Queer

The buzzy advent of the so-beautifully filmed Queer movie by Luca Guadagnino has revived my own adventure with Burroughs's soul-baring autobiography. Originally an aside to fill my evenings while wrassling the funding for the Bisso/Wold sword-and-sandal-and-ridiculously-epic Sub Pontio Pilato, it has become one of my favorites, and the favorite of a number of people around me, to the point of changing their lives, e.g. my long-time artistic partner Jim Cave, who came out, found a boyfriend, got married, and has lived one hopes a truer life. 

There is this lovely ambiguous interview with me about the opera, which now reading back seems to be from a more-articulate time in my life, so pause this blog, read it now and then come back. 

I loved watching the film, I keep thinking about it: its stagey aspects, CGI set extensions, the light, psychedelic scenes with the Yage, the filling out of the life beyond.  But when I was watching it, I was in a constant double-exposure with the opera. Like the opera, many of the dialogs in the screenplay are verbatim from the book, which is at it should be - Burroughs's language is the thing - and may have been required by the estate, as they did for me. But that meant that every line spoken on screen was at the same time playing its musical version in my head. 

For example, this scene, where "As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wrenched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child's smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and out of place, mutilated and hopeless." I've linked to the 2001 production of it, and below is the scene from the movie and to the 2010 version, Daniel Craig/Joe Wicht as Lee. 

And the scene where "Lee and Allerton went to see Cocteau's Orpheus. In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull towards Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other's body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes."  The film was able to visually represent the protoplasm, whereas in the opera, the narrative conceit of the book continued.  In film, one is  told to show not say, but narration has always been cool to me, and that Lee observes himself in the third person up until the bright ending is also. 

The movie, like the opera, is a love story, a love and lust both reciprocated and unrequited, painful, wrenching.  But the routines - some of my favorite parts in the book, e.g. the General von Klutch episode and that over Chess Game with their baldfaced racism and sexual predation - are lessened in the movie.

And what to do about the ending, which in the book simply evaporates, "the end of the road" as he wrote later in the introduction. The movie in a dream follows Lee to the end, the skip tracer forever searching for the object of his idealized affection. 

 

Die Welle

Once again Ron Jones's Third Wave experiment at Cubberly High School in Palo Alto has been dramatized, this time by the German director Dennis Gansel. There are some questions about the original story's veracity, as the main source is Ron Jones himself, but it is highly believable: that a few simple step-by-step manipulations of a group young people leads to their wholehearted acceptance of brutal authoritarianism: sitting in attention postures, starting all sentences with 'Mr. Jones,' answering all questions in three words or less, learning a simple salute. All the results included the usual harbingers of disaster: unquestioning adherence to the rules, xenophobia, the ratting out those who didn't measure up. But he also found improvements in academic skills and an excitement and motivation he had not seen before. Although some pro-fascists would focus on the latter as a justification of the former, I prefer to think that it's best to accept a little less perfection and a little more anarchy and more chaos and a little more joy.

Valkyrie

I had intended to discuss the new Tom Cruise epic in terms of its pro-Prussian nationalist blinders and its rather ridiculous implication that Claus von Stauffenberg was some kind of hero to the world for merely coming to the conclusion that, after six years of doing his darnedest for his beloved leader and his beloved leader's inestimable awfulness, that maybe the way things were going wasn't the best for the future of his beloved Deutschland and maybe he and some of his cronies better off the guy in charge before he did any more damage. Not to the world, mind you, but to Germany and especially to its officer corps. But Roger Friedman has already done it for me, better than I could have, in a beautifully lilting and scathing review, from which I quote a choice passage:

... in “Valkyrie” Singer opens the door to a dangerous new thought: that the Holocaust and all the other atrocities could be of secondary important to the cause of German patriotism. Not once in “Valkyrie” do any of there “heroes” mention what’s happening around them, that any of them is appalled by or against what they know is happening or has happened: Hitler has systemically killed millions in the most barbaric ways possible to imagine.

It’s kind of galling to allow now, in 2008, that von Stauffenberg et al were either totally unaware of this, or that they felt their mission superceded it. In “Valkyrie,” at the expense of making a joke, they are almost like Franz Liebkin, author of Mel Brooks’s fictitious “Springtime for Hitler.” His famous line in “The Producers” is: “War? What war? We vas in the back. We didn’t see a thing!”

A good list of Hitler assassination attempts is here, some by people less reprobate. Many involved in the German resistance were less bloody-handed than von Stauffenberg: for example the leader of the anti-anti-Semitic Confessing Church in Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged with piano wire during the post-Valkyrie purges, and the Weisse Rose, all beheaded by the Gestapo in '43.