The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
It’s difficult not to resent this movie — and Orson Welles. He apparently made it because he needed cash to get costumes out of hock for a theatre production of Around the World in 80 Days that never actually happened. His attitude to the film was petulant; he never bothered to take the time to make the plot comprehensible, apparently, and the studio had to cut the self-consciously theatrical final scene by 20 minutes — it’s hard to imagine any reason for it to last 25 — other than Welles’ arrogance. The philosophy spouted by the ‘black Irish’ leading man (played by Welles himself) is unabashedly nihilistic in an adolescent way. There seems to be no evidence Welles cared more about this film than he did about showing off. It strikes me that Citizen Kane may have been a magnificent accident, as there is something evidently self-important about it too, but perhaps in the battle between Welles’ talent and his conceit, inspiration won — but only in that particular case. I am not convinced of Welles’ genius — only of his pretension. It’s hard to remove from your brain the image of that prodigiously fat man eating himself to death between guest appearances on The Lucy Show — even when you learn he was trying to finance his ultimate filmic vision of Shakespeare (Chimes at Midnight -- but please remember that when they made it, some critic actually mentioned it was the first time an actor was actually too fat to play Falstaff). Much ink has been spilled over Orson Welles, but Pauline Kael effectively proved Citizen Kane was written as much by Joe Mankiewicz as Welles himself. And after watching him smirk his way through The Lady from Shanghai I’m starting to believe Welles was simply a narcissistic poseur who's gotten away with all his overpraised shenanigans for far too long. The only thing interesting about The Lady from Shanghai is the decadence of the romantic situation: a old, unattractive, disabled man hires a young, handsome, virile one to live with himself and his stunning wife on their yacht, all the while constantly alluding -- in not so veiled terms -- to the possibility that the young man and his wife might have an affair. And yes Welles does have one lovely speech — the ‘shark’ speech — all about that decadence: “Then the beasts set to eatin' each other. In their frenzy, they ate at themselves. You could feel the lust of murder like a wind stinging your eyes, and you could smell the death, reeking up out of the sea.” But what does it all come to? Welles offers nothing to replace this corruption other than the tired cliche of world weary cynicism. It’s no wonder that his work appeals to straight young men just out of film school — most of them are pretentious wankers anyway; Welles’ purported genius helps them justify their own self-adulation. There is something heterosexual about any kind of mastery. It’s why I don’t like Joyce, and why Kubrick gets on my nerves. Yes, we are amazed at your technical wizardry, and it’s something every straight young male artist can aspire to, but the fact that James Joyce knew thousands of languages and that Ulysses is really Homer’s Odyssey -- only with thousands of veiled meanings alluded to in every precious word -- doesn’t make it a great novel. I’ve only read one chapter of Ulysses and it was the ‘brothel’ chapter— which I had no idea was set in a brothel until somebody told me. A brothel scene should have tits, ass and hopefully a penis or two, and it must turn you on. Give me Charles Bukowski — so self-deprecating and frankly inept that you certainly couldn’t accuse him of being good at anything, least of all, life. As soon as artists talk about perfection and working for years on their craft, I turn off. I actually like Kerouac —because he was a deeply flawed human being who displayed those flaws as often as he could, and I would prefer any sort of bilge coming out of his typewriter to a carefully crafted sentence by Nabokov any day. I know all this can and will be used against me; it serves a lousy writer like me terribly well to whine about perfection, doesn’t it? But any writer who actually thinks they’re ‘good’ either doesn’t know anything about writing, or is not aware of ‘humility’; a timeworn, manipulative, rhetorical technique (absolutely necessary). And it doesn’t matter that the narrator of Ulysses is a simple working-class man who we actually witness taking a shit — on a toilet — because that scene is handled with such ‘mastery’ that we have no idea what he is doing anyway. Let’s face it Ulysses can be studied in school because it’s profundity trumps its obscenity. And Shakespeare’s work is written basically in a foreign language, so we can ignore the filth. (But I assure you it’s there, and was quite evident to theatregoers at the time, and not just the much vaunted ‘groundlings’-- as everyone was obsessed with bodily functions back then, including Queen Elizabeth herself.) Remember there were no bedrooms in Renaissance houses, so regular moms and dads screwed in front of their children. And there was no such thing as the middle classes (thank God!), which will be the death of us, and the death of culture; what is palatable to the bourgeoisie can be studied in a classroom, or released as part of the Criterion Collection, so there’s no ‘good parts.’ I’m very happy not to be a part of Canada’s literary scene, let me tell you, and it is only very rarely that I get a letter from some high school student (usually it’s a young woman) who found some renegade teacher willing to teach her my play Drag Queens on Trial — God knows how the obscenity in that play slipped through the cracks (somebody was obviously asleep at the switch). That’s why I read only novels by women, they are not afraid to be unpretentious and entertaining, and they talk about small things, not big ones. It is through detail that profundity — if it exists — will appear, somewhat by accident, through shy observance of that which is all around us, which has not been chosen primarily for its significance, or the universality and magnificence of it’s allusiveness. The sun keeps going in and out today, and the patios are open. We still have difficulty touching and hugging each other though, and those who have boundary issues —or fear they are not ‘good people’ — have a mask to assuage them. It’s going to be hot though, and the sun simply demands we take everything off, and the mask must be first to go.
