its use. Although the new translation got a royal nod of approval, it was only ‘appointed’ to be read in churches, not commanded. Other versions continued to be favoured according to taste, including the puritan Geneva Bible, translated by exiles during the reign of Mary Tudor.

The original publication, moreover, was beset with all sorts of problems, largely to do with inadequate proof reading. In one of the verses in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Judas’ was substituted for ‘Jesus’. In the account of the crucifixion given in Luke Jesus is said to have been executed with two ‘other’ malefactors. Fundamental errors and poor production meant that the new Bible was slow to catch on. Robert Barker, the book’s first publisher, was unable to recoup his outlays, with the result that he finally ended his life in a debtor’s prison.

Even twenty years after the original publication there were still proof reading and printing problems. A 1631 edition was so bad that it came to be known as the Wicked Bible, omitting the word ‘not’ from the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ In another place God’s ‘greatness’ was misprinted as God’s ‘great asse.’ No, I’m not joking!

The Authorised Version only really started its steady advance after William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, banned the Geneva Bible, far too puritan for his High Anglican taste. Even then, mirroring the politics of the day, there was a kind of civil war between the holy books, with the Authorised Version only gradually winning out over its Calvinist rival. Its final triumph came with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The paradox here is that by this time the language used in the 1611 translation was already antiquated in the way that Shakespeare was antiquated. But this only added to its charm and authority, giving it a central role in the rediscovery of a more authentic religion and a more authentic England, uncorrupted by the traumas of the Civil Wars and all that followed.

It was now that the translation, always intended for recitation in church, became a central part of public worship, helped along by the fact that there was no alternative. It was, if you like, the only word of God. But it also took its place alongside the poems and plays of Shakespeare as the word in English, whose beauty and lustre is increased by the passage of time.

The Poison Dwarf

Most of the leading cadres of the Third Reich were, on a simple human level, tiresome bores, Martin Bormann being the most boring of all. There are exceptions, most notably Hermann Goring, the regime’s number-one sybarite, a sort of cross between Nero and Falstaff. But the personality who fascinates me most is Josef Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda, widely known, even among his own party comrades, as the poison dwarf.

Dwarf he certainly was; of large head, slight frame and low stature, he was born with a club foot. In every way he was the antithesis of the Nazi ideal of the Aryan superman, all so much ideological window-dressing. He was also an intellectual, of a sort, in a movement made up of so many thuggish boneheads. Above all he was a propagandist of outstanding brilliance, one who always knew exactly how to tailor a political message. As a speaker he was, at a visceral level, even better than Hitler, evidenced, above all, in his infamous 1943 Total War oration.

Now he is the subject of a new biography – Joseph Goebbels by Peter Longerich, published recently in Germany, with an English translation planned. It’s based on a detailed study of the Propaganda Minister’s diaries – he was a life long scribbler -, emphasising the personal as much as the political. He is depicted as a depraved sexual obsessive, full of mawkish sentimentality.

His affairs during his period of power were notorious. Control over the German film industry gave him control over the casting couch, earning him another sobriquet – the ram. Looking at him, looking at his obvious lack of physical attraction, he seems to be a classic example of Henry Kissinger’s dictum, that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. But even before he achieved senior office he had a variety of affairs, which suggests a personality with sufficient power to overcome his physical handicaps.

Paradoxically, though he promoted the racial ideals of the regime, even if he did not represent them, the closest he came to downfall was over a passionate romance he had with Lida Baarova, an actress and a Slav. It was only after Magda, Goebbels’ wife, appealed to Hitler, that he was forced to drop her. Thereafter his standing in the inner circle went in to decline, only to be revived during the war, when he became Hitler’s most important lieutenant and the real face of the Third Reich.

I’ve read some of Goebbels’ diaries, fascinating documents, an exploration of his personal politics and his psyche. The most fascinating of all is that for the period of 1925 to 1926, leading up to the point when he was appointed Gauleiter of Berlin. Never intended for publication, they give away far more than the later documents. He writes in a staccato, machine-gun like fashion, brief sentences, often little more than exclamations. This is an obsessively vain individual, preeningly so, almost school girlish in his expressions of sentiment, most dripping of all when it comes to his descriptions of Hitler. There is no better illustration that evil is not always banal. Sometimes it’s histrionic.

The Man who was Chesterton

One is invariably being pursued by one’s own prejudices; it takes speed and dexterity to avoid being caught! Unfortunately Paul Johnson, journalist and historian, is not quick enough. In a recent review of The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, a compilation of quotations by Bevis Hiller, he suggests that prejudice (“the BBC establishment has always hated him”) was responsible for a failure to televise the author’s Father Brown stories, though they are, in Johnson’s words, ‘a natural.’

A quick spot of research shows that this is not true. Some of the stories were televised, though not by the BBC. In 1974 ITV, the commercial television station, broadcast a series of thirteen episodes, staring the late Kenneth More in the title role. The series is still available on Amazon.

Johnson goes on to suggest reasons for this alleged hostility by the ‘establishment’, mentioning and dismissing Chesterton’s alleged anti-Semitism in passing, before alighting on the real cause as he sees it - the author’s Catholicism. Knowing Johnson, knowing something of his own background, I really have to say he would, wouldn’t he!

The more likely explanation, the explanation I see, is that Chesterton was one of those uneven writers who just stopped being fashionable. He stands in this regard in the same pantheon as Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, somewhere on the outer reaches of imagination and taste; of their times, not ours.

This does not mean to say that he is a bad writer; far from it. I admit that my experience of his work is fairly limited, confined mostly to The Man who was Thursday, a novel published just over a hundred years ago, and some shorter pieces. I haven’t read the Father Brown stories and probably never shall because I consider the detective genre to be a lower class of fiction. There you are: a prejudice just caught up with me!

Still, sifting through The Wit and Wisdom has opened up possibilities, opened up some of the intellectual depths of this Oscar Wilde of the conservative right. I use this comparison deliberately simply because Chesterton made, in brilliant aphoristic style, one of the most telling observations about the fate of Wilde that I have ever read;

We feted and flattered Wilde because he preached such an attitude [a new immorality], then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.

Chesterton adopted something of the method, if not the immorality, to carry out his own counter-attack on those aspects of modernity that disturbed him most. Some of his observations are trenchant and witty; others just ill-placed and bad tempered, hence the uneven quality. I’ve compared him to Oscar Wilde though Hiller draws an altogether more apt parallel with Dr Samuel Johnson, whom he resembled not just in literary grumpiness but in corpulence!

I suppose Paul Johnson is right in part in suggesting that Chesterton’s faith accounts for some of the prejudice to which he alludes. But it seems to me it was less because he was a Catholic - by conversion, incidentally - than because he was more orthodox than the orthodox, often a symptom of any kind of conversion. His Catholicism seems to have been of a particularly obscurantist, neo-medieval kind, allowing him to dismiss the Enlightenment in one sweeping announcement: “I know of no question that Voltaire asked which St Thomas Aquinas did not ask before him – only St Thomas not only asked, but answered the questions.” This is a mind not so much closed but bolted shut!

There is grumpiness here; there is prejudice, attitudes that do not quite harmonise with the modern age, an observation I feel sure that would have delighted the reactionary old fogey, who wanted to return to a feudal economy where every man – no mention of women – would be allocated “two acres and a cow.” Yes, grumpiness and dottiness but also charm, good prose and intelligence; wit, occasionally, of quite brilliant intensity. What more could one ask for?

¡Viva la Revolución!

What happens when the legislature turns against the executive, a question that doubtless has engaged Barack Obama since last November? That’s easy: abolish the legislature. If that’s too radical consider the next best thing: get the old legislature to pass an Enabling Act before the new legislature meets.

Ah but American presidents are tied by the safeguards built into the constitution, unlike, say, the president of Venezuela, where the constitution can be set aside with ease. Taking a well-trodden path, Adolf, sorry, Hugo Chavez now has enabling power to protect him and his Communist Reich from the new parliament, recently sworn in following the September election.

Under the new powers the Venezuelan parliament has become something of a political irrelevance, rather like the Reichstag in Hitler’s Germany. Chavez now has the power to rule by decree, while the assembly has been sidelined, meetings now reduced to four days a month. But to make assurance doubly sure all parliamentary commissions have been placed under government control, while speeches in the assembly itself have been limited to fifteen minutes per member. I suppose, on reflection, that’s not a completely bad idea if only it could be applied to El Presidente, who has a tendency to witter on interminably.

Thus it is that dictatorships are built, piece by piece, not just by hamstringing the legislative branch of government but by controlling the media and packing the judiciary with placemen, all part of Chavez’ recent gleichshaltung, which has even extended so far as higher education. He also intends to neutralise the advance of the opposition in local government, having the power to transfer its functions to ‘socialist communes’, bodies packed, of course, with a lot of chavs.

Control of broadcasting and telecommunications has even been extended to cover the internet and mobile phones, just in case someone says something nasty about the government, the said nastiness, incidentally, being on their own heads. According to a report in The Economist punishments will be meted out for promoting disrespect for the country’s institutions or “alarm” among the population. So I guess Chavez is a fat communist pig is out!

Meanwhile, in reference to this, the opposition is calling for peaceful but energetic resistance against government tyranny and the attempt to install a communist system. It’s a cause that has a wide base of support, with labourers joining farm owners to prevent further Mugabe-style land grabs by the chavistas in the area around Lake Maracaibo. Those who have taken to protesting against Chavez’ coup have been attacked by government thugs, injuring many.

If there is any doubt that democracy is dying in Venezuela one should take heed of the pronouncements of Chavez and one of his senior military commanders on the coming presidential election, scheduled to take place in 2013, in which the dear leader is seeking another six year term of office. An opposition victory, they said, will not be tolerated. Revolutions, after all, can only ever go forward on the tracks laid down by history…and by tweets on Twitter.

Satyrs and nymphs

Last weekend the Times carried a rather censorious leader, tut tuts and finger-wagging, all taking Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s premier and Europe’s premier dirty old man, to task. He must go, it said, for the ridicule that he has brought both on himself and his country. This comes after the latest revelations about his sexual shenanigans, which allegedly included sleeping with underage call-girls. Anyone, young or old, who agrees to go to bed with this old goat surely deserves some kind of compensation, but let that pass.

To the Times I have to say Italy is Italy; it’s a foreign country: they do things differently there. For the rest of us politics is such a serious business; we need some diversion; we need some light entertainment; we need the ongoing farce that is Italian politics; we need silly, theatrical Italian politicians, a blessing on the simple, silly souls. Above all we need dear old Silvio, this seventy-four year old King Knut, desperately trying to hold back the advancing tides of time, with dyes, hair weaves and what have you. Contrary to the Times assertion, we need the opera buffa that we have come to expect from the Italian political class.

My sincere apologies to all my Italian friends; I mean no offence, though offence some of you have doubtless taken. I dare say you are one of the more serious among your nation, one who did not vote for this endearingly comic man, one of those who are not beguiled by his boyish machismo. You may favour the fall of his coalition, you may vote against his party, but do please consider the rest of us. After all what will we be left with if Silvio departs the stage? Herman van Rumpuy and Angela Merkel, that’s what, and not that much in the way of fun and frolics is to be expected from them!

As a good Italian you will know something of your modern history. Silvio admires Benito, you know, that man in the black shirt who only sent opponents ‘on holiday.’ Silvio should admire Benito, for he, too, was very much in the tradition of Italian farce. Now you are even angrier with me. But do remember what Benedetto Croce, the best of your modern philosophers, said in contrasting Nazism and Fascism. You’ve forgotten? Let me remind you then. He said that while National Socialism was a dark shadow, deep and brooding in German history, Fascism, even in the midst of its worst excesses, never quite lost its carnival atmosphere. Yes, and it also did wonders for the sale of castor oil!

So let’s hear it for farce, let’s hear it for carnival, let’s hear it for opera buffa, let’s hear it for Silvio! Italy is the theatre of the comically absurd. Let it remain in a permanent state of emotional adolescence, a place where satyrs are perpetually chasing nymphs. We need it so, a little southern colour in our gloomy northern light.

Bogus Journey

There is one glorious snippet of information I discovered about Season of the Witch: Dominic Sena, the director, was apparently inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s classic The Seventh Seal, in which a knight returning from the Crusades meets Death in the midst of his plague-stricken land. If I tell you that Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey does it so much better you might get a flavour of this movie!

Starring Nicholas Cage as Behmen and Ron Perlman as Felson, two crusading-weary crusaders, Season of the Witch is a sword and sorcery romp, the sort of thing I normally love. I say crusaders but I could not honestly say which crusade these guys are on – it’s set in the fourteenth century-, who they are fighting or for what end. I can’t even say which crusading order they belong to, though I would have to guess the Teutonic Knights, judging by the black crosses on their surcoats. Actually it’s much more of a Western, or the kind of medieval scenario that might have been found by a Connecticut Yankee visiting the Court of King Arthur!

This is not a bad movie; it’s an awful one. The script is shallow, the editing incompetent, the dialogue laughable and the acting dreadful. It might actually have been quite effective as parody – it certainly carries slight Monty Python overtures – but unfortunately it takes itself too seriously. I have to say that there were points I almost laughed out loud at some of the one-liners. There is Behmen comment on the number of times he has saved Felson’s ass, or his aside in one battle that whoever slays the most men buys drinks.

The one- slightly- bright spot is Perlman, who can do medieval quite well. He was superb as the grotesque monk Salvatore in the film adaptation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I had the feeling here that he was the only one to recognise the absurdity of the script, hamming it up accordingly. He only needed a cigar to complete the effect of medieval Europe by way of the Mid-West, playing a kick-ass Sir Rambo. But in the end he was a victim of a director who could not make up his mind about which direction he wished to travel.

Anyway, these two cowpokes, sorry make that knightly buddies, decide enough is enough after about a dozen years of murder and mayhem on behalf of the church. Deserting the cause, they find themselves in a plague-stricken land. It’s the fourteenth century so we are in Black Death country…or are we? As the pals mosey along into town they are recognised as apostates and brought before the local big-wig, a cardinal by the name of D’Ambroise, his face so disfigured by plague pustules, buboes and boils that it’s quite impossible to recognise our own Christopher Lee!

Now the terrible truth is revealed to Behmen and Felson: the plague, it turns out, is not caused by microbes – they didn’t exist in the middle ages -, bad air or Jews poisoning wells; no it has been caused, so the Cardinal believes, by witchcraft, or rather by one witch in particular, only ever identified as ‘The Girl’, played by Claire Foy.

In return for absolution the chums are asked to escort her across country to a distant monastery, where the monks possess knowledge, drawn from a secret book, that will determine whether ‘The Girl’ is a witch or not and lift the curse. They eventually agree, but only on Behmen’s insistence that she gets a ‘fair trial.’ A fair trial, on an accusation of witchcraft in the Middle Ages! Here we are firmly back in Wild West country – we’ll give her a fair trail and then we’ll burn her at the stake!

It get’s funnier. The party is made up of a priest called Debelzaq, played by Stephen Campbell Moore, almost invariably pronounced, at least to my ear, as Da Ball Sac, and a guide by the name of Hagmar, played by Stephen Graham, an English actor who affects here a bizarre American accent in a time centuries before America was discovered. With ‘The Girl’ safely enclosed in a caged witch-mobile off we go.

I say it gets funnier but the humour soon dries up. We are not in the heart of darkness, just the heart of dullness, stock images and unimaginative clichés. At one point the path is intercepted by a precipice that can only be crossed by – guess what – a rickety old rope and plank bridge, possibly left over from an Indiana Jones movie set.

In the end it turns out that the witch is not a witch at all. No, she is simply possessed by a gargoyle – at least that’s what the computer-generated image looked like – which manifests after the chaps try a spot of do-it-yourself exorcism, the monks all being dead from the plague. The appearance of the beast is the occasion for the movie’s most memorable line, Da Ball Sac’s immortal “We are going to need more holy water.” The thing is, you see, the said demonic gargoyle, replete with a wonderful set of wings, fooled everyone into taking him to the monastery so he could lay his claws on the monks' secret book and thus plunge the world into darkness. If he had only flown there he would have saved himself, and us, a wholly wearisome journey.

Even the finale, an extravaganza of demon-bashing and chopping up of ninja-monks, brought to life by possession, is just too silly to engage on any emotional level at all, even one of simple visceral excitement.

Season of the Witch is clearly just another milestone on the seemingly downward spiral in Nichols Cage’s career, so sad when compared with how brilliant he once was in movies like Leaving Las Vegas. Here he is hopelessly out of place, hopelessly miscast, reciting banal lines with a dream-like lack of engagement. I was tempted to write that this movie is so bad it’s actually good, right up there with the Ed Wood masterpieces; but it’s not – it’s just bad, dull and predictable.

Incidentally, ‘The Girl’, the witch who is not a witch, is given a voice-over at the end, telling us her name at last. She is Anna. :-)