Day 129: Death and Venice

“Gustav Von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) the artist at the climax of his career; composer, conductor, maker of great music, suddenly alone. Aschenbach, the artist at the crisis of his life, suddenly alone in the magical city they say is doomed to sink back into the sea, from which, by Venus, it rose. Aschenbach the artist at the crisis of his life, here faces the images of immortality and beauty”. This is the voice-over on the theatrical trailer for the 1971 film Death in Venice, by director Luchino Visconti.

For a while there, Visconti, Fellini and Antonioni dominated Italian cinema and made their lasting mark on the world of film; of their pictures, the word “masterpiece” is used again and again.

What is it about Venice that seems to attract the maudlin and melacholy in storytellers and filmmakers? Three films come to mind - Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) (starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), The Comfort of Strangers (Harold Pinter’s screenplay of Ian McEwan’s book, directed by Paul Schrader) and Death In Venice (1971) - all set in Venice, all beautiful and yet, all enveloped in a preoccupation with death?

Death In Venice, based on the Thomas Mann modern classic, is the story of Gustav Von Aschenbach, who comes to Venice to recover, following the death of his wife and child to the plague, at home in Germany, and to convalesce from his own near mental collapse. There he falls madly, helplessly in love...but with a boy, Tadzio. His passion for the impossibly beautiful youth, and the impossibility of it, leads to despair. When a new plague (Asiatic Cholera) invades Venice, Von Aschenbach pleads with the boy’s mother to take the youth and his siblings away from the city, whilst the composer remains to wait for death and liberation from his desolation.

Visconti acknowledges that Thomas Mann talked of the German Composer Gustav Mahler in the same breath that he would talk of his protagonist Gustav Von Aschenbach, and the story is set in 1911, the same year that Mahler died. To that end, Visconti uses the beguiling fourth movement (Adagietto) of the Symphony No.5 by Mahler throughout the film, it dominating the score.

Day #129 Tip: The Degeneration Plot
A “plot of character” says story scholar Norman Friedman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’, University of Georgia Press, 1975), “...the Degeneration Plot fetaures a character (in our case Von Aschenbach) who was at one time sympathetic and full of ambition (we see this in flashbacks to earlier times in his life) and subject him to some crucial loss (the death of his wife and child and collapse of his career) which results in his utter dissillusionment. He then has to choose between picking up the threads of his life and starting over again, or giving up his goals and ambitions altogether, or he may end midway between these two alternatives not knowing what to do next.”

“There is a sequence of feeble and short-range hopes, followed by the materialisation of long-range fears, with maybe the final effect being one of pity....it all depends upon how convinced we have become that the protagonist has in fact, only one real choice he can make, upon how impossible staying alive for another try seems to be.”

Over the last eight or nine days, I’ve been working through the different archetypal plot forms, using a different film as an example for each type of form; tomorrow I’ll wrap this up with The Tragic Plot.

Happy days.

Day 128: Ernest nailed it.

This is a favourite writing anecdote of mine; can’t remember where I heard it or who to credit:

“Ernest Hemingway reportedly dashed this one off when his friends bet him ten bucks he couldn’t write a story in less than ten words:

‘For sale. Baby shoes. Never used.’”

I reckon that I could sit here (at my keyboard) from now until the dawn of the next millenia and I’m not going to better that. I’m not a Hemingway afficianado, however - I have read The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) and The Old Man and the Sea, albeit many years ago - so I’m in no position to sit here and wax lyrical as to ‘why Hemingway this’ or ‘why Hemingway that’.

From the little that I know of this towering literary figure, I could not have been more dissimilar if I possibly tried to differentiate myself from him: a war veteran, Middle East war correspondent, game fisherman, safari hunter; seems like he courted death and danger if not always in the proximity of it and was never far from a gun.

The novella of The Old Man and the Sea, defies film adaptation, but that didn’t stop a movie version being made in 1958, the year I was born. The majority of the story features an “old man” (Spencer Tracy) alone in a small sailing boat, out at sea, trying to reel in an enormous marlin that he’s hooked. Facing sharks, fatigue, hunger, the sea, the weather and his flagging strength, he has to make it back to his native Cuban port with this giant of a fish.

Directed by John Sturges, witha screenplay adapted by writer Peter Viertel (chosen by Hemingway) there are only two speaking parts of note in the film - that of Spencer Tracy and a young boy. The boy is only really in Act 1 and at the end of Act 3, with the rest of the movie’s speech handed over to the old man either when he’s talking to himself at sea, or in his thinking, represented by Tracy’s voice-over. I would have said that such a script would fail on so many levels, so thank God they didn’t come to me for advice.

Despite this, does the film hold up 52 years on from it’s release and subsequent Academy Award nominations? If you get past the outrageously obvious studio sets of Spencer Tracy at sea in his skiff or whatever it is that he’s sailing, and if you suspend your disbelief (not your awe) at the library footage added in of the marlin segued in as being from the old man’s point-of-view, then, yes, the film still “works”. Putting aside the craft aspects of the film - cinematography, set design, editing - it’s the story that is timeless and would never fail, for Hemmingway knows how to write pithily. He’s as lean and mean a writer as you could get and yet he spins a phenomenal yarn.

I’m not an impoverished fisherman living in Cuba in the 1950’s, I’m a middle-class hungry screenwriter living in Sydney in the second decade of the twenty-first century, yet this film speaks to me across the years and the oceans of so much that is pertinent to me.

Day #128 Tip: The Testing Plot
“Hemingway became fascinated with the strength of character of the fishermen of Havana who braved the loneliness and dangers of the sea each day as they set out in search of the great fish. For Hemingway, this was a metaphor for the lifelong struggle feared by every man in the search for their defining moment.”

Robert McKee defines the Testing Plot as “stories of willpower versus temptation to surrender” and cites Cool Hand Luke, Fitzcarraldo and Forrest Gump as other movie examples.

Norman Friedman, who I’ve been citing over the last week or so, adds “...our sympathies here are curiously compounded, since he (the protagonist) places himself in danger of misfortune if he persists, and the temptation he withstands would, if yielded to, better his material welfare. Thus we feel he should give it up and save his neck, yet if he does he will pay the price of losing his own self-respect and our respect for him as well.”

A character dilemma of the lesser-of-two-evils if ever I heard of one and a character dilemma that seems, some days, all-too familiar.

Day 127: Gordon Bennett

“Gordon Bennett!” is an expletive of sorts that may be peculiar to England, and might be known only to the generation I grew up with as you don’t hear it so much these days. It was used (if you’ll forgive me) in the same way that people might say “Jesus Christ!” today, or another archaic one of my childhood which was “flippin’ Henry!” I’m sure if you dip into any Carry-On film of the 1960’s, Sid James will be “Gordon Bennetting” left, right and centre.

An example of the phrase in usage: the midwife says “Your wife’s given birth to a daughter sir.....number five I think?” to which the father, exasperated at yet another woman in the family replies “Gordon Bennett!!”.

That, I was thinking, would have been Mr. Bennett’s plight in Pride & Prejudice, where Bennett women abound everywhere and at every turn. In Meriton, or wherever else it was that they lived, I don’t suppose you could so much as go to the local pub or Seven-Eleven without running into one of the Bennett girls: Elizabeth, Jane, Kitty, Mitty, Ditty, Zitty and Flitty....sorry, I get confused after one or two Bennetts.

Let me put my cards on the table: I’m not a person who queues in the rain to see a film where too many women are wearing too many bonnets for too much of the time, which isn’t too say that I’m averse to the classics of the nineteenth century, I’m not; my love of Charles Dickens is well-documented on these pages. Let’s just say that I approach the world of Jane Austen a little guardedly, and so it was when I sat down for two hours of Pride & Prejudice to prepare for this piece, not helped by the fact that the “star” of this movie version - the latest version - is KFK.

“Who” might you ask is “KFK”? “KFK” is the acronym that I invented (don't let anyone else tell you that they came up with it, such is the widespread usage that it's now finding), and should have copyrighted, for Keira Knightley. The “F” of “KFK” represents a latterday expletive that ends in “ing”; whenever a film appears with this starlet in it, I can be heard to groan “....not Keira F...ing” Knightley?!" Look, it’s probaby a personal thing and just in case Ms Knightley is an avid bloggee of this sight, I humbly and abjectly apologise and ask not to mind me nor my opinions.

I just don’t get the KFK thing?! Since I first saw her in Bend It Like Beckham, I’ve been irritated by her prescence on screen. Irritated in Atonement (a McEwan book that I love), irritated in the dubious piece of work that is Love Actually (even though Ms K has a wonderful line in that movie), I just can’t get my head around those teeth that she bares and the weird-grin thing that she does that comes with them. I will stress however, that I did actually enjoy KFK’s performance in the 2008 film The Duchess. Maybe it’s because she plays a character - 18th century aristocrat Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire - who is reviled? Does that make me a cad?

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy Pride & Prejudice, neither did I not enjoy it, but one thing that it certainly has made me do, is want to rush out and and buy a copy of the BOOK. I have Emma and Northanger Abbey, both accquired for fifty cents in garage sales that I’ve alighted upon, both never read, but I don’t have P&P, and I want to read it. One of my problems with the film (maybe it’s just this version) is that things moved too quickly; one minute Darcy is a, well, he’s a snobbish bounder and then in the blink of an eye he’s come good and it’s “on again”. And, conversely, then he is in Elizabeth’s good books, only for her to learn seconds later that he’s carried out some deplorable act and her dream (and mine) is shattered and Lizzie must change her mind back again. It’s like someone has the remote and keeps channel-surfing her emotions.

Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice the year after Charles Dickens was born, but they fished the same literary pond. What my very poor figure of speech is meant to offer up, is the notion that I know, from my reading of Dickens, that pages and pages and pages and more pages must elapse between major plot points that affect things like, how I and the protagonist think of another character; that’s the whole point. I bet if I read P&P, I’ll find that for page after page I’ll be with Elizabeth Bennett and her thoughts, her loving thoughts of Darcy, only eventually to find out that we’ve both been wrong when we hear how he’s done something “dastardly”?

I want to know more of Elizabeth Bennett because I like her; I like her strength, her wit, her independence, her suredness of self, her way with words, her fearlessness and I’d like to spend more time in her company as Jane Austen wrote and saw her; not as this film saw her. Keira Knightley is by no stretch of the imagination horrible in this film, and I’m certainly not championing for “Queen” Cate in the role, but maybe I have to go back to the 1940 adaptation and Greer Garson because I’ve been trawling through cast breakdowns for every other TV and film version and I can’t find an actress in the role that makes me think “Hmm, now that’s an Elizabeth Bennett I’d like to seee?”.

Maybe it’s avery tricky casting decision? My actrines of choice: Emily Watson (Breaking The Waves), French actress Isabelle Huppert, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Australian Susie Porter, Julianne Moore, all women who I would have liked to have seen as Elizabeth Bennett, but then, I’m a writer, not a director, nor a producer, casting is not my forte, what would I know?

Day #127 Tip: The Affective Plot
“There is a change in attitude and belief here, but not of the general and philosophical thought. The problem in this type of plot is for the protagonist to come to see some other person in a different and truer light that before, which involves a change in feeling.” That’s our regular story panellist norman Friedman (‘Form and meaning in Fiction’, University Press of Georgia, 1975).

That’s Elizabeth Bennett’s journey to discover Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (a pleasant discovery) and Marlow’s odyssey to find Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (an unpleasant discovery); put filmically, Captain Willard’s voyage into deepest Cambodia to unearth the darkness that is Colonel Kutz in Apocalypse Now .

So, I’ve now been introduced to the world of Jane Austen, I’m not sure how long I’ll loiter in her world, but it will be time enough to marvel some more at the quick-wittedness that is Elizabeth Bennett; doesn’t mean, for a second, that I’m a convert to the wiles and charms of Keira Knightley nor Bridget (“Bridge”) Jones . Though I do wish both those women well, neither has affected a change in my mind.....at least not just yet anyway.

More plot tomorrow.

Day 126: Time to grow up

Everyone has one.....that incident when you were a kid, usually a kid in that twilight between childhood and adolescence, with friends the same; the incident I talk of, is that one that started out as fun, as a joke or a prank, for everyone, but then went horribly wrong.

This is the territory that Mean Creek traverses.

George Toomey is a bully, he’s bullied Clyde, Rocky and now he’s beaten up Rocky’s younger brother Sam (Rory Culkin). Everyone’s had enough of George and so they enlist the help of the slightly older, and more streetwise, Marty to help them get even, to teach “fat” George a lesson. The plan is to take him on a boating trip, strip him naked, throw him in the river and make him walk home like that.

Sam brings along his young girlfriend-in-waiting, Millie, and the group of six set off for a paddle on a “beautiful day”. Even though George endears himself to his companions, things soon turn sour and then the river and events “turn a shadowy coner”. A game of truth or dare (always guaranteed to end in tears, sick, guilt and shame) leads the group toward the kind of harrowing incident (already mentioned) unable to steer away from it even if they could. The choice that they make after “the incident” will affect the trajectory of the rest of their lives and they know it.

Mean Creek has a filmic DNA that can be traced back to Stand By Me and Deliverance. Paralleling the former, it’s about innocent youngsters, in this case taking the boat out on the river, returning as youths, old-before-their-time, weighed down by an un-carry’able burden. In the immediate aftermath of the incident that takes place - a death - someone points out that it’s not as though Superman’s going to appear and wind the world and the clock back, what’s done is done and now they must deal with it. It truly is one film that, when I watch it, I wish I could turn back the hands of time for them. The authenticity, the truth of what happens in a split second, just the tiniest of seconds, is going to echo down through the years, out through their community and affect so many lives; it’s no grim jest. Yet, that’s what happens.

On a personal childhood note, I remember the time that my best friend and I went to a building site on a weekend when it was left unattended by the workers. We found fun and adventure amongst the planks, ladders and scaffolding and then childish joy throwing cupfuls of cement about the place, scooping the grey calcining lime powder out of the sacks. Then a sudden breeze whisshed through the open brickwork and blew the powder back into my friend’s eyes. That was a game that ended in his hospitalisation and temporary blindness for him; I’m glad to tell that he came good, but it could have been so awfully different. Whether accidental or - as in the case of Mean Creek, pre-meditated - scattered incidents in childhood can be cruel.

I’m going to draw a very long bow here and make reference to the killing of two year-old James Bulger by two ten year-old boys in England, in February of 1993. My thoughts then, were the same as they are today: a deep sense of sadness and loss for all the children involved, such a terrible terrible situation. Who can guess at the way miknds not yet fully formed work? I leave that to professionals much better equipped to talk on the subject than I. One year later and a not dissimilar killing took place in Norway, this time the victim was a five year-old girl. Just this year, on the 23rd March, the Sydney Morning Herald reprinted an article that was first published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper on the completely differing ways in which the two countries media and criminal systems handled the respective situations. I’m afraid that I don’t have the name of the article’s author, but I would encourage you to seek it out on the ‘net' and read it for yourself. Salutary and yet hopeful matter.

I first saw Mean Creek at the Sydney Film Festival, six years ago, back in 2004. An "indie movie", shot in Oregon, its the sort of film that is indeed the darling of film festivals; it caused ripples, beyond the creek, at Sundance and Cannes and deservedly so. I haven’t tracked the career of writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes since, but this debut of his is an exquisite postage stamp of a movie. It did get a tiny general release here in Australia, but I’m guessing that it would have passed most people by and I can only urge you to track it down now and give it the viewing it deserves.

Day #126 Tip: The Maturation Plot
Mean Creek - like Stand By Me, Bambi, Emma, The Portrait of a Lady and Saturday Night Fever - is what’s generally referred to as a “coming-of-age story”, otherwise known as The Maturation Plot. Here’s what our resident story scholar, Norman Freidman (‘Form and Meaning in Fiction’, Georgia Press, 1975) has to say:

“...it involves a sympathetic protagonist whose goals are either mistakenly conceived or not yet formed...this insufficiency is frequently the result of inexperience and naiveté. His character must be given strength and direction, and this may be accomplished through some drastic, or even fatal misfortune....our long-range hopes that the protagonist will choose the right course after all, are confirmed, and our final response is a sense of justified satisfaction. Since this type of story frequently involves young people, we call it the maturing plot.”

Sam and his friends do choose the “right course of action” by story’s end but not all are in agreement and I won’t tell you just how it plays out; even so the film remains bitter-sweet (as it should do) probably leaning into the dark more than it does the light. But to everyone involved in Mean Creek I make my nod of thanks.

There but for the grace of God.....