Consumption

I've been a good consumer. Today, I forced myself to finish a book I've spent two weeks working my way through, and I've seen two movies in the last few days that have been meaning to see for years.

The book was Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. I started this within a few days of finishing Our Man in Havana, but found it considerably denser than that book. The plot - which concerns a Mexican state where a revolution has made one its goals the forcible liquidation or assimilation (by forcing them to marry and cease practicing) of all priests - is fairly tangled, and the atmosphere is often grim. The plot moves in bursts - lengthy scenes of dialogue between characters (many of whom only reappear, if at all, much later on in the story) are interspersed with sudden passages of time, ranging from several days to several weeks. It's a far cry from Our Man in Havana, a book Greene wrote some 15 years later. That book has a light, rapid pace. The Power and the Glory is heavy on philosphy and religion; specifically, how a man can atone for his sins before the clock runs out on him. Or at least, that's what I think it's about - it's a book I could probably stand to re-read now that I know where the plot is going, paying more attention to the characters and the exchanges between them now. That's probably why it took me over a week to get through this*, while I read Our Man in Havana in 2 days. The Power and the Glory is full of wonderful passages like this one, which occurs when the protagonist - a priest on the run - has one of several encounters with his chief pursuer. Asked by his pursuer if the he still believes in miracles, the priest responds:

"Or, it's funny, isn't it? It isn't a case of miracles not happening -- it's just a case of people calling them something else. Can't you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn't breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart's not beating: he's dead. Then somebody gives him back his life, and they all - what's the expression? - reserve their opinion. They won't say it's a miracle, because that's a word they don't like. Then it happens again and again perhaps - because God's about on earth - and they say: there aren't miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say science has disproved a miracle."

Interestingly, one thing that helped me understand this book was that the previous owner had underlined several key passages and made notes on a few pages - clearly a better student than I ever was.

As for film:

I finally saw Velvet Goldmine. I was a giant - giant - David Bowie fan in the mid-1990s. At the peak of my fan-dom, I saw him perform live 6 times between 1995 and 1997. I bought every CD, book, or magazine that featured Bowie. My college dorm was plastered with close to ten(!) Bowie posters during my senior year. Velvet Goldmine came out in 1998, and was an open semi-fictionalization of Bowie's rise to fame in the early 1970s, complete with analogues for Iggy Pop, Tony DeFries, and other figures from the period. Why I didn't see this movie the day it opened, I have no idea. I do remember that the filmmakers voice their unhappiness during the making of the film when Bowie refused them permission to use his songs in the film, and perhaps that's what kept me away. If so, it was a dumb reason. The movie soundtrack, as it stands, is loaded with material from the first Roxy Music record - mostly re-recorded in versions that hew close to the originals - and from Brian Eno's first two solo records, Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). They've also got a few T. Rex songs and Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" - which was produced and arranged by Bowie - as well as a few Stooges tracks. Finally, there are also a few original compositions, like "The Ballad of Maxwell Demon", that are fairly impressive Bowie songwriting impersonations c. 1972. My point being: I like the soundtrack. Being Bowie-less didn't hurt it.

As it turns out, the bigger reason to stay away is the sheer lack of focus in the film, which makes for a highly unsatisfactory ending. Christian Bale sleepwalks his way through the film as a reporter working in the mid-80s who is trying to learn what happened to Brian Slade (the Bowie facsimile) after he staged a phony assassination and retired in the mid-70s. Meanwhile, Bale's character is trying to resolve his own past - out of touch parents, finding his peers, the trauma of learning to apply glitter - at the same time. The film also spends some time on Slade's relationship with an Angie Bowie facsimile (played by Toni Collette) and an Iggy Pop/Kurt Cobain character (played by Ewan MacGregor). Oh yeah, and Oscar Wilde. Sound confusing? It is. For starters, it's not clear who the main character is - I'd say it's Bale's, but he does so little emoting it's hard to notice when he's on screen. In fact, the only time I could really pay attention was when Collette or MacGregor were on screen; both give broad, emotive performances, particularly MacGregor, who improves everything he appears in (well, OK, not everything).

I should have known what I was for by the opening sequence, in which aliens leave an infant Oscar Wilde, via their spacecraft, on the doorstep of a British couple in 1854. (Yes, really). It was that kind of movie. But I did enjoy the concert sequences, as well as some of the meticulous attempts to mimic actual historical events - like MacGregor's character body-surfing a la Iggy, Brian Slade "going down"on his guitarist like Bowie did with Mick Ronson, and the early television appearances of Slade's band, looking uncannily like early Bowie promotional videos.

I wonder if fictionalizing rock-n-roll, while borrowing liberally from actual people and events, and trying to simultaneously infuse a deeper story (unlike the light That Thing You Do) is even a task that can be accomplished well. Velvet Goldmine reminded me uncannily of Grace of My Heart, another semi-fictionalized rock-n-roll movie, with similar (if not as extensive) storytelling problems.

The second film I saw this week was Gabriel Over the White House. This was easily an odder film than Velvet Goldmine, yet the core was much more compelling and the ideas - particularly as a historical piece - far more interesting to consider. Loosely, the plot concerns a recently-elected Depression-era US President, Judd Hammond, who at first glance appears to be solely a tool of his party, elected to conduct business as usual. But after a high-speed car accident, he returns from the brink of death transformed into a crusader for the public, and when he encounters resistence in DC, his solution is to wield his power ruthlessly, firing his cabinet, suspending Congress and installing himself as dictator, and using military tribunals to try and execute gangsters. He uses military force to coerce European and Asian nations into repaying their leftover debts from WWI and signing a major disarmament treaty. He organizes unemployed, disgruntled labor into a paramilitary "construction army".

Ready for the punchline? He's the hero! That's why this movie is a fascinating historical piece - because at no other time in US history, outside of the early years of the Depression, could a US President essentially embracing fascism be portrayed by a major film studio as anything other than a tyrant and villain. Gabriel Over the White House was made by William Randolph Hearst in 1932, and depending on which analysis you believe, it's either a reflection of Hearst's proto-fascist leanings (remember, Hitler hadn't achieved significant power yet in 1932 and Mussolini didn't seem so bad on his own) or his idealistic wish for a person like Franklin Roosevelt to succeed Herbert Hoover (as he would, several months later) and cut away the regulation and tradition that prevented the federal government from taking more significant action during the early years of the Depression. Either way, the film couldn't have been made at any other time and treated Hammond so heroically (it is strongly suggested that he undertakes his actions as a result of divine intervention - hence the title, although Gabriel himself never appears).

Of course, it suffers a lot of the weaknesses of old Hollywood films - stilted dialogue, tiny sets, unbelievable setups (I didn't realize gangsters could carry out drive-by shootings into the foyer of the White House) - and the characterization could be a lot better. But I was able to follow along for all 86 minutes a lot more enjoyably than the two hours of Velvet Goldmine.

On the same topic, I started a book today: It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis' 1936 novel about a fictional US Senator who establishes a dictatorship in the US. This time, he's the villain.


* Ultimately, I resorted to taking my copy of the book to a local Starbucks and forcing myself to read the last hundred or so pages in a single sitting, free of the distractions of home.