A Kiss Before Dying (1965)
An odd morning, and an unsettling film. Too much excitement in my life right now, organising a reading online of one of my plays, feeling like a bit of a traitor for doing that, theatre should not be online, I don’t want to have any part of that — but I want my play read aloud. Then A Kiss Before Dying led me down a bit of a wormhole. It’s a movie that — under present circumstances — is spookily prescient for all of us. I don’t want to sound too pretentious, but when I start a play or a novel or pretty well any writing, there’s something weird going on because I often feel I am writing my future, due to the number of times my own work has come to predict incidents in my life. Which brings me to Robert Wagner and A Kiss Before Dying. It’s a damn good film — if you can handle all the mediocre acting. It must have been cast by the ubiquitous Hollywood agent Henry Willson, as two of his protégées — Jeffrey Hunter and Robert Wagner — star. Though they are passable actors, for me there’s nothing special about them except their beauty. Virginia Leith — who plays the rich sister that Robert Wagner does not successfully kill — was also the disembodied head in The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. (It’s hard to look at her without thinking of that.) Only Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor acquit themselves well. Mary Astor is a surprising gift — she would have been nearly 60 when the movie was made, but she is still majestic and awe inspiring, and possessed of the same strength and honesty that was so appealing in The Maltese Falcon — and of the kind of beauty that radiates from inside. Joanne Woodward is almost as good as Shelley Winters in An American Tragedy — playing the requisite role of the not too attractive rich girl who has snagged herself a gift in the slender, smooth-limbed Wagner. She actually plays Dorothy (Dory) as if she were an annoying goof, and you feel Dory is the type of person who might drive you crazy after 5 minutes -- as she has no self esteem and is constantly whining in a ‘don’t you like me?” sort of way. Since Woodward portrays Wagner’s pregnant girlfriend, you completely understand why he wants to throw her off a building. Still, the moment when Wagner does so is still incredibly chilling — especially in the light of present news stories about him. But after Woodward is dead there are only boring actors left really, and it’s all about the police tracking down Wagner before he kills Woodward’s sister Virginia Leith. Ira Levin’s obsession with unwanted pregnancy seems to foreshadow Roe vs. Wade; this movie seems like a dry run for Rosemary’s Baby. The women in these movies are treated as containers for babies. Did seeing Rosemary’s Baby influence people to pass abortion laws? Or was it just a prescient prophecy written by a writer with his ear to the collective unconscious? One can’t answer that unless one believes art is magic — which brings me to Robert Wagner and this film. Now I was never very fond of Natalie Wood as an actress, but I always found her death suspicious. And just recently — i.e. this month — Vanity Fair has been digging for dirt, and several people are stepping forward with evidence to suggest there were bruises, she was in a fight, there were overheard harsh words — (we know that already as Christopher Walken, who was strangely also on the boat, heard them). Perhaps we will never know, but the fact is that Robert Wagner waited more than two hours to report his ex-wife’s death. This seems at the least a mini-crime, if not a confession of guilt. To see him prancing around in A Kiss Before Dying, so sleek and slender, and then solemnly kill people — seems to indicate something. Perhaps it's related to the ‘nothingness’ of his screen presence - which gives us absolutely no insight into the mind of a criminal (as does the tortured Iago). He simply has the efficient stealth of a psychopath. It’s probably just his lousy acting, and lack of a centre— perhaps as a person. But if art is what I think it is, then Wagner is guilty of the murder of his ex-wife in real life. Did Ira Levin (and the the director Gerd Oswald) know when they cast him that he would some day kill Natalie Wood? But I’m talking about something else. Art has a strange power, and we shouldn’t fool with it. I remember when Maggie Huculak asked me to remove the peacock feathers off the set of my production of my Playmurder production so many years ago -- as peacock feathers are unlucky -- I didn’t argue, I just obeyed. Oscar Wilde in The Decay of Lying (my Bible) says no one knew about the fogs of London until Whistler painted them. His theory has been confirmed by a vanload of post-structuralists; our reality is created in our minds before it exists in the real. When I first wrote Drag Queens on Trial I was not a drag queen, I had to get the actors to explain drag to me. I thought I was only interested in drag as a metaphor -- but maybe I was being driven by something else. Similarly, I wasn’t gay when I wrote City Nights, a play that has a long scene with two quarreling superficial homosexuals, (one of them played by not-yet-a-famous-Canadian-designer Glenn Davidson ) and I soon turned into a quarreling homosexual myself. My book Sad Old Faggot turned out to be autobiographical, and I’ve written another novel (just killed by the pandemic) which successfully predicted my excommunication from Buddies way before it happened. I think that’s what artists do; they create reality. And I’m not saying I am such an artist, just that I’m trying -- perhaps clumsily -- to be one. We ignore art at our peril. Perhaps when we talk of censorship, i.e. excising bad words or evil concepts, it’s simply beside the point, what we are really afraid of is arts power to -- not only read our minds -- but create them. Wilde didn’t believe that there were no 'misty days in London when you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face' before Whistler painted fogs, what he meant was that the notion, then the obsession, then the paradigm of 'foggy London' did not exist before that. It’s clearer when we think of Foucault’s observation that it was only after Tissot coined the term masturbation that people began masturbating. You’ll be pleased to know that for years people were touching themselves ‘down there’ and thought nothing of it, until it became a ‘thing.’ And yes, without Outbreak, Deranged and Panic in the Streets (interesting title for today) we would not have the present state of affairs. It’s something to think about. Or maybe not, because up there in your head, you may be creating, perhaps without knowing it, what will happen tomorrow.
