For Gabby Goo Goo: Bob Dylan Children’s Troubadour

What follows is the text of a paper I delivered in June 2012, a the ChLA conference in Boston. It really needs accompanying illustrations and perhaps a tune or two, but copyright restricts me from uploading these. Not knowing what else to do with this paper, I place it here. A list of works cited is missing.

“when asked what you think of gene autry singing of hard rains gonna fall say that nobody can sing it as good as peter. paul and mary” (Lyrics 1962-1985, 124)

“I hate oppression, especially on children.” (Biograph, Liner Notes)

1. Dylan and kids

Bob Dylan’s 1990 album Under the Red Sky has the dedication, “For Gabby Goo Goo.” This Gabby is apparently Dylan’s (at the time) four-year-old granddaughter, and the album, as many have noted, contains a number of songs that adapt and rework familiar nursery rhymes. Oliver Trager notes that Dylan “had often mentioned recording an album for children,” and he goes on to suggest that Under the Red Sky “was as close as [Dylan’s critics] were likely to come to hearing one” (648).  Two years later, in 1992, Dylan released the familiar children’s song “Froggy Went A-Courtin” on the album Good As I Been To You, and in 1999 he recorded a version of “This Old Man.” Three of his songs have been transformed into picture books: Forever Young (2008, illus. Paul Rogers), Man Gave Names to All the Animals (2010, illus. Jim Arnosky), and Blowin’ in the Wind (2011, illus. Jon J. Muth). An earlier version of Man Gave Names to All the Animals appeared in 1999 (illus. Scott Menchin). Another picture book tells the story of Dylan’s early years, When Bob Met Woody: The Story of the Young Bob Dylan, written by Gary Golio and illustrated by Marc Burckhardt (2011). These picture books target a young audience, but a graphic work for adults and young adults also exists: Bob Dylan Revisited (2008; first American edition 2009). This book consists of “13 graphic interpretations of Bob Dylan’s Songs” (Book Cover), by artists such as Dave McKean, Christopher, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Thierry Murat. Finally, I note that the Kid’s Page of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ website contains the lyrics to “Blowing in the Wind” [sic] (http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/songs/favorites/blowingmid.htm). Clearly, we have Dylan admirers who make the connection between Dylan and kids.

            Dylan has also been photographed with children. Barry Feinstein’s photographs are perhaps the most well known. Here [I had prepared a PowerPoint for the oral presentation of this paper] we have two photographs taken in Liverpool, England, in 1966. The one shows Dylan sitting in a doorway surrounded by children, and the other is a wistful shot of him watching children watching Dylan on a mostly empty street. Dylan and the children nicely reflect each other. These photographs deliver a sense of nostalgia worthy of the bard who sang (and sings) prophetic songs about humanity’s endangered future. In November 1975, Dylan and Allan Ginsberg are photographed with children from the Franco American School in Lowell, Massachusetts. The picture captures something of the youthful energy of the Rolling Thunder Review that Dylan was taking on the road that year. And of course we have Elliott Landry’s photographs of Dylan with his children in Woodstock, New York, in the late 1960s.

            In October 2011, Universal Children’s Audio in Wellington, New Zealand, released a CD that makes the argument that Dylan’s songs are relevant and appeal to children: Kids Sing Bob Dylan by The Starbugs. The Starbugs are five young New Zealanders who, when the album was released, ranged in age from 7 to 15. They are Jessie Hillel, Rebecca Jenkins (the youngest), Sarah Whitaker, Ben Anderson, and Roisin Anderson. The album’s producers are David Anthony Clark and Radha Sahar. Clark says that he saw a “doco” (documentary) in which 14-year-olds were asked, “if they had heard of Bob Dylan,” and they had not. He set out to rectify this situation. As for the Starbugs, they express enthusiasm for Dylan’s songs. 10-year-old Jessie says, “Hearing and listening to him [Dylan] was really fun,” and 7-year-old Rebecca says the songs “made her want to dance.” Roisin noted that, “there was a lot of action in Dylan’s music.”  The kids noted the emotion “that he puts into his songs” (Ben Anderson – quotations from Dallas and Tuckey).

            And what of the choices for this album by and for children? Clark included a couple of “Dylan’s folk songs [that] have long been the stuff of classroom sing-alongs, such as ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’” (Dallas and Tuckey), but he also included “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be Released,” described in a press story on the album as “world weary” songs (Dallas and Tuckey). But perhaps the most surprising inclusion is the song, “Mozambique.” When the kids sing “it’s so unique to be/Among the lovely people living free/Upon the beach of sunny Mozambique,” they are most likely unaware that in 1975, when the song was first released, the long war against the Portuguese colonial masters had just ended and a long Civil War was about to begin. Mozambique was hardly a “magical land.” It was a land in turmoil.

            In any case, “Mozambique,” along with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “I Shall Be Released” accompany songs that had previously been connected with children – “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Forever Young,” and “Man Gave Names to All the Animals.” The Universal Children’s Audio web site says the album contains “songs appropriate to children’s lives,” and that they are “perfect for a family sing-along, the classroom, or a long car ride.” Visitors to the web site are encouraged to, “Let Dylan inspire your kids as he inspired you!”

            Okay, it is time for a bit of autobiography. Was I inspired? You bet. In the fall of 1963, my friend Donnie Knapp came to school with the news that he had joined the Columbia Record Club, and that he had received a record by some guy that had some good songs on it, but that the guy couldn’t sing worth a damn. When pressed, Donnie said one song was about “going down the road, with a suitcase in my hand, bling bling bling.” He reiterated that the guy – he could not recall his name - just could not sing and that he (Donnie) was going to return the record to Columbia. For reasons I can no longer remember, I asked Donnie if I could listen to the record before he sent it back. Donnie just lived around the corner from me on Winnifred Street, and so I went to his place after school and listened to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. I was 18 years old. I was not a child, but when I heard those songs I felt as if I had been hearing them all my relatively short life. That was the year I began to read. That was my last year in high school. That was when I began to write this paper. If you had asked me back then what I thought of that singer who could not sing, I would have said that Donnie Knapp was half right – the songs were great – but that his evaluation of the singing was way off in the circle of hell devoted to tin ears. That voice struck me as a voice for the ages; what I could not say back then was that Dylan “had the blood of the land” in his voice, but that is the best description of his voice that I have heard.

2. Hard Rain: Kids Can Take it

And so along with Bob Dylan singer/songwriter, painter and visual artist, and author, we have Bob Dylan children’s artist. The question is: what does Bob Dylan’s work contain that makes it suitable as work for children? According to the folks at Universal Children’s Audio, the songs express the “energy and spontaneity” of a youthful era – “the spirit of the 60s and 70s.” I get the sense that for these folks the songs contain something of Benjamin’s “aura,” something rich and elusive, something somehow connected to a youthful exuberance that does not age. And I suppose this is true. We can, however, be more precise. My argument is that in both form and content, many of Dylan’s songs speak directly to, or may speak directly to, children. They do this because they call on traditional forms and traditional subjects familiar to the genre of children’s literature. In a nutshell, Dylan’s songs delight in language play and parody; they also manifest a sensitivity to childhood as that complicated construction of adult concerns that children are expected to explore: identity, environment, and human rights. Dylan put this succinctly in his Oscar acceptance comments in March 2001when he closed his thank-you speech with the words, “peace, tranquility, and good will.” His work promotes peace, tranquility, and good will. He is liberal to a degree; he wants everybody to be free.

But more particularly, the concerns of early songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” not only contain elements familiar to children and their literature, but also contain a vision of humanity vital to a continuing tradition of imaginative possibility – dare I say of imaginative freedom? Imaginative possibility functions both conservatively, in what Frye called a “myth of concern,” and more progressively, in what Frye called a “myth of freedom.” For our purposes, the myth of concern is that which socializes and keeps things running smoothly for a political group, and the myth of freedom is that which energizes desire for the world we want. I might locate the myth of concern in social cohesion organized by the law of the father and the myth of freedom in the pivotal moment of the Imaginary, that moment when we recognize for the first time choice emanating from separation and difference. Children’s literature crucially balances these two myths.

We know, for example, that “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a catchy song that serves to gather people together in a robust sing-a-long. Jon Muth, the illustrator of the recent picture book version of the song, and Greil Marcus, who wrote the Note at the end of this picture book, both write about the song as if it was a sentimental call for maturity, as if the song is about the importance of understanding that “we are the world, we are the children” and we can make a brighter day. This sense of the song fits easily into the myth of concern, the myth that we are all “God’s children.” But the song has a harder edge. We do not need to historicize the song to grasp its call to action. If the answer is blowing in the wind, then we need to get out there and take the buffets that the wind has to offer. We need to stand in the wind. Only this way can the sound of people crying penetrate. In other words, the song is both contained within its musical and literary world, separate from actuality, a safe call to our liberal humanist sensibilities, and also the trumpet that calls to action, that topples walls, and that connects the musical and the literary with material conditions.

Perry Nodelman has convincingly demonstrated an “essential doubleness” to children’s literature (59-68). We can see doubleness, an appeal to both child and adult, an ideological pull both left and right, in Dylan’s work. As a test case, I offer a song that has not appeared as one of Dylan’s works that appeals to children: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna to Fall” (Freewheelin’, 1963). Here is a song suited to audiences both old and young. Older audiences hear the song’s fear of nuclear night; its cold war politics and warning of nuclear devastation. For the younger audience, however, what we have is a ballad with its familiar story of quest and perhaps even triumph. Christopher Ricks terms the virtue of the quest as “fortitude.” In any case, we have a story redolent of the nostalgia children can understand and maybe even appreciate, the nostalgia that renovates and rebuilds. I think this is what I heard when Donnie Knapp played Dylan’s second album for me back in 1963. That was a revelatory moment.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” consists of five stanzas nicely structured on the motif of the journey. The stanzas vary in length from 16 lines to 9 lines. The lack of symmetry in stanza length finds counter balance in the first 2 and final two lines of each stanza that offer repetitions. These repetitions serve to package each stanza so that each stanza is a self-contained unit. Repetitions of words appear throughout the song, giving it an incantatory sound. The first two lines of each stanza echo the traditional ballad “Lord Randal” and also the traditional nursery song, “Billy Boy.” “Oh where have you been charming Billy?” Or, “O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my son!/And where ha you been, my handsome young man!" The echo of these two traditional works connects Dylan’s song with the folk tradition, with a tradition of song and rhyme that speaks across generations. Like the nursery rhyme, the ballad, and the fairy tale, this song is not age specific. It has the haunting quality of the ballad. Its imagery is familiar from such traditional material: misty mountains (sounds like Tolkien), sad forests (what is a sad forest if not either a fairy tale forest or one about to be chopped down?), babies and wolves, the poet who died in the gutter (a figure we might meet in an Oscar Wilde story), white man and black dog. Then we have the curiously elusive imagery: bleeding hammers, a white ladder covered with water, a black branch bleeding, and a highway of diamonds with nobody on it. We have here the uncanny. The imagery is both familiar and strange; something calls for us in these images, something that encourages us to leave our stepping-stones behind.

As uncanny as these images may be, the children and young people in the song – the child beside a dead pony, the young woman whose body was burning, the newborn baby menaced by wolves, the young children holding guns and sharp swords, and the young girl who gives the blue-eyed boy a rainbow – are a composite of hope and despair. Children are vulnerable in their innocence. They are capable of violence and of generosity. They can be soldiers; they can be Samaritans. The blue-eyed son answers the father’s questions with anaphoric intensity, giving the song a prophetic insistence. The scattered rhyme – it is hit and miss throughout the song – captures the brokenness of the world the young boy has experienced. And so anaphora and rhyme counter balance, helping to give the song both its prophetic resonance and its pessimistic reportage. We can add alliteration to this brief list of rhetorical devices that elevate the register of the song’s language. Everything is broken, but we need not despair.

The song ends with resolution. When the singer, the blue-eyed son, asserts that he will “reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,” he gathers all experience. We have here a most intricate example of synesthesia, expressed in the word “reflects.” To reflect is to bend light, but it also may refer to an echo, the reflection of a voice or a sound. We might see or hear a reflection. To reflect is also to consider, to ponder, to contemplate something. The song, precisely, contemplates what I will call the mal de siècle. Further, a reflection signals the consequence of something – such and such reflects your decision to act in a beastly manner. Hard rain is a consequence of human failure to reflect on the state of things. And to reflect is to give back. The singer, the blue-eyed son, gives back what he experiences “so all souls can see it.” They see it because they hear it.  The synesthesia inherent in these lines reflects the song’s interest in unity and connection. Everything is broken, but we need not despair.

The message here is for the young. Experience the world, its deepest black forests, its polluted rivers, its empty-handed people, its damp dirty prisons, its hunger, its forgotten people, and having experienced this bleak place tell the story. Tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.  The song ends with the image of the ocean, the ocean of time and space we also have in William Blake’s poetry and art. The resolve is to stand on this ocean until the sinking begins. The resolve is to take a hard look at a hard world weathered by hard rain. Who better to take such a hard look but those people who will have to live in this place for the foreseeable future? Who better to hear this song than the young who are setting out to explore the deepest dark forests? 

Samuel Fuller – The Big Red One (1980)

 Just another war move or a Samuel Fuller movie? The claim is that the 114 minute version released in 1980 is just another war movie with a studio-added musical score and voice-over, whereas the 160 minute film recently “reconstructed” from lost footage is a Samuel Fuller film. Be this as it may, we have the 114-minute version before us. And this gives us enough to see certain of the Fuller trademarks.

1. The film begins with an opening sequence that is stark and starkly allegoric. In this sequence, Fuller invokes All Quiet on the Western Front and World War 1. The sergeant, Lee Marvin, sees and hears a German soldier coming out of the fog. Marvin kills the man near a tall crucifix that stands in the middle of no-man’s-land. The scene is bleak and brutal and ironic. We soon learn that the war is actually over and that the German soldier was announcing the end to combat. Fuller allows his camera to close in on the figure of Christ on that tall cross. Christ’s face is haggard and his eyes are hollow. Here is an image of desperation and despair. The Christ on this cross sees nothing; instead, he is a reminder of the cruelty of the human species. 

2. A band of soldiers who somehow survive the entire war, from 1942 until 1945. They begin in North Africa, go on to Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Omaha Beach, France and Belgium, and finally Czechoslovakia where they liberate one of the death camps. The story is more representative than actual. 

3. Fuller’s constant theme of survival. Life’s a battleground and war is Fuller’s constant metaphor for life itself. 

4. The use of children to remind us of innocence. The helmet with woven flowers is a Fuller touch – hokey and sentimental. Then later, we have Lee Marvin befriending a scared child from the death camp, carrying him on his shoulders an hour or so after the child has died, and then burying him. As in The Naked Kiss, children are innocent, children are exploited by adults, children are a sign of human vulnerability and weakness.

5. Action and no long speeches.

6. The five protagonists are Fuller’s cowboys, American GIs who follow orders, fight because they have to fight (using the bodies of fallen soldiers to hide behind when necessary), struggle to survive, live for the most part without women, and liberate that which needs to be liberated.

7. A reminder that humans are nuts. The scene in the mental hospital tops off Fuller’s theme of human insanity. In war, who is sane and who is insane. A great Fuller moment is when one of the patients in this institution takes a machine gun, begins to shoot his fellow patients, and repeats over and over – “I am sane, I am sane.” Well in this world, he is. The sane ones are the ones shooting guns. Once again, Fuller’s irony is not subtle. 

8. The ending that rounds to its beginning, complete with the German announcing the end of the war, the tall crucifix, and Marvin killing his enemy four hours after the end of combat. But this time the German may live. And so Fuller offers hope, but faint hope.

9. Death pervades Fuller’s world. Marvin says to the German soldier at the end, that if he doesn’t live, he’ll beat him to death. This line is reminiscent of Moe’s assertion in Pickup on South Street that if she does not get the money for a good plot and headstone, she thinks it will just kill her.

10. Once again, we have little in the way of back story. We know about the Sergeant’s experience in the first war, but that’s all. Who is he? What did he do before and between wars? He seems to live for war. And the four young guys are equally without much in the way of back-story. We have some idea of ethnic background, but not much. Fuller’s characters live in the moment, struggling to survive in a dangerous world. 

11. The crudity of Fuller’s treatment of “symbol.” Guns in this film are obviously Freudian. The tank turret gun looks phallic. But if we did not get the connection, then Fuller is going to make sure we do. And so he has his soldiers use condoms to keep their rifles dry when they make a beachhead. 

The Big Red One is the First Infantry, formed in 1919. Fuller fought in this unit during World War 2, and this film is both his memory of battle and his idea of the war. Roger Ebert has said that the film is neutral when it comes to war, that it is apolitical. According to Ebert, the film is neither for nor against war; it simply records the battle experiences of its five protagonists. I’m not so sure. It seems to me that we have enough material here to mount a case against war. The opening and closing scenes, for example, suggest the absurdity of war. One minute a soldier will kill an enemy; the next minute, the same soldier will try to save that same enemy because the war is over. An enemy is an enemy in war, not in peace. We also have both the Americans and Germans making a distinction between murder and killing. Soldier kill, but they do not murder. If soldiers do not murder, then what does Griff do near the end of the film when he corners a German soldier in one of the incinerators? He empties his magazine into the German, and then begins on another one given to him by the sergeant before he finally stops. Is this action any less demented than the insane person shooting and yelling “I’m sane, I’m sane”? War may be hell, but it is also insanity. In a scene restored to the recent longer version, we have a child shot by a sniper as he is held in the arms of the sergeant. Scenes like this or the scene with the German officer hiding behind the figure of Christ on the cross must surely communicate the absurdity of war. Or take the scene on Omaha beach when the soldiers are trying to oust a German machine gun nest by planting tubular explosives near the German line. The sergeant sends out at least four (more, I think) soldiers to move the tubes closer. As one falls, shot by the Germans, the sergeant sends out another one. Finally Griff makes it. Griff (Mark Hamill) is the coward of the unit, but he’s the guy who succeeds here. Why? No reason. He is just the one who makes it. War holds no rhyme or reason; it is absurd. For Fuller, life is absurd.

The actors in Fuller’s films are, as often as not, forgettable. This film boasts Lee Marvin who was a well-known actor, but the others are relatively unknown (Mark Hamill had been in Star Wars and its two early sequels, but he was hardly a “star”). The actors are, however, young. Fuller wanted, I think, to stress just how young these guys were. War takes the young more often than it takes the middle-aged or the old. And the soldiers come and go anonymously. The soldiers we follow point out that they do not even know the names of replacements that arrive and then are killed. In Fuller’s world, death is everywhere. Fuller’s battle scenes are frenetic – lots of noise, dust, falling bodies, confusion. He anticipates Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan by about 20 years when he shows the shores of Omaha Beach running red with blood. The shot of the soldier’s arm and wristwatch nicely counterpoints life and death – the soldier’s life has come to an end, the watch continues to record ongoing time.

As we might expect with Fuller, this war film does not have a hero – no John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or Tom Hanks here to save the day. These are just 50-cents-a-day dog soldiers doing what they have to do to stay alive. That they manage to stay alive has as much to do with luck as it does with their training or professionalism. Hawks’s heroes are professionals; Fuller’s are just average Joes trying to get along.

Notes for a class - with questions

D.W. Griffith, Broken Blossoms (1919)

Griffith had been making films for ten years or more. In 1915, he made what is one of the most famous (and infamous) films in history when he made Birth of a Nation. The film uses white actors to play Black men, as Hollywood continued to do with various racial types right up until recently. Broken Blossoms does the same, using white actors to play Chinese people. Birth of a Nation depicts the Black men as ugly and violent. The film was (and continues to be) seen as racist. In 1916, Griffith made the lavish (like a Cecille B. DeMille extravaganza) film, Intolerance (some prints are as long as 208 minutes). This film seems in some way Griffith’s attempt to assuage his guilt for his portrayal of African American people in Birth of a Nation, the way John Ford tried to do something similar when he made Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 as a way of revising his earlier depiction of Native Americans. But Intolerance is both very long and structurally demanding, telling four stories from different historical times simultaneously with a recurring bridging scene of a mother rocking a cradle. Griffith might have thought that to make his point he needed to make a more straight -forward film, something simple such as Broken Blossoms. Did I say “simple”? Well, you know what I mean: the story unfolds sequentially.

Broken Blossoms is a melodrama with oversized villain and pint-sized victim.

Broken Blossoms is obviously about race. The story is reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, but instead of two families feuding, we have two races. The lovers cannot come together happily precisely because of the intolerance of the society in which they live.

What do you make of the opening scenes in China?

This is a film about broken dreams and aspirations.

This is a film about entrapment. The scene in which Lucy retreats to the closet and cringes as her father hacks away at the door with a hatchet will serve as example (cf Kubrik's The Shining). But the entire shooting style communicates entrapment, from the opening shots inside a monastery, to the closed boxing ring, the soporific house of sin, the claustrophobic shop where the “Yellow Man” works, the short abrupt streets, the house where Lucy and Battling live, the enclosed space of the dock and work yard, the night shooting, the close-ups, the extreme narrowness of the bedroom above the shop. We seem unable to stretch in this film. For the most part, the camera cannot get distance from the actors or the action.

This is a film about love. But I wonder just how this film envisages love. Why does the Chinese man find Lucy attractive? Why does she find him attractive?

This is a film about inner struggle and turmoil. The camera locates much of the “meaning” in body language and, especially, eyes.

This is a film about the loss of innocence, its fragility, and its inevitable failure.

The intensity of such loss is, perhaps, nowhere  more  evident  than in the scene in which Lucy mends her father’s work socks. She does this carefully, and just before she puts the mended socks away, she briefly strokes them. What does this suggest? (See a similar gesture in Ford’s The Searchers)

And what about Battling? His body language more often than not suggests arrogance, anger, violence, and a huge reservoir of frustration. Why, I wonder?

This is a film about xenophobia. I wonder how successful Griffith is in presenting China and Chinese people sympathetically.

Birth of a Nation was technically advanced. Andrew Rausch’s book lists the many innovations this film introduced (see pp.34-35).

Some of these techniques appear in Broken Blossoms: cross-cutting, tinting, close-ups. In fact, we might call Broken Blossoms a film of close-ups. We have many instances of facial close-ups and mid-range close-ups (from torso up). The close-ups serve to intensify the emotional impact of the film.

The film gesture: perhaps the most famous feature of Broken Blossoms is the gesture Lucy (Lillian Gish) makes when her “Daddy” insists that she smile. She places her fingers to her mouth and pulls her lips into a smile. This gesture appears throughout the film, but most significantly in Lucy’s last close-up as she dies. Does this work?

Gesture: we have many instances of signature gestures in film (Bogart pulling on his ear in The Maltese Falcon, Wayne holding his forearm in The Searchers, Woody Allen‘s many ticks and mannerisms and those glasses, Henry Fonda’s play with the chair in My Darling Clementine). Can you think of others? The gesture reminds us of the body. It reminds us of non-verbal communication. It draws our attention to  character. The gesture reminds us of visual cueing. Not only do we have Lucy’s gesture in Broken Blossoms, but we also have Battling’s fists, various smoking apparatuses, and flowers. These serve as visual “symbols” or signs. Each of these signs communicates to the audience. What have I missed in the list below?

1. gesture of forced smile
2. clenched fists
3. flowers (used for various “gestures”)
4. the dolls and the one doll
5. smoking apparatuses
6. feet and foot
7. clothes
8. food
9. streets and sets
10. use of establishing shots (e.g. dark shots of night and ships, or dockside with workers sawing and  doing other things, shots with mist) 

Opening shots establish themes: we see various contrasts, and the film builds on contrasts:

1. children/sailors
2. east/west
3. young (children)/old (merchants)
4. Buddhists (peace)/sailors (rowdy and pugnacious)
5. Buddhist priests/American clergymen missionaries
6. Chinese part of town/dock side 

What do you make of the comment at the end of the film that this day has seen “40,000 casualties”?

American Film comedy

For the past few weeks, I have been showing some friends examples of American film comedy. We began with silent comedy - Keaton, Lloyd, Arbuckle, and Chaplin. Then we sampled the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Mae West, Screwball Comedy, and Bob Hope. I wrote short notes for the evening's viewing. Anyhow, this week we are sampling Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The film is Artists & Models. We also begin with a cartoon. Here are the notes for this week's viewing. Shall I post the other notes?

Puss ‘N Booty (1943)

            This is the last black and white cartoon made by Warner Brothers Studio. Leon Schlesinger was the producer. He first had his own studio and then came to run Warner’s cartoon unit. The Director of this film is Frank Tashlin who had worked with Schlesinger for some years. Tashlin would later go on to make live-action features such as The Paleface with Bob Hope and Artists & Models with Martin and Lewis. Tashlin made a number of films with Jerry Lewis. His films had something of a cartoon sensibility. Puss “N Booty is notable for its deviation from the standard cat-stalks-canary story line. Here the cat has actually eaten a canary, and we get to know something of its personality before the usual series of attacks on the bird cage. Tashlin keeps changing direction in the film. We have the opening search for the missing canary (feathers let us know that the cat has eaten the canary), the impatient wait for the arrival of the next canary, and the attempt of the cat to catch and eat this new canary. Then the “surprise” ending.

The Comedy Team

            For reasons that elude me, comedy likes to come in teams of two. Wheeler & Woolsey, Olson & Johnson, Allen & Rossi, Rowan & Martin, Tommy and Dick Smothers, and of course the better-known duos: Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Crosby & Hope, and Martin & Lewis. These are just a fraction of all the comic duos we have had on stage, on radio, on film, and on television. Typically the comic twosome consists of the gagman and the straight man. The straight man is the worldly one, experienced and serious; the gagman is the innocent, a child confronting a dangerous world. The straight man is also the ladies man, the good-looking one, whereas the comic foil is the jester, the clown, the funny-looking one. The straight man sets up the jokes or provides relief from the comic moments. In the case of Martin and Lewis, Dean Martin is usually the one who gets the girl (occasionally each of the comic team gets a girl – e.g. Artists & Models), and he is also the one who does the crooning. Dean is a singer, the Bing Crosby to Jerry Lewis’s Bob Hope. But Jerry is quite unlike Bob Hope in his infantilism. Jerry plays the boy to Dean’s adult. Jerry’s comedy relies on bodily and facial expression, voice, and physical contortion. He is a very visual comedian. His humour often relies on mime (see his film The Bellboy in which he does not speak at all). Early in Artists & Models, Jerry mimes eating a meal beginning with one bean and some ketchup. In fact, as a team Martin & Lewis began over time to focus more on the antics of Lewis than on the charm of Martin. After a 10-year partnership the duo separated in 1956. Lewis went on to make a series of films in which he gained more and more control and experimented with film form in interesting and comedic ways. As for Dean Martin, he went on to become an important recording artist and an actor in dramatic films.

Artists & Models (1955)

            1954 saw the publication of a book that has since become infamous: Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederic Wertham. Wertham’s book is an indictment of comic books and the comic book industry. It argues that comic books are destroying the moral fibre of America’s youth, inciting disobedience against parents, violence in schools, sexual deviance, and even smoking. The book was sufficiently influential that the government instituted the Comic Book Code, a form of censorship meant to ensure the moral purity of comic books. This bit of historical information informs the story in Artists & Models. In the film, Rick Todd (Dean Martin) is a comic book artist with aspirations of becoming a “real” artist. His roommate, Eugene Fullstack (Jerry Lewis), is captivated by comics, especially comics with the character, Bat Lady. His infatuation with comics generates the first catastrophe in the film. Rick and Eugene have neighbours who also work in the comic book industry, two women, Abigail Parker (Dorothy Malone) and Bessie Sparrowbush (Shirley MacLaine). The plot involves the two women connecting with the two men. The names of two of the characters let us know who will pair with whom (Fullstack and Sparrowbush are obviously meant for each other).

The comic book industry is notable for the lurid nature of its products. Much of the action turns on Eugene Fullstack’s dreams. These dreams provide sensational material for Rick’s comic books, but they also contain secret military information. This part of the plot gathers in another topical theme: the cold war and the fear of the Communist Menace. Espionage enters the plot. The year Artists & Models reaches the screens of America is the year, roughly, that the McCarthy paranoia abates. It abates, but it does not by any means disappear. The film is a spoof of earlier anti-Communist films such as The Red Menace (1949), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), Big Jim McLain (1952), Invaders from Mars (1953), and On the Waterfront (1954).

            The opening scene of the film involves a giant billboard with huge lips. (Why does this remind me of La Dolce Vita?) The play with this (at the time) high-tech gadget is clever and prurient. The jokes here are deeply embedded (as it were) to escape the censors. Indeed, much of this film skirts with censorable material. Probably the reason for this is the direction of Frank Tashlin. Tashlin began his career as a director of cartoons and when he graduated to live-action films, he brought his cartoon sensibility along with him. Artists & Models is noteworthy for its colour (something we will not fully appreciate in the washed out copy that we will see). The film is extremely colour conscious, as you might expect in a film about an artist. The comic book has always been a colourful medium (at least it has been so since the advent of inexpensive colour reproduction in newsprint and paper). The film, like comic books, is colourful. The first scene with those red lips and the three cans of paint that topple onto the big wigs draws attention to colour right at the beginning. This is a colourful film with flamboyant characters, lively songs, and zany antics.

            A side note: Jerry Lewis plays an aspiring children’s book author in the film, and the director Tashlin was himself a writer of children’s books.

I haven't been here for a while. Here is an old piece on a film I like.

Repo Man (1984)

"The life of a Repo Man is always intense." (Bud)

The strangeness of this low budget film is not its off-the-wall sensibility in evoking the world of Punk youth in the early 1980s, but rather its use of the repo man as the focus of critique and hope. The job of repossessing cars from people who cannot maintain their payments is about as sleazy a job as we can imagine. The film makes this clear in its vision of the Helping Hand offices, the environment of burned out Los Angeles, the violent and crude behaviour and language of the people who work in this job, and the general malaise of city life. The repo man is just a shade above the criminal in his way of doing business, as we see the first time Otto meets Bud. Later Bud tells Otto the repo man code; he may have a code, but he still takes cars from people without asking and without seeking the aid of law enforcement. His code is akin to the code of the west; it is a frontier code tested in fights and flights and conflicts. The repo man is a creep. And yet in this film, one repo man ends up flying high in a mystic Malibu. The older man lies dying while the younger man, the protégé, leaves the ground with the shamanistic grounds keeper, named Miller.

The film influenced the style and tone of such films as the Coen Broithers’ Raising Arizona and Scorsese’s After Hours. In turn, it shows the influence of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and a host of teenage angst films from Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause to Arnold’s High School Confidential. It also shows the influence of Weekend and other surrealist films by the likes of Bunuel, Kubrik, and even John Carpenter (his Dark Star has something of Repo Man in it, or I should say that Repo Man has something of Dark Star in it).

But what is the film about? Most definitely this is a Cold War film. It begins with the shot of a map showing Los Alamos in New Mexico where the Atomic Bomb was first created, and it follows a car with dead aliens in the trunk. This might make us think of Roswell, New Mexico, cite of alien encounters. The driver speaks of the neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact. We see what he means when a couple of people open the trunk only to be burned to nothing, leaving just their smoking boots behind. The dead aliens raise the theme of the alien, and we have enough characters in the film who are “aliens” that we get the point. The whole punk sub-culture is an alien culture. Teenagers are aliens. Otto, whose name reminds me of a guy named Otto Binder who wrote books about flying saucers when I was growing up, tries to enter normalcy by getting a job in a grocery store, but he discovers that normalcy is a rare commodity. Most people are aliens, when you get right down to it. Then he meets Bud who works for the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation. All Bud’s associates have names associated with beer (Bud, Oly, Miller, Lite). Bud takes Otto under his wing, so to speak, teaching him the repo man code. Then the two of them get caught up in the chase for a 1964 Chevy Malibu worth $20,000. Also looking for the car is Agent Rogersz who has a strange metal hand, and the Rodruiguez brothers, rival repo men. Meanwhile, Otto’s parents, refugees from the 1960s, spend their time (and money) watching the Reverend Larry on TV and smoking dope. The film’s plot has many coincidences with characters turning up in ways that suggest the world is smaller than we might think. TV screens show a world of televangelism and imperialism in Central America (Nicaragua). The implication is that consumerism, hucksterism, and downright greed have pretty much taken over spiritual and political life. Repossession is the order of the day in a world gone rotten. The metaphor that best communicates the modern world empty of spirituality is the lobotomy (remember One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest). The driver of the Malibu has had a lobotomy and now he feels much better than he did. Otto’s parents have lobotomized their brains with dope and fundamentalism. (The lobotomy is like another metaphor for modernity’s zonked out mind meld – zombieism.) About the only spiritual person in the film is the grounds keeper at the Helping Hand, a character named Miller who does not drive because too much driving makes you less intelligent. He spouts a cracker barrel philosophy and speaks of a cosmic consciousness, something the film may invoke at the end when he and Otto go for a drive in the hot (literally) Malibu. The end quotes the end of Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Otto looks out at the city below and an array of coloured lights form a display in front of him. We have here the splendor of new hope associated with raised or cosmic consciousness. The other intertext here is Spielburg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which aliens offer Richard Dreyfus an escape from the mundane. Before he goes for this cosmic drive, Otto’s girl friend, Leila, asks: “What about our relationship?” And Otto replies: “Fuck that.” And off he goes. The stuff of everyday youth rebellion and youth activity pales alongside the beckoning shimmer of the mystic Malibu. This film, like Weekend and perhaps even like others we have seen (Freaks, Johnny Guitar, The Searchers) has its apocalyptic aspect. Apocalypse means “revelation” and “uncovering.” We usually associate apocalypse with a cataclysmic change – the end of one way of being and perhaps the beginning of a new way of being (a new Heaven and a new Earth). The paradox is that the revelations we experience are mysterious. “He muttered underneath his breath/Nothing is revealed” (Dylan’s “Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”). Apocalypse is that explosive moment when everything is revealed and nothing is revealed. Apocalypse is the opposite of what happens when a neutron or a hydrogen bomb falls. For Otto, apocalypse is raised consciousness, a consciousness that rises above the degenerate state of modern Los Angleles. For Bud, apocalypse is a belly ripped open by bullets.

In short, Repo Man is a film about disaffected youth in a world ruled by the cash nexus (represented by the context of Reaganite and Thatcherite conservatism). It catches the anger of the punk sub-culture by challenging the sensibility of viewers who look for mainstream film. This film is “popular” by virtue of its willingness to be as rebellious as the youth it champions. It refuses to exonerate a youth that tries to lay blame on society for youth alienation; Otto tells Duke that he is “just a suburban white punk.” The film blends genres; it is a combination of Sci Fi, youth rebellion, buddy, coming of age, western, and gang films. It mixes all these elements in a series of scenes that are largely self-contained. Early in the film, we see one of the Punks wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt that uses the line from the Paul Anka/Frank Sinatra song, “I did it my way.” This is a song that Johnny Rotten famously spit out. The line, “I did it my way,” strikes me as a nice encapsulation of Alex Cox’s film. He made a film his way. The film somehow manages to make a statement about human desire for meaning in a world largely divested of meaning. As in Weekend, the car becomes a focal point for desire. People want cars, and they get them even when they cannot pay for them. Everyone wants the Malibu in this city of angels.

What best typifies this film is the absence of brand names on various products we see: beer is Beer, cereal is Corn Flakes, and so on. We have generic products, for the most part, packaged in white boxes or cans with blue borders. Supposedly, the reason for this has to do with keeping the cost of making the film low. However this may be, the generic packaging reminds us of generic lives, lives lived according to stereotypes (the Punks, the hippie parents, the blond generic CIA agents, the mad scientist, etc.). The generic packaging draws our attention reminding us of consumerism, emptiness, branding, homogeneity, and blandness. Intensity is what makes the life of a repo man different. Intensity is what separates a life lived and a life accepted. Only by transforming the car into a shimmering center of energy can the repo man inherit the intense life that is his to experience. 

The Seven Samurai: Yes, this film is not a western

A colleague recently expressed some surprise when I indicated that I owned a copy of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film, The Blood of a Poet. My colleague expressed this surprise by saying “I thought you only knew about westerns.” What can I say? I do know about westerns, and over and over again I read just how some of Akira Kurosawa’s films have the sensibility and even of some the plotting of the American western. And it is true that a number of Kurosawa’s films have been recast as westerns – Roshomon becomes The Outrage (Martin Ritt, 1964), Yojimbo becomes A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964) and also Last Man Standing (Walter Hill 1996), and of course The Seven Samurai becomes The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960). We can also find quotations from The Seven Samurai in a number of westerns from John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1968) to Tonino Valerii’s My Name is Nobody (1972). The line of riders appearing on a horizon, slow motion deaths, ritualistic duals with close-ups, cross-cutting to create tension, a boot hill cemetery, the town with a bridge at one end, the training of combatants, all of this and more have become familiar, if not overly familiar, in film after film since The Seven Samurai appeared in 1954. This film was Kurosawa’s 14^th feature and his first samurai film.

The Seven Samurai has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less interested in the land than in the people who share the land. As Kambei, the leader of the Samurai (Takashi Shimura), says at the end of the film, the Samurai have lost and the peasants are the victors. Kurosawa himself echoes this point in an interview. The film details the uneasy relationship between the Samurai class and those beneath them, the peasants. The samurai do not deal easily with the peasants because they carry some disdain for these lower class people, and the villagers harbour their own distrust of the samurai, a distrust most evident in Manzō’s (Kamatari Fujiwara) insistence on cutting his daughter’s hair and disguising her as a boy. The seventh samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), serves as a bridge between the samurai and the villagers because he is himself a peasant, but a peasant who aspires to be a samurai. Notice Kikuchiyo’s excessively long sword (it sometimes comes right into the camera as Kikuchiyo moves). The sword reflects Kikuchiyo’s histrionic personality, his braggadocio, and also his intense desire to be that which he fears he cannot be. This sword might remind us of special guns sometimes worn by cowboy heroes – the buntline special, for example, that Burt Lancaster’s Wyatt Earp wears in The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (John Sturges, 1957).

A paraphrase of the film’s plot may also sound familiar to viewers of westerns: a small village is terrorized by a gang of wandering bandits, rogue samurai who have banded together to make a living by pillaging vulnerable and passive peasants. The villagers debate what to do about the recurring assaults of the marauders, and they decide to seek out a small number of samurai to help them. They can offer only food and lodging as recompense. A few villagers, among them the hothead Rikichi (Yoshio Tsuchiya), go to town to seek out the samurai. What follows is the now familiar gathering of the group. Once the band of samurai (or more precisely the ronin or samurai without a master) have come together, they accompany the peasants back to the village where they make plans for battle and transform the village into a makeshift fortress. To help orient the viewer to the layout of the village, we have scenes in which Kambei, the leader of the seven, examines each entrance to the village, using a map. Finally the brigands arrive and a three-day battle ensues. The samurai and the villagers succeed in defeating the brigands and the village returns to normal, the film ending with a scene of the villagers singing and planting the next rice crop. The action of the film takes approximately a year.

In short, we have set-upon villagers rescued from their plight by heroic good guys, a plot that might describe many westerns that precede The Seven Samurai, such as Law and Order (Edward L. Cahn, 1932), Tombstone: The Town too Tough to Die (William C. McGann, 1942), My Darling Clementine (John Ford 1946), Shane (George Stevens, 1953), and many B westerns in which a hero arrives in a community tyrannized by a big rancher or a big banker or just a band of looting marauders and cleans things up only to leave at the end. The hero or heroes are not part of the community. And so the connection between Kurosawa’s masterpiece and the Western film as produced in Hollywood or Rome is well established. This is unfortunate because The Seven Samurai is much more than a Japanese western.

The western may provide one source for The Seven Samurai, but Kurosawa’s sources range far beyond the western. The close-up of villagers, especially villagers at work in the fields, invoke the films of Sergei Eisenstein. Echoes of John Ford appear repeatedly, although the influence works both ways because the cemetery above the village as well as a concentration on doorways appear later in Ford’s The Searchers. The lighting often reminds me of the films of Josef von Sternberg, as well as the distinctive contrast of dark and light in American films following Citizen Kane (1941). Deep Focus keeps us constantly aware of action in the entire frame. Acting, as well as the blocking of actors, often involves practices of silent cinema. In short, The Seven Samurai is something of a compendium of film practice. Nothing is gratuitous. Take for example, two fleeting glimpses of a puppeteer in the scene in which Kikuchiyo blunders drunkenly into the evening gathering of the six samurai. This character, the puppeteer, does not appear elsewhere in the film, and here he only appears in the background. He is, however, important. The puppet tells us that the fates of these characters are controlled. But what controls their fates is a combination of personality and history, personal history as well as national history. Kikuchiyo’s fate is apparent right from the beginning.

We can also see the force of personality and identity as formed by history and class in the early scene in which Kambei cuts his topknot and has his head shaved so that he can disguise himself as a priest to fool the kidnapper of a young child. The villagers look on in amazement as Kambei’s head is shaved; they identify him with his hair. Similarly, the young girl Shino finds identity in her hair. But neither Kambei nor Shino take their identity or their character from their hair. Who they are lies much deeper than the hair on their head.

The Seven Samurai is also a film that reflects it own time. As a late postwar production, The Seven Samurai continues to communicate the mood of Japan as it comes to terms with its occupation by foreign troops (the occupation ended in 1952), and as it continues to reconstruct its economy and social life after a period of upheaval. The story takes place in the early 16^th century, a time of civil war and change in Japan. The samurai represent a way of life quickly becoming something other than it had been.

The Seven Samurai contains much to occupy the eye. It has kinetic camera pans with cuts while the camera is in motion; these cuts take us from one pan to another, creating an intense sense of movement, as well as passing time. The film contains amazing crane shots such a the one that tracks down a steep hillside near the village. Deep focus allows us to see activity on several planes- in the foreground, the middle ground, and the background. Wipes shift from one scene to another, forcing us to acknowledge the formality of the camera, its intrusion into our sense of actuality. The black screen punctuates major shifts in time and space. The close-up, the two-shot, and the reaction shot bring us close to these characters; we come to understand who they are and why they act and react the way they do. The telescopic lens brings the viewer as close as possible to the action. Multiple cameras shoot scenes so the action can be fully and dramatically captured. Accented lighting highlights facial features, creates shadows, and enhances the contrast between outside and inside, time of day, and mood of the characters. Famously, Kurosawa composes his scenes in a painterly manner, even as characters enter and leave the frame.

For a film of over three hours, it moves quickly even as it keeps action slow, almost still. For example, the scene of the duel between Kyūzō (Seiji Myaguchi) and a would-be master swordsman is, in effect, an action scene. However, the action that takes place in the two duels, the first when the swordsmen use wood rather than steel and the second in which they use real swords and the challenger dies, has the pacing of a dream. The camera gives us the faces of the crowd as it watches the duel, the faces of the combatants, a distanced shot that takes in the field of the duel and the crowd that watches; we shift from perspective to perspective several times before the burst of action that ends in the first instance in stillness as the two men stand with their wooden swords on each other’s shoulders, and in the second instance in the slow motion death of the challenger. Kurosawa captures the ritual nature of the duel, the interest and concern and admiration and shock of the crowd, and the professionalism of Kyūzō in a long take that stretches time just as the camera stretches space when it frames the duel from a distance.

The camera also catches images that serve as leitmotifs communicating both emotion and idea. Examples include the waterfalls that appear twice in the film, the waterwheel, a stream, the flooded fields, and the torrential rain. Water is one of the four elements and the other three also catch our eye. The earth is front and center when we see the grave mounds above the village and when we see flowers and forest and mud. Air is evident in the wind that blows at significant times accentuating characters emotions. As for fire, we have fire a few times in the film, one instance I’ll look at here. Near the end of the film, just before the final battle, Katsushirō (Isao Kimura), the youngest of the samurai, meets the girl Shino (Keiko Tsushima) and the two surrender passionately to each other. They meet in the dark one on each side of a blazing fire. They move from the fire to inside a nearby building where they fall to the straw amid a chiaroscuro formed by the dazzling combination of light and shade, a shot reminiscent of a shot in Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930). The fire of course communicates the young couple’s passion and the chiaroscuro lets us know that this passion is troubled, roughened by circumstances.

Another motif is the circle and the open circle. At the beginning of the film, the brigands ride in silhouette across the horizon and come to a stop on an outcropping above the village. We see the village from the brigand’s perspective, with the riders in the foreground looking down upon the village. The village has a circular form. The opening for the road would break at the bottom end of the village, but the brigands effectively close off our sight of this road and consequently they complete the circle effect. Shortly after this, we have a scene in which the people of the village gather in a circle to discuss what to do about the brigands. We have a sequence of shots from above, close-ups, and the disruption of the village circle by the agitated and angry character, Rikichi who wants to kill the brigands any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. A crane shot shows Rikichi leaving the group, walking away from the others and slumping to the ground. A cut shows him from nearly ground level as he sits apart from the others who are now in a horizontal line behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we see the figure in the foreground (Rikichi) not so much isolated from the group as blening with them. First one person emerges from behind Rikichi, and then others come to bring the hothead back into the fold. He is reintegrated into the group.

Another example of the circle at work occurs when the samurai have accepted the job and are traveling to the village with the peasants who have recruited them. At this time, they are six samurai. Coming along behind in a hang-dog sort of way is Kikuchiyo. The scene takes place on the road and we view the characters from a position up the road from where they walk. At one point the group stops, turns, and looks back up the road to see Kikuchiyo at the horizon. The group in the foreground forms an imperfect circle, with an opening, an opening that will eventually be filled by Kikuchiyo. This insistence on the circle is picked up in the image of the water wheel, an image that captures all four elements: the wheel is a water wheel, it serves to turn the mill to grind the earth’s grain, it rises into the air, and it crashes in flames when the final battle takes place.

Another geometric figure we see is the triangle. We have triangles formed by weapons, architectural features, burial mounds, and characters. The formality of the circle and triangle gives an indication of control and order. This control is evident in the manner in which the early fights are staged, and in the rhythm the film sets with its balance of slow action punctuated by bursts of action. Control and order come to ruin in the final battle in the rain. Here the world and its order descend into the primeval ooze. As the rain falls and the mud spashes any semblance of the formality of circle and triangle disappears in a maelstrom of bodies and weapons and horses and running about. The chaos of the final battle uncovers the ugliness of death and violence.

Horses constitute another motif. They provide energy in their galloping, an energy that is inevitable, natural, and powerful. They also provide comic relief a couple of times in the film. The scene in which Kikuchiyo rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then emerges chasing the horse is both comic and also proleptic, a reminder of failure. Kikuchiyo is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids follow him and laugh at his antics. He is, in short, a character marked by his tragic past, and consequently doomed.

Just as the film has much for the yes, it also has much for the ear. It uses sound carefully. Kurosawa uses music sparingly, but when he does it is important. Characters have their specific themes, the samurai theme, Kikuchiyo’s theme, the villagers’ theme and so on. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of horses’ hoofs, the insistent sound of the mill – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.

Finally, this is a film of faces. The faces of the people we see register the full gamut of human emotion from grief to exhilaration, from anger to sly interest, from fear to relief. Kurosawa has often been praised for his humanism, his interest in and compassion for human beings. He often gives us characters who do not quite fit in to their world – Dersu Uzala, Kanji (Ikiru), Taketoki (Throne of Blood), Sanjuro (Yojimbo), Kyoji Fugisaki (The Quiet Duel), for example. Here the obvious outsider is Kikuchiyo, but as the final scene suggests, none of the samurai fit into the world that is taking shape. The guns we see and hear in this film are correct for the early 16^th century Japan, but they also signal change. The world is passing and leaving the samurai behind. This is, perhaps, why the final shot gives us the cemetery with the graves of the four samurai who died in battle. This film is an elegy for a time of honour and bravery and community.

Meditation on Metaphor: Shelley's Sword

"Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it." (Shelley's Defense of Poetry)

Wow. This is writing at white heat. Top o' the world, mama. Apocalypse now. As rhetoric, this passage attempts to persuade us that poetry is of cosmic importance; it is engaged in some activity akin to Armageddon. This is writing that asks for belief, not analysis. So let's analyze. And here are the parts for analysis: sword/scabbard; lightning; and "consumes."

1. sword/scabbard:

Shelley's metaphor is martial, implying that poetry wages some sort of battle with some sort of foe. One source for this metaphor is Revelation in which Christ appears with a flaming sword in his mouth, an iconic bit that commentators have interpreted as Christ's power of word. The sword is neither a despoiler of the human body nor a ploughshare; it is word of mouth. To equate the word with the sword is to locate power in words rather than actions; words are deeds. The metaphor intends to convince us that poetry is powerful: sharp and bright and capable of enacting deeds of valour.

Like most swords, poetry comes with a scabbard, but Shelley's metaphor erases the scabbard even as it names it. What is the scabbard that finds itself erased or more accurately "consumed"? If the sword is that which does battle, then the scabbard is that which keeps the sword from doing battle. As Shelley says, it contains the sword. Containment means keeping in check, controlling, holding down, restraining, or preventing an enemy from advancing. The word "contain" is consistent with the martial and political implications in the evocation of a sword, although what Shelley does is to set sword and scabbard at odds. They are in an adversarial position here. Why? Well, if poetry is the power of the word, then the power of the word has the effect of challenging, waging war with, power of other kinds--say political or economic or social power. In other words, poetry is that which allows for the continual challenging of vested interests and entrenched systems. Nothing can contain it; all containment is an attempt at silencing the word. Poetry's function is radical, critical, and threatening to that which would contain it: that is political and economic and social vested interests. In short, the scabbard represents all those things that seek to place a quiescence on us; the sword seeks to break that quiescence. For Shelley, poetry has political impact.

Before I go on, I note that Shelley's rhetoric might manifest his very insecurity. He writes at a time when systems of patronage for the artist had pretty much broken down, and poetry was beginning to be shouldered to the periphery of the literary polysystem and of the social system generally. I mean, who takes poetry seriously today besides poets, professors of poetry, and those few apparently eccentric souls who spend time reading the odd poem and even taking courses in creative writing and critical appreciation? The audience for poetry today is tiny compared to what it was even in Shelley's day when it was beginning to shrink. In other words, Shelley's desire to convince his reader of the importance of poetry is frantic; it arises in part from his fear that poetry's importance is lessening in the face of a changing world. The poet now, remember, must assume a place in the market like any other hawker of goods. If the poet wishes to find buyers for his or her product, then convincing the buyer that poetry is a good buy is imperative. Poets are legislators, right? Shelley indulges in a bit of wishful thinking, but I confess that his wishful thinking convinces me. Would that everyone wished for what Shelley envisaged.

But let's go back to the sword and scabbard. Obviously the metaphor is martial, as I have said. But regarding Shelley's raised sword from the vantage point of the early 21st century, even assuming that the sword protrudes from the mouth, we cannot but think of Freud. Can we? We all know full well Freud's take on pointy or tubular objects. We all know about cigars or baseball bats or poles or pens or swords. Before I hear a ho-hum, I hasten to note two things about Shelley: 1) he is a poet of the erotic; like Blake he placed his faith in the liberatory effects of sex; and 2) his theory of poetry in the Defense insists on the relation of poetry to the body. Poetry and love are synonymous, and this explains why Shelley argues that "social corruption" has one aim--to destroy pleasure, erotic pleasure. The great poets are men who "celebrated the dominion of love" (524). Shelley is speaking of a sublime (implied in the sword metaphor) that is distinctly masculine, that conquers not with the force of arms, but with the force of words and words that tell of "erotic delicacy."

The phallic implications of Shelley's metaphor bring together phallus, sword, pen, and word. We have here what we have learned to call phallocentrism and logocentrism and phallogocentrism. In other words, Shelley lives in a world in which people like him can jettison traditional religion (Shelley was an avowed atheist), and yet maintain a belief in the power of the word to reveal truth. The "deep truth" may be "imageless" (Prometheus Unbound), but it is nevertheless existent and words in the form of poetry as erotic consummation can reveal it to us. Poetry is revelatory. In Blakean language, poetry is the Last Judgment.

But another echo deconstructs Shelley's metaphor. If poetry is a sword of lightning that consumes, then it reminds us (me, at least) of the flaming or covering cherub (see Ezekiel 28:16 and Genesis 3:24), that which bars the way back to Eden. This flame reveals not the deep truth, but rather the confinement of humanity in a fallen world, a world of woe and oppression, precisely the world Shelley so fiercely wants to topple. If we take Shelley's metaphor from this perspective, then poetry is, like all forms of language, that which keeps us from unity and perfection. Poetry is divisive, just as swords are divisive. That Shelley cannot escape this "abyme" is because he, like Wordsworth before him, cannot accept a theory of language that stipulates a logical and essential connection between the word and the thing, or what we have come to think of as signifier and signified. Because the deep truth is imageless, all words can do is continually slide between signified never fully knowing which one to take as a final resting spot. In fact, to find that final resting spot would be to stop the sliding and to stop the sliding is to stop living as we know it. I'll conclude this section with Keats's lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn":

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Addendum to this section: Feminist note:

The scabbard as that into which the sword slides is a vaginal metaphor. Male sword and female scabbard might set up a further binary of male poetry and female nature (or world). The scabbard as female or as world might lead to the scabbard as mother, that from which the sword emerges, that which gives birth to the sword. The connection is between mother--mater--matter. The body produces the sword, gives birth to it. Shelley, however, is rooted in the masculine sublime; according to his metaphor, the sword consumes the scabbard. In some bizarre sense, for Shelley the sword can do without the scabbard, and if this is so, then the sword can produce that which we might have thought the scabbard itself produced. In other words, the sword gives birth--delivers that golden world Sidney speaks about. (I'll return to this later.)

2. lightning:

Shelley's metaphor is, however, not single; it is double. Poetry is not only a sword, but it is also a sword of lightning. I guess I've alluded to this aspect of the metaphor above, but let's contemplate "lightning" a bit more. The most obvious thing to me is the notion of "light" here. Poetry brings us out of darkness, and as such it is a civilizing activity. Commentators have stated this for eons: we have seen this argument in Sidney, Vico, Pope, Blake, and Wordsworth. We could find it in any number of other writers. From the beginning of human society, poetry has been that which brings people together. The argument rests, in part, on the notion that poetry begins in an oral context. Pre-literate societies communicate important truths and information through poetry. It is also true that certain religions pass on certain mysteries and doctrines orally, refusing to allow these truths and doctrines to be inscribed because they are too precious for such hardening. Light can blind when it flashes willy-nilly without the guiding voice of the special person: priest, intercessor, swami, poet. In any case, the metaphor points to the notion of poetry as that which distinguishes the civilized society. Light brings with it relationship and love.

But of course, Shelley's metaphor speaks not simply of light, but of "lightning." Lightning has something to do with electricity, and the Shelley's interest in electricity will be familiar to any viewer of any of a number of "Frankenstein" films. For Shelley, the metaphor of lightning is both backward looking and forward looking: it looks back to the ancient sky bolts of Jove or Jupiter and forward to the new science of electricity emerging in Shelley's day. Poetry is both something that connects us with the past, and something that carries us into the future. I think here of Wordsworth's connection between Science and Poetry in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

Lightning has yet another force here. In Shelley's day, as Frankenstein indicates, people considered electricity the life force. Electricity was that which animated organic activity. What I am getting at is a force of metaphor we still use today when we speak of two people having an "electric" attraction. In short, for Shelley electricity is of the body. I'm back at Shelley's insistent connection between poetry and the body. In Wordsworth's language, poetry is "felt along the blood" (see Tintern Abbey). What I am suggesting is that in these writers we have an incipient sense of what it means to write the body or to equate poetry with the body, with sexual pleasure, with jouissance. Or we might consider the generative effect of electricity; it is that which may give birth (as it does to Frankenstein's monster). In this sense, we are back to a reading of Shelley that marks him as essentially masculinist.

3. consumes:

The allusion here is to the biblical text that speaks of God as a consuming fire (Exodus 19:18; 24:17). To make this connection is to replace God with poetry, and to replace God with poetry is to install poetry in the place of religion, a move made more firmly in Mathew Arnold's writing later in the century. As traditional religion becomes more and more ungrounded through the "higher criticism" and the finding of science, the need for something to replace it emerges. That "something" is for many poetry. This is one reason why pious Victorian writers such as George MacDonald and Gerard Manly Hopkins could revere Shelley despite Shelley's claim to be an atheist. They simply did not believe him. In any case, we do see emerging in Shelley what we know of as "liberal humanism," a belief that through poetry the individual can gain spiritual strength and access to eternal truths about the human condition, truths that apply across racial, national, gender, class, age boundaries.

The metaphor here moves from notions of destroying and squandering and burning to the more obvious eating ("devouring" is a word sometimes used in the biblical text). To consume is to eat in large quantities. This means that poetry does not simply destroy that scabbard which seeks to contain it, but rather that it eats it. The metaphor of eating is interesting, especially if we keep in our minds the scriptural echoes in Shelley's prose. The disciples eat Jesus, just as Catholics continue to do so each time they partake of the sacrament. Eating in this sense is not destructive; rather it is empowering. For poetry to consume its scabbard, it assimilates it, absorbs it, surrounds it, takes it in, in short "contains it." This is imitation in a rather large sense: imitation as assimilation. If poetry can consume the scabbard, and if the scabbard is the world that in its own way tries to consume (take in, surround, contain) poetry, then what poetry does is transform the world through containment. The poet delivers a golden world, and this golden world is the Real world touched by the transforming blade of poetry. We can hear echoes of Plato filtered through Plotinus here.

"Consumes" also connects with "consummate," which my Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary informs me means: "to make perfect"; "to make (marital union) complete by sexual intercourse." The marriage metaphor is one that recurs with great frequency in Romantic texts. You can find it in spectacular use in Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Usually it invokes the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb in Revelation, that apocalyptic moment in which time is no longer. Shelley too uses it this way in Prometheus Unbound. In other words, we are back to that notion of poetry as revelation I discussed earlier. And yet, we are still on this earth in the presence of a marriage that includes consummation as sexual intercourse. The body returns. Poetry and the body are inextricably connected. We have, in effect, an oxymoron: the body of poetry (a term used to describe both a single poet's oeuvre and the whole gathering of literature). I say oxymoron because poetry signals something unworldly, something of the non physical, and body signals something decidedly physical. Here is an attempt on the part of Shelley to bridge the phenomenal and the noumenal, flesh and spirit, physics and metaphysics. Here in a nutshell is Shelley's defense of poetry: poetry enacts the impossible communion of fact and fiction, flesh and spirit, time and eternity.

Do you believe all this?