As I grow older—and this seems to just keep happening—I find that there’s very little that interests me so much in art and in life as paradox, those quandaries which can never quite be worked through, and can at most be handled by blocking out contradictory information through the willful adoption of blinders.
One of the pleasures of re-reading Pauline Kael’s collected criticism (see last week’s column) was to be recalled of her energetic-if-often-frustrating undertaking—abetted by unheard-of word counts—to describe how films, chaotic combinations of economic pressures, artistic deliberation, on-set happenstance, and audience reception that they are, run off in several different directions at once. Quantifying all of these simultaneous happenings being the analytical equivalent of herding cats.
A personal favorite example of the unpredictable alchemy which occurs in the passage from screenplay to screen comes from a “Making Of” DVD extra to the Criterion release of Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours. In it, Pialat, who acts in the film, describes the process of evaluating his own performance. He remembers re-watching takes, in some of which he can recall having been completely emotionally immersed in the scene, wholly sharing the emotions of his character; others he remembers as having been purely perfunctory. What Pialat notes is that, with full knowledge of which takes were “invested” and which were not, he often cannot tell the qualitative difference (Anyone who writes has probably experienced some variation on this phenomenon: True labor-of-love pieces can go unnoticed, while some dashed-off bit of piffle will be quoted to you for years.)
Here is but one facet of the fascinating phenomena which altogether make up the problem of intention in the arts. (As difficult to comprehend for those who create as those who discuss. There are a few things that no critic should ever write. One is “I think that…” or “I feel that…”; another is “Unintentionally funny”—what are you, clairvoyant?) Another item of recurring interest is what I call “The Lewis Paradox.”
The Lewis Paradox is named for Herschell Gordon Lewis, who went from making “nudie cutie” titillations in the early ‘60s to become the pioneer in “gore” filmmaking, beginning with 1963’s Blood Feast. Lewis’s longtime producer, David F. Friedman—who died in February of this year—was a midway huckster, a Southern carnie barker to the bone. Lewis himself was, as he has quite explicitly said, only out to make a buck—he had a background in marketing, a genius for swinging sponsorships, and when he lost his cornered market to other more stylish sickos, he dropped out of the film business entirely and began making a comfortable living speaking at sales seminars and authoring such horrors as Effective E-Mail Marketing and Open Me Now: Direct Mail Envelopes That Work.
What I think is particularly interesting about Blood Feast is that, however cynical the motives for its creation, it has an austere, hypnotic ceremonial quality and a stark perversity that can’t be so easily laughed away (Per yours truly’s dead earnest roundup of a small 2011 HGL retro at Anthology Film Archives: “The [film’s] Egyptian theme was determined by Friedman and Lewis’s use of Miami Beach’s Suez Motel as their studio, and parallels the raiding of Old Hollywood Biblical epics in ’60s underground films.”)
The general assumption—justified, yes, much of the time—is that money can only have a corrosive effect on the artist. And yet here we have something like an artist, albeit in the art brut category, who almost certainly would not have produced work had it not been for financial incentive. This may seem like a specious claim, granted that it’s based on the assumption that reader, like author, finds something of art in the stilted monologues of Montag the Magnificent in Lewis’s film maudit Wizard of Gore. On a more highbrow plane—or at least in another era—the Lewis Paradox might equally well be applied to Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose mounting gambling debts kept him feverishly dictating his pay-by-the-chapter novels, so that we might not today have the putrefaction of Father Zosima or “The Grand Inquisitor” were it not for an unhappy turn at the Faro table. (Perhaps most pertinently, you certainly would not be reading this supple prose were it not for the bottle of Slivovitz that I am contractually obliged to receive with the delivery of each The Classical column—hey, it beats geeking!)
To the ancients, inspiration was the product of the Muse—for we moderns, a Tenth must be added: Lucre. I have recently been re-reading the final novel by a favorite author, Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur. The title refers to a West Village watering hole, but also doubles as a commentary on the monetary ambition that prods along artistic undertaking, for among Powell’s favorite themes was the eel-slippery nature of popular success, which she herself never enjoyed. (Powell, it should be added, had a mentally impaired son to care for by the time she was 24, and it is difficult to say how much of her bibliography we owe to the additional financial pressure created by “Jojo.”)
So, here’s to that eternal motivator, the Tenth Muse, The Golden Spur. Of course in carrying on like this, I do not mean to discount the other, nobler motivations that one can have for a career in arts and letters. To represent these more lofty and beautiful aims, I turn to a monologue from Nathaniel West’s doggerel novella, The Dream Life of Balso Snell:
“I’m fed up with poetry and art. Yet what can I do. I need women and because I can’t buy or force them, I have to make poems for them: God knows how tired I am of using the insanity of Van Gogh and the adventures of Gauguin as can-openers for the ambitious Count Six-Times. And how sick I am of literary bitches. But they’re the only kind that’ll have me…”
On that note, I’m clocking out. Next week: Maybe something about digital projection?
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.