A Decade of Archives 8: 2005

This is the eighth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

2005 was a big year around these here parts, as the blog was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. I went to the World Fantasy Convention and wrote up a report of that experience here. It was an exciting time.

From my perspective now, though, 2005 doesn't seem like all that great a year for actual blog posts,. There are lot of them — 2005 is second only to 2004 in the number of individual posts — but most of them are quick links, bits of news, etc. The stuff that I now will just throw on Twitter, or ignore altogether.

This is reassuring, actually, because I often look back on the number of posts in 2005 and 2004 with fondness and even a certain awe — how did I ever write so much? (My life was no less busy and crazy back then; indeed, it was busier and crazier.) I often fear the blog is lying fallow, victim of my other work. But if anything, the number of substantial, substantive posts here has increased over the years.

Getting back into the oldest of the archives brings about mixed feelings. A bit of nostalgia, certainly, occasionally a moment where I'm impressed with something I wrote, but mostly a lot of cringing. There's a youthful enthusiasm, a youthful naivete to a lot of it that just makes me want to hide under a table. I was 29 and 30 in 2005, and yet often wrote like a precocious 12-year-old. (Eight years from now, if I'm lucky I'll be able to say my writings in 2013 remind me of a precocious 20-year-old.)

I'm not going to go back and laugh at my younger self. The archives are there for you to explore and chuckle through all you want. Instead, I'd just like to note a few posts that don't seem to me entirely worth sending down into the memory hole quite yet...

Harold Pinter (1930-2008)

Harold Pinter has died.

Here are the last words from one of his last plays, Celebration:

Silence.

The WAITER stands alone.

WAITER

When I was a boy my grandfather used to take me to the edge of the cliffs and we'd look out to sea. He bought me a telescope. I don't think they have telescopes anymore. I used to look through this telescope and sometimes I'd see a boat. The boat would grow bigger through the telescopic lens. Sometimes I'd see people on the boat. A man, sometimes, and a woman, or sometimes two men. The sea glistened.

My grandfather introduced me to the mystery of life and I'm still in the middle of it. I can't find the door to get out. My grandfather got out of it. He got right out of it. He left it behind him and he didn't look back.

He got that absolutely right.

And I'd like to make one further interjection.

He stands still.

Slow fade.

Pinter and Losey

Soon after Harold Pinter won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, I thought about writing something about his films, because I've seen quite a few, and read many of his screenplays. But I hadn't done any of that recently, so I wanted to refresh myself before spouting off in public.

I decided to start reviewing Pinter's film work with some of his earliest movies: the three directed by Joseph Losey. I own an old VHS tape of The Servant, and was able to borrow a now-out-of-print DVD of Accident and a VHS of The Go-Between. I watched them in the order they were made, and then read the scripts (in Five Screenplays). Each film is based on a book, but of them I have only read Nicholas Mosley's Accident.

The Servant may be the best introduction to Pinter that exists. Apparently, both Pinter and Losey had separately thought of adapting Robin Maugham's novella to the screen, and through various negotiations, were able to bring their efforts together and get the film produced. Michael Billington, in The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, says of the Pinter/Losey collaborations:

Both were natural outsiders, both were steeped in theatre, and both viewed the British class sytem, a constant factor in all their work, with a mixture of moral disapproval and grudging fascination. ... But Pinter and Losey were also sufficiently dissimilar to make a perfect team. Pinter's verbal economy checks and balances Losey's baroque tendencies, while Losey's visual stylishness simplifies Pinter's exactness and precision...

Billington was discussing The Go-Between there, but his insights apply equally to all three films.

The Servant is the most disturbing of the films, the only one that delivers a visceral kick, the only one that lingers, for me, emotionally. The Go-Between is extraordinary in many ways, but it's an intellectual extraordinariness, and the emotional effect is to produce a certain wistfulness and melancholy in the viewer rather than the deep revulsion that comes at the end of The Servant. Some people have referred to the end of The Servant as tragic, but it's not -- the characters are repulsive, reprehensible, grotesque, pathetic. The ending is both the strongest part of the movie and its greatest failing, because it is entirely nihilistic: unattractive, self-absorbed people become debauched, debilitated, destroyed. It's fascinating to watch as it happens, but it leaves us with nothing. In some ways, this was a useful corrective at the time to certain sentimental aesthetics, and it was a logical extension of the sorts of things attributed to the "Angry Young Men", but now it can feel shallow. (I have similar, though stronger, reservations about Five Easy Pieces, but that's another topic entirely...)

Accident has a couple of exquisite scenes, but I don't particularly care for it on the whole, though many people consider it a masterpiece. There are plenty of misjudgments in Pauline Kael's review of the film, but she also hit some targets that needed hitting: "In Accident," she said, "it shouldn't be that difficult to make at least the accident itself relate to the characters and plot. Nothing in the movie would be much changed if there were no accident (the only revelation -- that the philosophy don would 'take advantage' of a girl in shock -- isn't convincing anyway)." This is exactly the opposite of the book, because in the book the accident presents the central moral problem. It's a philosophical novel with a melodramatic plot to move us from one speculation to another; the movie preserves the melodrama but dispenses with the philosophy. (And in the book the don doesn't "take advantage" of the girl at all -- and that he doesn't is an important moment, an important insight into his character. Mosley chronicles his discussions of this moment with Pinter in his autobiography, Efforts at Truth.)

Kael gets to the heart of the problems with the film's narrative by picking up on Pinter's response when asked what the movie "meant": "I have no explanation for anything I do at all," Kael reports him as saying, and then continues:

This might give the impression that the movie has been written out of the unconscious, but it is so carefully plotted that you can watch the preparations being made and chart how each event or reaction was led up to.

Reading the script of Accident, it occurred to me that what I dislike most about the movie is how efficient it is: every line and image has a purpose. Of course, that might seem to be what good writing is -- no wasted material -- but good writing also needs to appear less mechanical, less determined to connect all its own dots. There needs to be more room for messiness, as there is in so much of Pinter's (and Losey's) other work, or else we end up with a hypothesis or a graph, not art. (Losey's messiness was often not to his benefit; Pinter's is usually the messiness of a conundrum, which is more palatable than the messiness of a mess.)

The Go-Between is far more satisfying, and is in many ways the best film of the three, even if I prefer The Servant for its shock value (and the way it plays with the overt homoeroticism of the relationship between servant and master). The ways the narrative, voiceover, and imagery upset the chronology remain interesting, even in these post-Pulp-Fiction-and-Memento days, because they are subtle, ghostly, and essential to the protagonist's development. The Go-Between also seems to have had an effect on Pinter's playwrighting -- there is a noticeable difference between his post-Go-Between plays and the earlier ones, both in their depth of situations and in their handling of time and memory. Indeed, Betrayal might not have been possible without The Go-Between. (The Go-Between works better as a film than the Betrayal movie, though, because plenty of techniques that are effective in live theatre feel arch and clunky on film, despite strong performances. I've found Betrayal to be both moving and funny on stage, but was less enamored of the backwards-chronology when I saw the film, because it felt somehow heavy-handed, while the chronological tricks in The Go-Between play upon both our senses of sight and sound [via the voiceovers, which don't match with the images] in a mysterious and unobtrusive way, and are therefore richly cinematic.)

The Pinter/Losey (or Losey/Pinter) films came in the beginning and early middle of Pinter's career as a writer, and the beginning of his career as a screenwriter. Later scripts, such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, are better crafted and more impressive, but I've not yet seen a film Pinter wrote where it felt like the director was as strong a collaborator with Pinter as Losey was.

For anyone interested in Pinter's screenwriting, Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process by Steven H. Gale is useful and illuminating, despite the author's occasional moments of fannishness, repetitive prose, unjustified assumptions, and superficial analyses -- these are weaknesses, but nonetheless the book is filled with research and information about Pinter's writing process, which can be enlightening with regard to some of the choices he made in the scripts.

Political Pinter

I expect I'll have more to say about Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize, because I have admired his plays for a long time, but for now I just want to make a quick note about his politics. Pinter is an aggressively political man, though, and his controversial statements have made it relatively easy for some of the more ignorant and illiterate denizens of the American right wing to proclaim that Pinter won the Nobel for his political views. Pinter himself seems to think this could be true. And it could be. But it's irrelevant, because even if Pinter were a neo-Nazi, the fact is, he's one of the two or three most influential and enduring playwrights alive.

There are no irrefutable, objective ways to judge a writer's worth, and there will always be dissenters, because tastes vary. But the tests of time and influence are useful ones -- a writer who influences the work of other writers, and whose own work survives for multiple generations, has made a valuable contribution to literature, regardless of what any one person thinks of that writer's work. (I have an almost physical aversion to the plays of Arthur Miller, for instance. I think they're idiotic, manipulative, awkward, sentimental, tedious ... well, I could go on. But it would be absurd to deny that Miller was one of the major American playwrights of the twentieth century, one whose work had a profound influence on writers, actors, directors.)

Pinter's great contribution has been to show that the linguistic minimalism that Beckett took to its farthest extremes could be applied to the traditional domestic drama, and this melding of two seemingly contradictory modes of writing created a wealth of new visions for theatrical art. For know-nothings like Roger Kimball and Stephen Schwartz, it is inconceivable that a flagrantly left-wing writer could actually be any good. According to Schwartz "Pinter has produced no significant work for the stage in 40 years", which is simply wrong. Pinter's early plays were lightning bolts, but his later work includes such masterpieces as Betrayal, Moonlight, and Ashes to Ashes -- three of the most significant plays to be written in English in the past few decades. Betrayal alone would be enough to solidify any writer's reputation.

Pinter's political views fuel his work, but he has, for the most part, restricted his polemical impulses to his hideous poetry. It would be wrong to ignore Pinter's politics, but it is equally wrong to suggest that the only people who can appreciate his plays are those who agree with his politics, while those who disagree must pretend he is not a significant writer.

For more on this subject, see Alicublog. (via About Last Night)

Quote for the Day

REBECCA: Guess where I went after tea? To the cinema. I saw a film.
DEVLIN: Oh? What?
REBECCA: A comedy.
DEVLIN: Uh-huh? Was it funny? Did you laugh?
REBECCA: Other people laughed. Other members of the audience. It was funny.
DEVLIN: But you didn't laugh?
REBECCA: Other people did. It was a comedy. There was a girl...you know...and a man. They were having lunch in a smart New York restaurant. He made her smile.
DEVLIN: How?
REBECCA: Well...he told her jokes.
DEVLIN: Oh, I see.
REBECCA: And then in the next scene he took her on an expedition to the desert, in a caravan. She'd never lived in a desert before, you see. She had to learn how to do it.
Pause.
DEVLIN: Sounds very funny.

--from Ashes to Ashes
by Harold Pinter, Nobel laureate