Today I read a disturbing post on the NYT’s City Room blog about a pair of teenagers who broke into a vacant apartment in Brooklyn, doused a cat with lighter fluid and then set it on fire. According to the article, “[t]he cat was later ‘found outside crying, unable to move, but still alive’… It was taken to an animal hospital with severe burns, and was put to death.”

Coincidentally, I was reading Richard Rorty on the subway, who (via Judith Shklar) defines a ‘liberal’ — philosophically speaking — as one who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing a person can do.

He also describes the role of fiction in our culture as a means to 1) empathize with those who are suffering and 2) understand our own capacity for cruelty.

It’s not difficult to imagine telling a story about two teenagers and their decision to torture a cat that fills both of these purposes: in terms of the kids, we might describe the bleak terrain of the neighborhood in which they were raised, the loveless existence they endured for the first ___ years of their lives, the physical and mental abuse they suffered at the hands of others; the slow escalation of mayhem and violence that led them on this particular day to hatch a plan for such a pointlessly repulsive act. We might even try to imagine them as they ignited the cat and listened to its terrified screams, and whether to witness this was as satisfying as they had hoped, or whether they looked at each other with a familiar expression of disappointment. What did they say as it happened? And later, did they laugh or cry or simply not acknowledge it at all, as if they had simply shared a bad dream?

I remember being in Paris 20 years ago, when I happened to go see A Short Film about Killing by Krzysztof Kieslowski; the story involves a young man who directs a taxi out into the countryside, where for no apparent reason he brutally murders the driver; he is quickly caught and sentenced to death, and throughout the proceedings shows absolutely no remorse or really any sign of ‘humanity,’ despite the best attempts of his defense lawyer. It is only near the end — after he shares a painful memory from his childhood — and as he is being led to his death, that we feel any compassion for him; in one miraculous shot he looks up at the lawyer, who is watching from the window above, and we understand from the prisoner’s expression that something has melted in him, that he no longer wants to die, and we — as the audience — no longer want him to die either.

In time, I may write a similar story about two teenagers from Brooklyn who torture animals and live to regret it.

But for now I would like to think about the cat, about how small and defenseless it was, and how the universe showed such little regard to its fate, and how in this sentence ‘cat’ is a metaphor for ‘any of us as individuals at any given moment.’

And how when we grieve, it is really for ourselves, and — finally — how we look to the sky with a certain anger and longing and forgiveness as we remember that despite everything — and this by turn cruel and comforting — we are still alive, at least for now.

Recently we learned from US Magazine that “[a] few weeks after signing the lease on a $60 million Long Island mansion, [Angelina Jolie], 33, was spotted checking out a nice building in Manhattan’s uptown Washington Heights neighborhood Tuesday afternoon.”

It makes us wonder how it came about that she would consider Washington Heights for even a second.

Did Angelina wake up one morning and say: I want to live in the most ruined and barely functional neighborhood in New York City, with sweeping views of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge, which has been my favorite bridge in the world since I first saw it as a child driving from ___ to ____ in the back seat of my ____’s car?

Or perhaps she’s going to be starring in a movie about the drug trade and wants to understand what it’s like to roll up and down Broadway in a massive SUV with blackened windows, laughing at the cops and expressing surprise/dismay at all the “white fggts” starting to move into the neighborhood.

Or maybe she’s a fan of The Gay Recluse!? (<3 u, Angie!)

Whether she moves in or not, we were struck less by the implausibility of it than a certain longing to see what would happen if she did.

Does she know that Washington Heights is a metaphorical and literal graveyard of shipwrecks and resignation, from which most of us who are lucky or unlucky enough to end up here can never hope to escape?

Maybe she will be the one to change this collective destiny:  maybe Angelina could live here for a few seconds and then leave forever, having taken in her share of the beauty — both architectural and geographic — yet remain unscathed by the ghosts of longing and torment with which the rest of us are so familiar.  After all, as US Magazine breathlessly informs us: Angelina “has owned or rented properties in three different countries in the past year alone.”

Or maybe this is too much to ask, even of her; maybe she looked out the window and was disturbingly entranced by the clouds gathering over her beloved bridge, at which point she instructed her driver to take her away from this place as quickly as possible, knowing that if she stayed any longer, she would never be able to leave.

[Thanks to Bennett for sending us the US Magazine article.]

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Stay tuned for the fifth and final installment of “City of Dreams.”

THE CHAOS DETECTIVE

City of Dreams (Part 1)

City of Dreams (Part 2)

City of Dreams (Part 3)

In Ludwig, Luchino Visconti’s four-hour treatment of the 19th-century King of Bavaria, we are introduced to the king as a young man, but learn almost immediately — in what feels like a flash-forward — that he will eventually be dethroned by the state legislature for maybe being insane. So with the question of what happens effectively taken off the table — as it should be in all biopics – this gives Visconti the opportunity to explore exactly how this earnest young monarch slips away.

Helmut Berger, both handsome and delicate, plays Ludwig with a brittle yet manic elegance that showcases both his beauty and optimism in the early part of the movie and a grotesque deterioration — including his horribly rotting teeth — with which it is gradually replaced. Throughout he possesses a nervous intensity that makes his descent into madness — or disillusionment? — completely convincing. That Berger was also Visconti’s off-screen lover makes sense; at a certain point the movie is less about the historical character — i.e., the tormented homosexual, the builder of castles, the financier of Richard Wagner — and more about Visconti’s obsession with Berger. As we watch, we become similarly entranced by Visconti’s depiction of a world that aches with fragile and untenable beauty, so that as the music — from Tristan and Tannhauser — repeats over and over, we are immersed into something close to a feverish dream state, in which even the smallest shift of our eyes away from the screen threatens to induce a searing pain.

The bright colors of the royal uniforms, the damask wallpapers and gilt interiors are contrasted throughout with barren, wintry landscapes; yet both are equally dream-like here. Visconti likes nothing more than to slowly pan across a landscape, often leaving the foreground blurry as we slowly fix our gaze on what may or may not appear in the distance. Eventually someone appears, we somehow understand that in the middle of this decadence they are doomed; that much of the cast — and particularly Romy Schneider as Ludwig’s cousin, the Empress of Austria — are exquisitely, almost painfully beautiful, both doleful and sensual, makes us forget the film’s more obvious and superficial flaws, i.e., its many loose ends, abrupt edits and pointless conversations. Once we succumb to Visconti’s vision — his “music,” so to speak — we understand that we are watching an opera, where language — at least in its most literal form — becomes secondary, and perhaps even irrelevant, to the piece as a whole.

It is for this reason that we are not bothered by the somewhat ridiculous dubbing of the actors’ words into Italian; just as Ludwig himself preferred the artificial beauty of his exotic interiors to anything in the real world, the film is an exercise in artifice; at no point do we lose sight of the fact that we are watching.

There is no “escape” watching Visconti; rather we are presented with the certainty that even the greatest and most sumptuous works of art — the ones that kings have literally died for — will like icebergs eventually melt into the sea and be lost to us forever.

After scouring the globe, we were finally able to obtain — from South Korea! — a copy of Senso, Luchino Visconti’s 1954 film about the Austrian occupation of Venice during the war for Italian independence.

In what is arguably the most operatic of Visconti’s films, we follow a beautiful-but-aging Viennese countess (which in the 1950s meant that she was about 26 or so), who against her better judgment falls in love with a younger Viennese officer. The story is not complicated: as the officer flits in and out of her grasp, she increasingly longs for him, until after a series of encounters she impulsively gives up her entire life — at this point, with political tension escalating, she has been safely sequestered in the countryside – to flee through a war-torn country to be with him. But the affair is doomed: we learn that the officer essentially played her, and when she arrives, he is drunk and cruel; he flaunts a young prostitute who emerges from his bedroom and lectures the countess on the impossibility of attaining happiness in such a detestable era of history. In a fit of vengeance she leaves and immediately turns him into the Viennese army — from which he had used her money to get a fraudulent discharge — and a few minutes later he is executed as she staggers through the streets of Venice while drunken soldiers leer at and molest her.

It hardly matters that you know the plot: rather, to watch this movie is to enter into a reflective state similar to what we sometimes experience at the opera; it’s almost as if your mind is bifurcated, but in the least neurotic of ways. You take in the sumptuous colors and costumes (Technicolor!); the decadent, decaying walls of Venice; the lush score, which employs Anton Bruckner and Giuseppe Verdi (trivia: Senso was used to reconstruct/renovate La Fenice after it was scandalously burned down — arson! — in the 1990s); and as you do this, you are somehow able to ponder the the threads of your own life as if you were viewing it serenely, like a piece of art, instead of pulling and tugging at this tapestry, as so often happens in the course of our daily travails.

As much as we loved Senso, however, it’s not our favorite Visconti film. We would never argue with those who claim that his greastest works — The Leopard, The Damned and Death in Venice — all came after.

But we watch Senso anyway, to understand what turned Visconti away from the neorealism upon which he built his career and led him to the intoxicating, extravagent decadence and — somehow — resignation that permeate his later works.  We want to reconcile the idea that the same man who made the La Terra trema, the Sinclairian documentary of a small village ravaged by capitalism, also created Ludwig, for example, the obsessive rumination on the last (and even more obsessive) monarch of Bavaria.

In fact, we are never convinced by Visconti’s embrace of communism, any more than we would say he was a monarchist; in this respect, Visconti brings to mind Walter Benjamin, who — as much as he would flirt — was similarly incapable of embracing a political ideology. Just as Benjamin lingers over the fruit sellers on the snowy streets of Bolshevik Moscow in prose that can only be described as romantic, Visconti allows his camera to caress his young male actors just a little too much for us to ever consider them political statements.

Much like reading Benjamin, when we watch Visconti, we are left with the sense that all great art is rooted in a philosophical pessimism, a constant dissatisfaction with the present and everything it has to offer, but one that ironically enough leaves us oddly joyous and satisfied as we take it in.

Tonight we watched Seduced and Abandoned, the 1964 film by Italian director Pietro Germi. Set in a small town in Sicily, it follows a family with a 15-year-old girl who in a moment of passion sort of consents (but sort of not) to have sex with her older sister’s fiancé. In short order she’s pregnant and her parents find out, after which the father is yelling and hitting and throwing things, while the mother weeps and plots with her husband to save their daughter’s honor. Lol, crazy Sicilans!

But underneath the exaggerated stereotypes that provide much of the film’s comic humor — and at times it definitely could be considered madcap or rollicking — there’s an equally cutting satirical element rooted in the family’s complete disregard for the truth as they attempt to arrange a marriage between the daughter and a man she doesn’t love. Increasingly elaborate measures are taken to ensure that the rest of the gossipy town have no reason to think that she’s a “whore” or that her father is doing anything less than begrudgingly giving her hand in marriage to the most ardent of suitors.

As the movie continues in this vein, the characters — including the town itself, filled with garish priests and nasty old men in the square — begin to acquire a grotesque quality that effectively undermines all of the conventions the family is trying to uphold: marriage, justice, honor and even the law, in which a marriage (if it can be arranged) can trump any other charge, including statutory rape or kidnapping.  As for the man who initially persuaded the girl to have sex with him, he claims he no longer wants to marry her because she’s “impure” and he wants to marry a virgin! Eventually we end up hating everyone in the movie — even as we laugh at them — except for the girl, the sullen and serenely beautiful Stefania Sandrelli, who resists her parents’ plans and dreams of escaping to the city.

The genius of this movie lies in the fact that by the end, you’re not quite sure whether to laugh or cry.

It makes us think of the 1960s and how society in many respects went through a revolution. You can’t watch this movie and not think that marriage is a ridiculous institution, clearly on its last legs!

To see it now is painful to the extent that we understand how far we’ve regressed — how sickeningly conventional we’ve become, and in more subtle, odious ways than Germi could have ever depicted — but at the same time it makes us eager for a new revolution.

Chances are if you’re geigh, you’ve heard about this movie called MILK! You might even feel guilty if, like us, you haven’t gone to see it yet because you’re gay and it’s about someone who’s gay and you should be eternally grateful that Hollywood would deign to tackle such a dirty and disgusting topic, although it’s great for laffs when the straight actors go on late-night teevee and asshole comedians groan and squirm about what it’s like to — ewwww! — kiss and “play gay.” But we digress! The point is, your editors at The Gay Recluse live in an actual (as opposed to gay) ghetto, with no movie theaters, and are too lazy to go see any movie in the theater, which means we probably won’t see MILK for ten years, when it reaches the top of our NetFlix queue.

Fortunately for us, Reader CB went to see MILK and provided the following analysis (in part a reaction to our post about subway homophobia), which we wanted to reprint in full. 

I went to see “Milk” tonight. It is, as the New Yorker and Charlie Rose had promised, quite well done.

I know the story from the excellent 1984 documentary, “The Times of Harvey Milk.” So I can’t say any of it came as a surprise. What did catch me off guard, however, was the degree of fury that rose in me as the picture neared its climax. I was literally shaking in my seat, and my fingers went numb, until I caught myself hyperventilating.

When I thought about it after, I connected to two, internal sources of anger:

1) The awfully ignorant, intolerant world of Anita Bryant, the Briggs Initiative, and the equation of homosexuality with bestiality, pedophilia, and worse, was the world in which I passed my formative years and adolescence. In my “sheltered” upbringing, I knew nothing of the hope and triumphs of the gay rights movement. It was rough going, and scars remain. The kind of violent hate crime touched on in the movie was very much a threat in my early adulthood, throughout the eighties, even in the supposedly more-enlightened world of Manhattan. One always had to be wary, and bashings were a regular fact of gay city life. So was suicide (a topic also woven into Milk’s story). The film coalesced feelings I haven’t visited much of late, but have certainly grappled with in my life: how much damage and pain was caused — to me, to people I knew and loved, to our culture — by dumb, hateful, or murderously insane people who felt strangely entitled to dictate the course of my life and other people’s lives, and of history? How is it that such people got away with the havoc they wrought?

2) How come they still get away with it? There are simply too many parallels between the world in the movie, with its obstinate, heartless, self-appointed “normals,” and our experience today. Recent statewide ballots (not to mention the past eight years of American government) make plain the ongoing co-opting of American sensibilities by homo-ignorant bullies. (As does the Recluse’s subway moment.) On the other hand, there’s little of the activism of Milk’s era today, nor the hope of setting an example: much of the civilized world has passed us by on civil rights. The cozy gay couple I saw the movie with provided cold comfort: they exist in complete and willing ignorance of the history “Milk” tells, and of the fragility and cost of the insulated, ghettoized “freedom” in which they live their material, suburban lives.

I came home from the movie to the Recluse’s sad subway saga. It was all too familiar, and too, too old a story. Not exactly an antidote to feeling that the gap between 1978 and 2008 is only a football field wide, perhaps, rather than a Grand Canyon which cannot be easily crossed back over.

“Milk” is an important, humanizing piece about a recent, pivotal moment in American (and gay) civil-rights history. The story is moving. But its reminder that the Dark Ages are far from over is chilling. I’m not so much sick of that, as shaking in my seat with rage.

Thank you for sharing, CB. As we always say: celebrate the new dark age.*

*Also the incredible title of an equally incredible Polvo record.  

Recently we watched the director’s cut of Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Lione’s epic Jewish/New York City gangster movie from 1984. When originally released in the United States, the producers imposed a chronological sequence onto the movie to shorten it, whereas Lione intended it to dreamily drift back and forth between three eras (roughly: youth, middle and old age) through the prism of one man’s memory.

There is much in the film to admire: Lione creates beautiful atmospheres in almost any context, and Robert De Niro is always a pleasure to watch. Even James Woods — who often bothers us — is well cast here, and his homoerotic obsession with the De Niro character is a compelling subtext.

There are problems, though! All of the childhood scenes are coated with an annoying sheen of nostalgia that makes them difficult to endure, so that while watching, we long for the return of De Niro & Company. Although at times brilliant — e.g., the Muzak version of “Yesterday” with exactly two words sung – the music too often crosses the line into a sort of dated kitch (two hours of Peruvian flute is perhaps one-hour and forty-five minutes too many?) that distracts from the unfolding story. Finally the Jewish component of the movie — primarily in the form of a few Yiddish phrases here and there, some Hebrew-lettered Lower East Side storefronts and a penchant for deli meats — did not really resonate for us. The problem is that there’s enough that (brilliantly) cuts against the grain of stereotype (namely, De Niro’s crushing melancholy and his opium addiction) that we are less forgiving of Lione when he succumbs to cliche.

The greatest flaw of the movie, however, is one that we’re beginning to suspect is intrinsic to the medium, i.e., the difficultly of conveying both the weight of memory along with its magic. Several times in the movie, Lione attempts to draw us into Proustian episodes of the “memoire involuntaire,” triggered by a range of objects and settings familiar but long lost to the De Niro character; ultimately, however, these transitions feel awkward and forced, and it takes several seconds for the narrative to recover from the jarring (but in the wrong way) effect of these memory sequences.

We are reminded of Visconti’s ill-fated attempts to similarly capture memory in Death in Venice, and are left to conclude that the novel is the best form to capture the subtle mix of real and unreal as we shift in and out of the present. For this reason, we don’t hold it against Leone that he failed where nobody else — at least that we know of — has ever succeeded.

In Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Robert Bresson offers us a portrait of a beautiful and painfully sensitive young priest who has just arrived to his new parish. For reasons that are never quite explained, the priest is mocked and detested by the local citizens; those who hate him include a rich young aristocratic heiress, her father the count, and a mob of ignorant young teenage farm girls (i.e., it’s not a class issue).

At one point, he does make a connection with the aristocrat’s wife — who in her grief over a dead son has shut herself off from the world — but she dies the next day and her evil daughter spreads malicious rumors that the priest caused this, when in fact he had guided the countess to a place of solace and peace.

The genius of Bresson in this film is less in the story than the seamless transitions between the priest’s awkward conversations with others and his own mental dialogue, in which he narrates for us — i.e., the audience — his discomfort and seeming incomprehension with regard to the pain the world never ceases to bring to him, despite his best intentions.

For some reason, nobody interprets this as an allegory of a gay man, striving to come to terms with his humanity in the dark ages.

But we know better, particularly when the priest flees the country to the city, where he is blessed by those like him who have fallen from grace, and in this way returns to it.

In Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, the young (and kinda hot, in an aloof, cerebral way) lead is given to wandering the streets of Paris, looking into the eyes of men with whom he has the briefest and most exhilarating (but ultimately soulless) encounters. Surprise: at least superficially, this movie is not about gay sex! Released in 1959, during the dark ages of post-war western civilization, the film deftly — and we mean this in the most literal sense, given the amazing choreography of wallets being lifted from the marks in question — presents a society of underground pickpockets to serve as a metaphor for the gay underground with which Bresson was obviously on very familiar terms. Even the ending, where the lead is supposedly redeemed through his love of a woman, makes much more sense when viewed through a gay lens, and here’s your first clue: the guy’s now in jail, and thus separated from his “love” by a literal set of bars! (Ha, this is like the long-distance relationship ploy used to such great effect by so many modern closet-cases, who will only confess their love to a woman when she’s in another city.)

While we were initially tempted to dismiss the work as the dated and agonized confession of a tortured soul (i.e., Bresson), the fim ultimately moved and — like his other work that we’ve seen — haunted us for many hours after it was done. The reason for this, we have come to realize, is that while Bresson in no way was prepared (or permitted) to literally deal with the question of homosexuality, his exploration through means of the pickpocket metaphor likewise released him from the burden of stereotype, so that the film ultimately resonates with a degree of truth and candor lacking in 98 percent of movies made today.

As with our dreams, Bresson speaks to us only in symbols and metaphors, and like the characters in his film, we find ourselves gripped by longing to understand not only his intentions, but our own, as if by doing so, we will be given clues to our larger fate.