Chan Marshall is one of only a few recording artists these days who seems to understand that the art of interpreting someone else's songs can be an act of creation on par with the act of songwriting itself. Each song on Jukebox, Marshall's fifth full-length release as Cat Power and her second album of covers, participates in an act of transformation. The original song is lost, submerged in a new wash of sound, and comes out something different.
The experience of listening to Jukebox is, at first, a little disorienting. Listening to "New York" and "Ramblin' (Wo)man" the first couple of times around, you might try to match the melody that Marshall sings to that of the familiar originals. Eventually, though, you would have to give up on this, because the melodies as Marshall reworks them are not the same. She could have written new words to the arrangements on this album and never been accused of theft. But that, it seems, is not the point Marshall is trying to make.
The iconic "New York" (the title pared down from the more familiar "New York, New York") takes on new meanings with Marshall's breathy reading of it. Some of the Sinatra swagger is there, but there is a quality to Marshall's voice that makes her version less about the braggadocio of taking the big town by storm than about the vulnerability of wishing for some experience that is beyond the limits of your own life as you have known it so far. She takes Sinatra's swing and replaces it with soul. The song will always be about taking a chance on the big city. Marshall makes taking the chance seem like a more risky enterprise than Sinatra did, but the risk here pays off. "Ramblin' (Wo)man," aside from taking liberty with gender role reversal, takes one of Hank Williams' only minor-key songs and spooks it out almost beyond recognition. On the original recording, Williams' voice is plaintive and apologetic--the voice of a soul in turmoil. Marshall issues no apology and makes no excuses for her rambling ways; she offers an explanation instead, stripped down as it is: "When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' woman." There's no other accounting for the mystery of her character. The echoing sound of electric piano is perfect for the mood Marshall evokes on these two songs: soul in the deepest sense, haunted, from the vaults.
As she did on The Covers Record, Marshall covers herself here, reworking "Metal Heart" from Moon Pix, filling out the song and giving her vocals a bigger sound, somewhere between the breathier hush of her earlier work and the classic soul-inflected tones she has pursued of late. Marshall will never be a belter like some of the singers from eras past that she seems to be drawing inspiration from, but her voice now is far from fragile.
Nowhere is Cat Power's new vocal confidence more evident than on her version of "Aretha, Sing One for Me," a somewhat obscure number by blues-soul songwriter George Jackson. The band is loose here in a good way, and the production is playful--listen for the whistling at the beginning of the track and Marshall's pronouncement to the studio engineers: "keep rolling." On other tracks, Marshall takes old songs and makes them new; here, the mood is retrospective, but it's an utterly winning track in all ways--impossible to dislike.
Really, there isn't a song on this album that doesn't profit somehow from its presence here, even if the result is not to overtake but to draw out new meanings from the originals. The Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion" (something of a Townes Van Zandt knock-off) takes on the opposite effect at work on "Ramblin' (Wo)man": these outlaw blues inherit a new sensitivity, and the cover, like "New York," exposes a kind of longing heretofore latent in the lyrics. James Brown's "Lost Someone" also holds up admirably. The sparse arrangement--unaccompanied electric guitar--on the traditional "Lord, Help the Poor and Needy" is pitched right for the song, which effectively gives the album grounding right at its center. (It also serves as a nice complement to "Moonshiner," another traditional song that Marshall covered on Moon Pix.) Dylan's "I Believe in You," from the odd and somewhat baffling Slow Train Coming (a fifty-cent bin favorite across the country), fits nicely with a chunky guitar riff powering it from start to finish. The tempos start to sag a little toward the end, but Joni Mitchell's "Blue," while doing nothing to inject energy into the album, is lovely nonetheless: thin and ghostly but aching with a soulful quality that again brings new dimension to a song that is now approaching a certain age.
There's one more gem here worth drawing attention to: the album's only new original track, "Song for Bobby." This is a quiet, understated song that brings to mind Cat Power albums of the past but also shows how much her music has refused to stay still. It also gives us reason to look forward to more original songs from Marshall in the future.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Thursday, February 14, 2008
On Reading Keats
Helen Vendler once called John Keats' "To Autumn" "one of the best poems in the English language" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Donadio.t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=Vendler&st=nyt&scp=1). I can't argue with her--I wouldn't dream of it--but I will say that it has taken me years to come around to an appreciation of Keats.
A few years of teaching poetry to high school students yields a simple explanation of what makes Keats so hard to appreciate: we don't read or hear with the same ears today. We stumble over the words, sometimes even the ones we know. Reading is re-reading, and we generally don't have the patience for that. Unless you grow up cultivating an ear for the musical quality of English verse, it takes years to develop your sense of sound. In teaching Keats, what I have discovered, though, is the joy of reading his poems aloud. "Joy" isn't a word I use often or lightly, but it applies here.
To take in the full effect of iambic pentameter, you have to learn to hear it twice at once. You need to learn to hear the steady beat of the iambs, and you need to hear the fluidity of the melody that surrounds this beat: the natural flow of the line. To read properly, you have to see both on the page. To hear properly, you have to listen for both--and you have to read it out loud. This is the music of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to the Modern era, and although we don't tend to use it much anymore, that doesn't mean that it can't sing to us now.
When we read out loud in class, I normally make my students do the work. With poetry, they take turns; they go around the room and read to a significant punctuation mark (period or semicolon, usually), or sometimes they practice "spirit reading"--where you start and stop as the spirit moves you. This year, I let my students perform a spirit reading of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," but then I told them that I was going to read "Ode on a Grecian Urn" myself. I wanted them to hear it the way I hear it, after having worked on the reading for years. I wanted also, somewhat greedily, the experience of reading the poem aloud.
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" gives us Keats' initial statement on the power--transportive as much as it is transformative--of poetry. Transport figures large in the sense that the speaker claims to have "travell'd in the realms of gold" but not to have truly breathed the "pure serene [air]" of far-away lands until reading Homer--specifically, Homer as mediated through the Elizabethan translation of George Chapman. In Keats' envisioning of him, Homer ruled a "wide expanse" of the ancient world "as his demesne"--that is, as though he were the lord of a feudal territory. Five years later, Shelley famously expressed a similar notion to what Keats hits on in this poem when he said, in A Defense of Poetry, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." (That Shelley's statement came five years after Keats' poem--and the same year that Keats died--is of little consequence; the two poets are of the same moment and ideas surely ran back and forth between them.)
In "Chapman's Homer"--as in Shelley's "Ozymandias"--the speaker's experience of the ancient world is mediated by time, history, and art, and in the process gives example to a great talent that the Romantic poets had for embedded narration. (Blake also does this to some extent in both versions of "The Chimney Sweeper.") This same method is used to convey a message of devastating irony in "Ozymandias" and a message of sublime inspiration in "Chapman's Homer."
A few years of teaching poetry to high school students yields a simple explanation of what makes Keats so hard to appreciate: we don't read or hear with the same ears today. We stumble over the words, sometimes even the ones we know. Reading is re-reading, and we generally don't have the patience for that. Unless you grow up cultivating an ear for the musical quality of English verse, it takes years to develop your sense of sound. In teaching Keats, what I have discovered, though, is the joy of reading his poems aloud. "Joy" isn't a word I use often or lightly, but it applies here.
To take in the full effect of iambic pentameter, you have to learn to hear it twice at once. You need to learn to hear the steady beat of the iambs, and you need to hear the fluidity of the melody that surrounds this beat: the natural flow of the line. To read properly, you have to see both on the page. To hear properly, you have to listen for both--and you have to read it out loud. This is the music of English poetry from the time of Chaucer to the Modern era, and although we don't tend to use it much anymore, that doesn't mean that it can't sing to us now.
When we read out loud in class, I normally make my students do the work. With poetry, they take turns; they go around the room and read to a significant punctuation mark (period or semicolon, usually), or sometimes they practice "spirit reading"--where you start and stop as the spirit moves you. This year, I let my students perform a spirit reading of "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," but then I told them that I was going to read "Ode on a Grecian Urn" myself. I wanted them to hear it the way I hear it, after having worked on the reading for years. I wanted also, somewhat greedily, the experience of reading the poem aloud.
"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" gives us Keats' initial statement on the power--transportive as much as it is transformative--of poetry. Transport figures large in the sense that the speaker claims to have "travell'd in the realms of gold" but not to have truly breathed the "pure serene [air]" of far-away lands until reading Homer--specifically, Homer as mediated through the Elizabethan translation of George Chapman. In Keats' envisioning of him, Homer ruled a "wide expanse" of the ancient world "as his demesne"--that is, as though he were the lord of a feudal territory. Five years later, Shelley famously expressed a similar notion to what Keats hits on in this poem when he said, in A Defense of Poetry, that poets are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." (That Shelley's statement came five years after Keats' poem--and the same year that Keats died--is of little consequence; the two poets are of the same moment and ideas surely ran back and forth between them.)
In "Chapman's Homer"--as in Shelley's "Ozymandias"--the speaker's experience of the ancient world is mediated by time, history, and art, and in the process gives example to a great talent that the Romantic poets had for embedded narration. (Blake also does this to some extent in both versions of "The Chimney Sweeper.") This same method is used to convey a message of devastating irony in "Ozymandias" and a message of sublime inspiration in "Chapman's Homer."
In "Ozymandias," the "frown," "lip," and "snear" of a terrible king are the means by which he conveys his famous message ("I am Ozymandias, king of kings, / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."). A sculptor transfers that message to stone. Time wears away at the stone, altering the message and shattering the statue to pieces. A traveler sees the crumbling remains of the ancient statue, and conveys the message to the speaker. The speaker tells us, and the message has changed: even the king of kings is subject to the decay of time, and we ourselves have little hope of withstanding eternity.
In "Chapman's Homer," the bard is figuratively the king, and his message is translated by Chapman and received by the speaker. The speaker relays it to us, only the content of the message has been lost in the transfer--there are no details evoking the great contest for Ilium or the voyages of Odysseus--it's like the statue of Ozymandias without the inscription--and what we have instead is a statement on the power of poetry. Shelley designs for us a message of despair and the inevitable wrack of history, while the message of "Chapman's Homer" is in praise of the ecstatic, transportive power of literature. (This same message was later transposed to the domain of visual and sound phenomena in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and together the two poems cover the spectrum of aesthetic experience.)
In effect, Homer is more than anything else an idea in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Specifically, he is the idea of the poet, and the power his work gives form to is the power that accompanies any great work of literature. Keats tells us about the transformation brought on by his experience of reading, not about the text itself, and in this context the claim of the poem is that reading is not only an experience but also an act of creativity in and of itself. The experience of reading is first related to the discovery of a new orb in the heavens--"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." But before Keats can travel further along these celestial lines, he changes tack and grounds us with a more developed earthly simile: the discovery of the Pacific by European explorers. The only reaction that Keats can muster initially, upon reading Chapman's Homer, is identical to that of his imagined explorers discovering the Pacific--amazed silence. Thus Keats' poem also corresponds with Wordsworth's famed statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." At the first moment of feeling, the poet is stunned, staggered with awe. There are no words for it then. The words come later. In the case of this poem, it wasn't much later--Keats is supposed to have written the poem immediately the morning after an all-night reading session with friend Charles Cowden Clark.
Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transfers the aesthetic experience of studying the work of a great poet to that of studying intensely a single work of visual art, specifically the "Attic shape" evoked by the title. Keats goes as far as to claim that the urn "canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," though I wonder whether Keats would have stuck with that stance had he been pressed on the subject. Keats devotes the first three and a half stanzas to the sensual imagery evoked by the woodland setting that rolls across the surface of the vase: a lover pursuing the object of his affection, "winning near the goal"; a piper, whose unheard melody transcends in sweetness that of the heard variety; trees with their "happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed" their leaves; and a "mysterious priest" leading a heifer to the sacrificial altar. As in all of Keats' major works, the evocation of sensory experience is riveting and complex, sometimes contradictory; senses overlap in the curious and powerful kind of synesthesia that is Keats' trademark. In the fourth stanza, Keats takes us beyond the imagery directly evoked by the urn itself to imagine the "little town by river or sea shore" that is "emptied of this folk, this pious morn." In Keats' mind, the town is still there to this day, abandoned, wondering where all her inhabitants might be. This extrapolation beyond the surface of the vase's image and into the super-historical moment depicted by it is perhaps the most powerful expression in the poem of the kind of reality engendered by artistic experience.
Keats almost--almost--wins us over with his famed closing statement. Again in the vein of embedded narration, the vase itself tells us that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" That, supposedly, is all we need to know. This statement corresponds with Keats' prose statement on negative capability from his December, 1817 letter to his brothers, where he asserts that the submersion of "fact & reason" and the ability of "being in uncertainties" defines the great poet. For Keats, "the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" and achieves a kind of factual nature. Keats seems to mean that the aesthetic experience is all and everything, that it supersedes history, politics, morality, and even nature itself. If so, this is perhaps the epitome of the Romantic worldview.
I am eagerly willing to go along with Keats until I realize where I am: in the classroom, with obligations to my students, papers to grade, a paycheck to earn, bills to pay, wife and children and mortgage, etc.--all of the things that are important but beyond the purely aesthetic.
The fact of the matter is that Keats' friend Shelley was a cad for abandoning his first wife and their child to pursue new love--and his own artistic temperament. Beauty is not truth. But it is to Keats' great credit that he comes so close to convincing us that it is.
In effect, Homer is more than anything else an idea in "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." Specifically, he is the idea of the poet, and the power his work gives form to is the power that accompanies any great work of literature. Keats tells us about the transformation brought on by his experience of reading, not about the text itself, and in this context the claim of the poem is that reading is not only an experience but also an act of creativity in and of itself. The experience of reading is first related to the discovery of a new orb in the heavens--"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken." But before Keats can travel further along these celestial lines, he changes tack and grounds us with a more developed earthly simile: the discovery of the Pacific by European explorers. The only reaction that Keats can muster initially, upon reading Chapman's Homer, is identical to that of his imagined explorers discovering the Pacific--amazed silence. Thus Keats' poem also corresponds with Wordsworth's famed statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." At the first moment of feeling, the poet is stunned, staggered with awe. There are no words for it then. The words come later. In the case of this poem, it wasn't much later--Keats is supposed to have written the poem immediately the morning after an all-night reading session with friend Charles Cowden Clark.
Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" transfers the aesthetic experience of studying the work of a great poet to that of studying intensely a single work of visual art, specifically the "Attic shape" evoked by the title. Keats goes as far as to claim that the urn "canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," though I wonder whether Keats would have stuck with that stance had he been pressed on the subject. Keats devotes the first three and a half stanzas to the sensual imagery evoked by the woodland setting that rolls across the surface of the vase: a lover pursuing the object of his affection, "winning near the goal"; a piper, whose unheard melody transcends in sweetness that of the heard variety; trees with their "happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed" their leaves; and a "mysterious priest" leading a heifer to the sacrificial altar. As in all of Keats' major works, the evocation of sensory experience is riveting and complex, sometimes contradictory; senses overlap in the curious and powerful kind of synesthesia that is Keats' trademark. In the fourth stanza, Keats takes us beyond the imagery directly evoked by the urn itself to imagine the "little town by river or sea shore" that is "emptied of this folk, this pious morn." In Keats' mind, the town is still there to this day, abandoned, wondering where all her inhabitants might be. This extrapolation beyond the surface of the vase's image and into the super-historical moment depicted by it is perhaps the most powerful expression in the poem of the kind of reality engendered by artistic experience.
Keats almost--almost--wins us over with his famed closing statement. Again in the vein of embedded narration, the vase itself tells us that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" That, supposedly, is all we need to know. This statement corresponds with Keats' prose statement on negative capability from his December, 1817 letter to his brothers, where he asserts that the submersion of "fact & reason" and the ability of "being in uncertainties" defines the great poet. For Keats, "the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration" and achieves a kind of factual nature. Keats seems to mean that the aesthetic experience is all and everything, that it supersedes history, politics, morality, and even nature itself. If so, this is perhaps the epitome of the Romantic worldview.
I am eagerly willing to go along with Keats until I realize where I am: in the classroom, with obligations to my students, papers to grade, a paycheck to earn, bills to pay, wife and children and mortgage, etc.--all of the things that are important but beyond the purely aesthetic.
The fact of the matter is that Keats' friend Shelley was a cad for abandoning his first wife and their child to pursue new love--and his own artistic temperament. Beauty is not truth. But it is to Keats' great credit that he comes so close to convincing us that it is.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
P. T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood
[Warning: You may not want to read this review if you have not seen the film.]
Something of great significance—a gesture with much power and thematic resonance—occurs early on in P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Daniel Plainview, iron-willed hard-scrabble oil prospector, slathered in the raw gore of his trade, picks up the just-orphaned son of an oil worker killed during the digging of a well shaft and smears a black daub of crude oil onto the infant’s forehead. With such a gesture, Plainview, some kind of prophet of the oil industry at the turn of the last century, baptizes his just-adopted son into a new religion. This moment—imbued with all the articulated grace that Anderson and his formidable star, Daniel Day-Lewis, possess—communicates with the viewer viscerally. It is one of many great moments in this film, but perhaps in its simplicity and humanity the most profound. It is certainly the most hopeful.
This moment exemplifies the thematic elements at the core of There Will Be Blood, which is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! In addition to being a family drama (minus the family, more or less), There Will Be Blood does something rarely seen in American film: it perfectly explicates the two impulses that founded our nation and sees them out to their logical conclusion. Of course, the Enlightenment-influenced revolutionaries of the late-eighteenth century founded our government. But the Puritans who preceded them set the cultural standard that has persisted to this day, and they operated on two drives: religious extremism and capitalism. Over time, these elements became sometimes isolated and even set at odds against each other. Both of these factors are at work in There Will Be Blood, separated out but still insinuating themselves within and around each other, their volatile equilibrium threatening to give way. Although Daniel Plainview displays an open contempt for the rampant Pentecostal Protestantism that grips many of the people around him, he is not by any means a godless character. A different kind of enthusiasm--an entirely more terrestrial one--possesses him. The rituals of the oil economy are the binding ties of his church.
Plainview proselytizes in evenly measured, plainspoken terms when he comes to a new town to deliver his pitch about how he is the best man to take control of their underground resources. He is convincing enough, knowledgeable in his trade, perhaps even a fair trader early on. But Plainview is near monomaniacal in his drive, of the same ilk as Captain Ahab; a landlubber, however, Plainview is perhaps closer to Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! When Plainview buys out parcel after parcel of land to pursue his ambition of building a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, we come to see Manifest Destiny acted out in miniature. This makes There Will Be Blood achieve a kind of American-ness in a way that Moby Dick achieves only metaphorically. America is about geography. Sutpen understands that, and Plainview understands it as well. For Plainview, it is not enough to merely own the land--he has to suck it dry. Still, the similarities to Melville obtain, and the image of oil-men washing their hands in crude oil in this film seems clearly to allude to the crew of the Pequod washing their hands in spermacetti oil.
The primary threat to Plainview's livelihood is initially the earth itself: it takes a good bit of work to get that bubbling crude started, and once it spouts the stuff can hardly be contained. This is man versus the elements. A new threat emerges, however, to counter Plainview's hold on the ground: the threat is not religion itself but rather one particular minister, whose ambition rivals that of Plainview himself. Along parallel lines, Day-Lewis's spectacular performance as Plainview is almost upstaged at times by the antics of Paul Dano, who plays not only the preacher Eli Sunday but also (briefly) Eli's brother Paul. The twinness comes to full effect only at the end of the film, when prophet becomes confused with profit, and we are given a clearer vision of how things truly are. (In fact, I wasn't sure that "Paul" was not simply an alias that Eli used until I saw both names listed separately in the credits.) Eli is an excellent raver, and the scene in which he performs an inspired act of faith-healing upon an old woman is, as Plainview puts it afterward when paying respects to the preacher, "a goodamn hell of a show."
The central conflict then that takes over the story is that between Plainview and Sunday--between capitalism and religious extremism, that is--and the central scene of the film is Plainview's reluctant baptism into the church. Sunday wants Plainview for his church--and he wants Plainview's money for his church. Plainview clearly regards it all as superstition, but Sunday gets his way. Plainview wants land; church members own it. Sunday cannot take Plainview's soul--it seems that he might not have one--but he can get what he wants, which is a nice show in front of the congregation. This is one of the few well-lit scenes in the film, the light provided by an open-air window in the shape of a cross behind Sunday's alter. Plainview's baptism is real and fake at the same time, an honest but forced statement of his transgressions, a washing in the light and in clean water--not oil, for once. Plainview clearly isn't saved.
The emotional core of the film--since Plainview's emotive range is so clearly limitied--is Plainview's adoptive son, H.W. The relationship between father and son is the only thing that humanizes this driven man in a way that enables us to identify with him. H.W. (Dillon Freasier) is taciturn to begin with, eager to assist his father, and (especially in context--he doesn't have much competition) altogether endearing. His interaction with Eli's little sister Mary is the only touch of romance, innocent as it is, in an otherwise nearly sexless film. When H.W. loses his hearing in an oil derrick eruption and subsequently starts to act out on his frustrations, the viewer becomes distraught, not only out of sympathy for H.W. but also because we know that he is the only thing keeping Plainview at bay. The question is whether the adoptive bond is strong enough to withhold the scalding mania that Plainview holds inside his head.
What does Daniel Plainview want? To some extent, this question cannot be answered. Anderson's film is remarkable in part for its retroactive perspective. Plainview forcefully and accurately embodies the attitudes behind turn-of-the-century Realism, and as such he is a pre-Freudian creature who does not know or even wish to know the forces that drive him so relentlessly. One thing that is clear, though, is that he--again, like Thomas Sutpen--wants family. More accurately, perhaps, he feels the absence of it, and true to the title there is a growing, parasitic suspicion in Plainview's mind that if there is not blood between kin there is not kin. This suspicion seems to take over at the end, and when Plainview disowns H.W., we see the worst in him. Plainview is too devoid of tenderness, it seems, to marry and father his own offspring, or for that matter even to consort with the employees of a brothel when he briefly finds himself in one.
The film includes one lamentable aesthetic mistake, aside from any objections we might have to the film's ending. Plainview’s killing of a man who claimed to be his brother—and who got away with it for some time—is distracting. Yes, Plainview felt more than cheated—he was wounded to the core by the very theme that afflicts him throughout the film, his lack of family. He has no blood ties to anyone else in the film, it turns out. In essence, though, the problem here is that this act detracts from the viewer's focus: we wait for fall-out, but none ever comes. Perhaps the lack of reaction merely shows that Plainview can commit murder and then never let it trouble him again. This act diminishes the impact of the things around it, though. It is clear a few moments earlier that Plainview determines that the man is a fake. There might be better reactions here that don't disturb the narrative momentum so much. This is the only verifiable moment when Anderson shows a lack of appreciation for the value of subtlety in this film. Sometimes understatement is better, which is a lesson that few American filmmakers seem to understand. Otherwise, though, in this film, it is a lesson that P. T. Anderson has mastered, taking in as he does the colors, the landscapes, and the subdued pacing of Hollywood's maverick directors of the 1970s.
The end of the film marks a major shift in tone, from elegiac American realism a la Terrence Malick to a Scorcese-esque grotesquerie of violence. The shift may be a mis-step, but once the new tone is set, it is consistently developed, at least, and artfully executed.
The big question that the film leaves us with is this: What's next for P.T. Anderson? (Another question is what's next for Day-Lewis, who makes few films but is, for my money, the best performer making the rounds these days.) To say that this film is something of a departure for Anderson is understatement. Not that earlier films such as Hard Eight or Boogie Nights were bad, but there is nothing in them that suggests that Anderson had a film like this inside of his head waiting to get out. Though There Will Be Blood might stop just shy of indelible classic, it is a powerful cinematic endeavor. If Anderson persists with films on par with this one--which achieves a kind of timelessness in its universality--legends will emerge. What did Shakespeare do in the 1580s? What did Robert Johnson, who had been a lackluster guitarist in his earlier days, do to acquire his masterful mature style? Story has it that Johnson made a pact with the devil. Anderson's devil is Daniel Plainview. Let's hope that they keep dealing.
Something of great significance—a gesture with much power and thematic resonance—occurs early on in P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Daniel Plainview, iron-willed hard-scrabble oil prospector, slathered in the raw gore of his trade, picks up the just-orphaned son of an oil worker killed during the digging of a well shaft and smears a black daub of crude oil onto the infant’s forehead. With such a gesture, Plainview, some kind of prophet of the oil industry at the turn of the last century, baptizes his just-adopted son into a new religion. This moment—imbued with all the articulated grace that Anderson and his formidable star, Daniel Day-Lewis, possess—communicates with the viewer viscerally. It is one of many great moments in this film, but perhaps in its simplicity and humanity the most profound. It is certainly the most hopeful.
This moment exemplifies the thematic elements at the core of There Will Be Blood, which is loosely based on Upton Sinclair's Oil! In addition to being a family drama (minus the family, more or less), There Will Be Blood does something rarely seen in American film: it perfectly explicates the two impulses that founded our nation and sees them out to their logical conclusion. Of course, the Enlightenment-influenced revolutionaries of the late-eighteenth century founded our government. But the Puritans who preceded them set the cultural standard that has persisted to this day, and they operated on two drives: religious extremism and capitalism. Over time, these elements became sometimes isolated and even set at odds against each other. Both of these factors are at work in There Will Be Blood, separated out but still insinuating themselves within and around each other, their volatile equilibrium threatening to give way. Although Daniel Plainview displays an open contempt for the rampant Pentecostal Protestantism that grips many of the people around him, he is not by any means a godless character. A different kind of enthusiasm--an entirely more terrestrial one--possesses him. The rituals of the oil economy are the binding ties of his church.
Plainview proselytizes in evenly measured, plainspoken terms when he comes to a new town to deliver his pitch about how he is the best man to take control of their underground resources. He is convincing enough, knowledgeable in his trade, perhaps even a fair trader early on. But Plainview is near monomaniacal in his drive, of the same ilk as Captain Ahab; a landlubber, however, Plainview is perhaps closer to Thomas Sutpen from William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! When Plainview buys out parcel after parcel of land to pursue his ambition of building a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean, we come to see Manifest Destiny acted out in miniature. This makes There Will Be Blood achieve a kind of American-ness in a way that Moby Dick achieves only metaphorically. America is about geography. Sutpen understands that, and Plainview understands it as well. For Plainview, it is not enough to merely own the land--he has to suck it dry. Still, the similarities to Melville obtain, and the image of oil-men washing their hands in crude oil in this film seems clearly to allude to the crew of the Pequod washing their hands in spermacetti oil.
The primary threat to Plainview's livelihood is initially the earth itself: it takes a good bit of work to get that bubbling crude started, and once it spouts the stuff can hardly be contained. This is man versus the elements. A new threat emerges, however, to counter Plainview's hold on the ground: the threat is not religion itself but rather one particular minister, whose ambition rivals that of Plainview himself. Along parallel lines, Day-Lewis's spectacular performance as Plainview is almost upstaged at times by the antics of Paul Dano, who plays not only the preacher Eli Sunday but also (briefly) Eli's brother Paul. The twinness comes to full effect only at the end of the film, when prophet becomes confused with profit, and we are given a clearer vision of how things truly are. (In fact, I wasn't sure that "Paul" was not simply an alias that Eli used until I saw both names listed separately in the credits.) Eli is an excellent raver, and the scene in which he performs an inspired act of faith-healing upon an old woman is, as Plainview puts it afterward when paying respects to the preacher, "a goodamn hell of a show."
The central conflict then that takes over the story is that between Plainview and Sunday--between capitalism and religious extremism, that is--and the central scene of the film is Plainview's reluctant baptism into the church. Sunday wants Plainview for his church--and he wants Plainview's money for his church. Plainview clearly regards it all as superstition, but Sunday gets his way. Plainview wants land; church members own it. Sunday cannot take Plainview's soul--it seems that he might not have one--but he can get what he wants, which is a nice show in front of the congregation. This is one of the few well-lit scenes in the film, the light provided by an open-air window in the shape of a cross behind Sunday's alter. Plainview's baptism is real and fake at the same time, an honest but forced statement of his transgressions, a washing in the light and in clean water--not oil, for once. Plainview clearly isn't saved.
The emotional core of the film--since Plainview's emotive range is so clearly limitied--is Plainview's adoptive son, H.W. The relationship between father and son is the only thing that humanizes this driven man in a way that enables us to identify with him. H.W. (Dillon Freasier) is taciturn to begin with, eager to assist his father, and (especially in context--he doesn't have much competition) altogether endearing. His interaction with Eli's little sister Mary is the only touch of romance, innocent as it is, in an otherwise nearly sexless film. When H.W. loses his hearing in an oil derrick eruption and subsequently starts to act out on his frustrations, the viewer becomes distraught, not only out of sympathy for H.W. but also because we know that he is the only thing keeping Plainview at bay. The question is whether the adoptive bond is strong enough to withhold the scalding mania that Plainview holds inside his head.
What does Daniel Plainview want? To some extent, this question cannot be answered. Anderson's film is remarkable in part for its retroactive perspective. Plainview forcefully and accurately embodies the attitudes behind turn-of-the-century Realism, and as such he is a pre-Freudian creature who does not know or even wish to know the forces that drive him so relentlessly. One thing that is clear, though, is that he--again, like Thomas Sutpen--wants family. More accurately, perhaps, he feels the absence of it, and true to the title there is a growing, parasitic suspicion in Plainview's mind that if there is not blood between kin there is not kin. This suspicion seems to take over at the end, and when Plainview disowns H.W., we see the worst in him. Plainview is too devoid of tenderness, it seems, to marry and father his own offspring, or for that matter even to consort with the employees of a brothel when he briefly finds himself in one.
The film includes one lamentable aesthetic mistake, aside from any objections we might have to the film's ending. Plainview’s killing of a man who claimed to be his brother—and who got away with it for some time—is distracting. Yes, Plainview felt more than cheated—he was wounded to the core by the very theme that afflicts him throughout the film, his lack of family. He has no blood ties to anyone else in the film, it turns out. In essence, though, the problem here is that this act detracts from the viewer's focus: we wait for fall-out, but none ever comes. Perhaps the lack of reaction merely shows that Plainview can commit murder and then never let it trouble him again. This act diminishes the impact of the things around it, though. It is clear a few moments earlier that Plainview determines that the man is a fake. There might be better reactions here that don't disturb the narrative momentum so much. This is the only verifiable moment when Anderson shows a lack of appreciation for the value of subtlety in this film. Sometimes understatement is better, which is a lesson that few American filmmakers seem to understand. Otherwise, though, in this film, it is a lesson that P. T. Anderson has mastered, taking in as he does the colors, the landscapes, and the subdued pacing of Hollywood's maverick directors of the 1970s.
The end of the film marks a major shift in tone, from elegiac American realism a la Terrence Malick to a Scorcese-esque grotesquerie of violence. The shift may be a mis-step, but once the new tone is set, it is consistently developed, at least, and artfully executed.
The big question that the film leaves us with is this: What's next for P.T. Anderson? (Another question is what's next for Day-Lewis, who makes few films but is, for my money, the best performer making the rounds these days.) To say that this film is something of a departure for Anderson is understatement. Not that earlier films such as Hard Eight or Boogie Nights were bad, but there is nothing in them that suggests that Anderson had a film like this inside of his head waiting to get out. Though There Will Be Blood might stop just shy of indelible classic, it is a powerful cinematic endeavor. If Anderson persists with films on par with this one--which achieves a kind of timelessness in its universality--legends will emerge. What did Shakespeare do in the 1580s? What did Robert Johnson, who had been a lackluster guitarist in his earlier days, do to acquire his masterful mature style? Story has it that Johnson made a pact with the devil. Anderson's devil is Daniel Plainview. Let's hope that they keep dealing.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Satan Is Real: Milton, Shelley, and the Louvin Brothers
The story behind the cover of the Louvin Brothers' 1960 Satan Is Real album is the stuff of country music/folk-art myth--it's like something out of a Flannery O'Connor story come to life. Ira Louvin soaked old tires in kerosene, buried them in rocks, set them on fire, propped up a hand-painted twelve-foot devil, and stood in pristine white with his brother Charlie while the photographer snapped pictures--and while the heat from the flames caused the rocks around the brothers to crack and split like real brimstone. The point: the devil is real, sin is real. Satan Is Real.When you hear the Louvin Brothers sing, you're tempted to believe in the reality of the devil, no matter your religious persuasion or lack thereof. But in fact, the Satan depicted here was only plywood, and despite Ira Louvin's bad behavior (he was the rounder, and brother Charlie the teetotaler; Ira knew all too well that sin was real) this fallen angel doesn't have much depth. Not so the Satan of John Milton's Paradise Lost.
In Paradise Lost, Milton strived to create something remarkable--something "unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." Not only was the fusion of classical epic and Christian tradition untried, no one had ever before endeavored to parse out the dimensions of Satan's character in the way Milton had. Marlowe's Mephistopheles, for instance, simply delights in evil, and that is that. He is a walking embodiment of the idea of evil, as all good devils had been up to that point. Milton's project, to "justify the ways of God to men," required that he indicate the devil as the source of the first fall from grace experienced by "our grand parents." That is, Satan, in the exercise of his own free will, had to corrupt Adam and Eve, who acted also on the premise of their own free will. Out of this situation will emerge God's greatest triumph: the redemption of downfallen humankind through His "Infinite goodness, grace, and mercy."
For all of this to work, though, Satan must be a compelling and convincing tempter. He must possess depth of character. Satan must be real, or at least as real as Hamlet--which is pretty real. Like Hamlet, Satan is complex, convincing, and--if you can conceive of such a thing--morally ambiguous. That is why Milton's Satan, who through the poet's liberal imaginative faculties fills in the blanks left by the Bible, engages our imaginations and at times perhaps our sympathies.
As a thinker, Milton was something that is inconceivable to many of us today: he was both a religious extremist and a rationalist. Moses (invoked in Book I of Paradise Lost as the author of the Pentateuch) was obviously not a rationalist. Milton planned to remedy that situation by rationally explicating the problem of evil as part of his larger project. Paradise Lost is a logical argument for God's rightness, and only in an era of burgeoning rationality would a poet feel so compelled to explore Satan in the way Milton did. The Enlightenment, a later era that took the rationality of Milton's day several steps further, replaced religious extremism with judicious humanism. A yet later era, the Romantic era, replaced this judicious humanism with a belief in passion and the imagination; the Romantics by and large said to hell with rationality as well. What happens when you take away both the rationality behind Satan's characterization and the religious impulses that automatically make Satan the would-be ursurper and God the legitimate source of power? You get Percy Shelley, who claimed in A Defense of Poetry that "Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost." If you think that sounds like crazy talk, then you haven't read Book I of Paradise Lost very closely.
Milton was not quite "of the Devil's party," as Blake claimed, but he might as well have been. Of course, Milton could not have anticipated the attitudes of later eras and how they might transform the concept of his wicked Archangel. Skipping over the parts about Satan's devotion to the "study of revenge" and his "immortal hate" (and is it not sensible to hate a tyrant?--for Satan, that's all God was), we are left with a being whose appeal to the Romantic poets is all-too apparent: a powerful figure with an "unconquerable will" and "courage never to submit or yield." Satan embraces adversity and strives to find a way to overcome. Satan's grand statement to Beelzebub, when the chief of the fallen angels hails the abysmal landscape of Hell as his new home, is among the most powerful testaments to the power of mind and imagination in all of literature: "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." (And is there not an echo of Hamlet here, who could get stuck in a nutshell and count himself "a king of infinite space"? Satan's character in Paradise Lost is far more sensible and consistent.) Satan continues: "Here at least / We shall be free ... / Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav'n." Satan is no rebel without a cause, especially given the fact that God in Paradise Lost is a real flat bore. Milton accepts it as a given that his audience would not conceive of the possibility of seeing God as anything but the good guy. He didn't count on the coming of a genuine anti-Christ like Shelley.
All of this raises a fundamental question about the value of literature: does the meaning of a text emerge from the author's intentions, or from the reader's interpretation? Jaded citizens of a postmodern landscape that we are, we are unlikely to believe anymore that it somehow springs magically from the text itself. Perhaps it's not magic, but just like the tree falling in the forest without anyone there to hear it fall, the book on the shelf doesn't own any meaning unless somebody reads it. Regardless, there's no doubt that Shelley's interpretation of Satan is itself a feat of great imagination, and not one without legitimate grounds. For Shelley, at least, Satan was truly real.
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