Human Automata

The modern concierge's daughter who fulfills her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. --George Bernard Shaw

It disappoints that the classic facial beauty Faye Dunaway emanates on screen leads with few exceptions to mere dilatory satisfaction. It may be the limitation of her range and roles operating off of each other, or that she never again had a director like Polanski, since Polanski seemed able to illicit a vulnerable tigress, a predatory feline who leaps forth as her hauteur fractures under pressure. The raging porcelain never quite delivers the suggestion of her intensity and emotional investment, once you look beyond Chinatown, except for her supporting role as Yolande fourteen years ago. She was a tour de force of conviction as a queen mother under duress in the face of the dissimulation of Franco national identity, despite the fact that The Messenger disserviced both the legend and the veracity of Joan d'Arc, a film of minute ensemble moments which could not carry the whole affair. Dustin Hoffman comes late in the day to post-modern fragmentation.

This does not detract from Dunaway's glamour; it only points to the juxtaposition between the promise of a glamorous figure and the expectations of catharsis within a performance. Marilyn Monroe had the same problem but conveniently overdosed into hagiography. Dunaway outlasted herself into the contempt of the familiar figure always on the verge of ferocious histrionics, devoid of climax and exhausted pleasure. She barely fakes it with Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. There is the glimpse of her breast, a diminutive curve in a room festooned under studio lighting, yet the erotic tension, repressed to the imagination, is nearly unbearable. Her contemporary stills evoke the octogenarian Mae West of my childhood, the capped teeth now garish, skeletal, somehow still beautiful. "I have completed a work," I wonder if this is how she settles her accounts with the residual impact of her rise during the decade of America's militant radicalism, a decade neither all that anarchist nor as transformative as is supposed among popular sentiment.

Two Jakes

I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.-- Claire Messud

There is a scene toward the climax in Chinatown, brilliantly staged by Polanski. Mrs. Mulwray drives Jake to the sanitarium which Noah Cross utilizes for his cover up, and in the foreground we see a resident of the sanitarium sexually harass a nurse who looks like a horse's scrotum, and the nurse, care worn and world weary, bids the octogenarian to have a seat and finish his meal. It is nearly a Shakespearean moment. The Nicholson Dunaway Huston trifecta bisected by the lewd romper room antics, antics which offer cues about Roman fucking nubile adolescents in puberty, and yet, Polanski's entitlement with his alleged victim is a footnote, an inconvenience, even as he might have been my psychotic stepfather, in my poem "Broken China" I am crying out daddy daddy help me, wishing my father had killed my mother's second husband, fearful of the reverse but unsure. Stuart was brutal, but my father had a more calculated Roman menace. Should this woman be a footnote due to Polanski's genius? That woman in India, I have to close my mind to her trauma. Many of us would; many of us do. What that must have felt like, gang raped and then internal hemorrhaging, an iron rod to violate her. Violate is too nuanced for her agony. Her uterus was likely perforated. A footnote.

My father will never know how much hatred I feel that I failed him, that the IRS my mother and his son destroyed the life he deserved. He never talks to me but now that his third wife is dying, now he speaks. He made me almost wealthy in an invalid's barren and bleak institutional environment and this is my evil, created my evil, that human life is so expendable. The veterinarian whom Moyers filmed openly discussed euthanizing  himself with horse tranquilizer during the brief time he could operate a power chair. In the last segment, he pleaded with his wife to let him go, recumbent, shrunken, clothed in a polo shirt. We do not realize the profound impact of the photographic medium, the saturation of prognosis, treatment, the mechanized technology with which we contain disease. The majority of my life was spent in a hospital, and then I force myself to watch it in a teleplay funded by Congress to educate the American public on the brutality of modern medicine.

Fruitful Multiplication

"Do you understand, or is it too tough for you?" -- Faye Dunaway

A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.

I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief  that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.

Key Largo Aside

The thought occurred to me and I thought I'd note it anyway as I am winding down toward my presleep reading, that John Huston is my favorite film director, and that because he is a pessimist, if not downright misanthropic as I am myself. Chinatown is a very dark film not just because the incest leads to inbreeding, but because it signifies a basic truth about those with real power. They win, and this is true whether or not you see a Gandhi or a Cassie James rise to the surface. I know Polanski directed, but Huston had some influence on the price we pay that Polanski exposes, and the film is rare for me in that I like Faye Dunaway and Nicholson both, which is not always the case in other venues, and by the way, for those of you familiar with my anti-CIL stance, I mean what I say about spending the rest of my life to fight to dismantle them, and if necessary, I will use Adapt's tactics, and break the law to get this ball rolling. I am not their only critic, but I am a zealot in my belief that they represent the worst aspects of socialist corruption, and I want this removed as a stain on the American soul. I hope the right will join with me on this.