Angels Afflicted with the American Dream
“Fellini manages to accomplish with film what mostly abstract painters do; namely, to communicate an emotion without ever saying or showing anything in a direct manner."
-David Lynch
To this day David Lynch’s favorite film remains Otto e Mezzo, directed by Federico Fellini: Western Europe’s sorcerer of confectionary delights and unending motion, the man who put the “dolce” in La Dolce Vita. Lynch's stated reason (quoted above), even if one were to take him at his word — and we must, of course, for no filmmaker has ever been known to misrepresent themselves to us — seems a strange instance of gravitational pull, particularly in the light of the formal strategies both men developed over time. Lynch has always favored a blunt pictorialism that, in its bluntness, borders on the language of Imagism: the studied simplicity of the language used to complex, powerful effect. Fellini, in 8 ½ and through much of his career, by contrast, unleashes upon the viewer an insanely fluid, brutally precise camera ballet. Here, in these conflicting dialects, we have ribbons of ideology swirled together like candy: a blur of four-wheeled luxury from the New World zooming past the region’s splendor into that brotherhood of man, that socio-economic nirvana imagined by Karl Marx in the Old.
Careening from one via to another at harrowing, white-knuckle speed, Fellini was once heard to lament that “Some neo-realists seem to think that they cannot make a film unless they have a man in old clothes in front of the camera.” George Bluestone, recording these words for the pages of Film Culture in 1957, was sitting in the literal passenger seat of that ideal metaphor for 20th century ebullience—post-war expertise; a precision machine hurtling through ancient Roman streets past graffiti-scrawled churches proudly bearing the hammer and sickle; that famous Black Chevy like Odysseus’s ship skirting Scylla (the Vatican) and its equally dogmatic Charybdis (the Party), because at that velocity, anything could and did make sense.
“Appearances aside” Bluestone wrote, “the Chevrolet is at every moment under Fellini’s control. He weaves in and out of traffic, misses pedestrians by inches, swerves away from Nomentana’s interminable monuments, dodging yellow traffic blinkers as if he were trying out a darkened slalom.” It is every bit a performance. Rome, after all, is the land of Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, Apollo and Daphne — marble-cum-flesh, even as flesh itself gives way to forms that leave the viewer in terrified awe. While reliving his own mythic, carbureted experience, Bluestone does some weaving of his own, quoting Genevieve Agel’s one-line pronunciamento (and, in the process, defining what would soon be labelled ‘Felliniesque’), “Fellini is a visionary of the real”, as the passenger positions his driver somewhere between corporeal reality and ecstatic truth while the big man (no old clothes for this maestro) drives and drives. “As one hand lightly guides the wheel, the other gestures — it acts.”
Spirits of the Dead is one of those compendium films, with voguish directors (Malle, Vadim, Fellini) entrusted with bringing to the screen a Poe story each. Only the Fellini episode, Toby Dammit, is notable; indeed, very notable, a hallucinatory yarn owing as much to Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill! as to Poe's Never Bet the Devil Your Head, its ostensible source. The title character, played by Terence Stamp with white-blond hair and dark roots, and constant beads of witch hazel perspiration, is visiting Rome to attend an awards ceremony, and to play Christ in a western. But he’s fatally distracted by his new sports car, and a vision of the devil in the form of a little girl. Toby’s ride through a hellscape of nocturnal Rome seems lifted from Jules Dassin’s 10.30 p.m. Summer (1966), but it works even better for Fellini than it did in the Duras adaptation. An oppressively subjective film, Toby Dammit narrows the view down to the Ferrari’s headlights, a ghastly floodlit interzone where human forms are gradually replaced with mannequins and cut-outs, as the city becomes as unreal as an elaborate movie set, an uncanny valley laid out for the staging of an epic stunt/snuff film.
“What for you is the greatest human quality?”, Bluestone asks. Fellini responds, “Love of one’s fellows,” a period-appropriate oath that rings true to his brand of ecumenical solidarity.
Italy’s post-war economic “miracle” was foisted in large measure by a self-neutering Communist Party, which laid down its revolutionary arms in exchange for seats in the government, at which point the mass shuffle-boarding of the southern poverty class began: 17,000,000 Italian souls — more than a third of the national population — would pay for “Il Boom” on northern assembly lines. Was Fellini’s Chevrolet some symbolic body-on-frame housing for America’s Marshall Plan, the economic engine driving oppression with such propulsive force?
Somewhere in the middle of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return there is a moment that, on its incandescent surface, could have been lifted from this great post-war dream of materialist deliverance: The top on the convertible is down, the radio on; The Paris Sisters are singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within the tapestry of this early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb associated eternally with Romance and Death (two conditions that Spector knew all too well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris is a voice from the American Beyond. We could be hearing a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know. Just as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood keeps us guessing with the elusive murmur that “Sharon Tate will never die,” which grants her a gaudy, if still wondrous L.A. to cavort in — 1969 forever — Tarantino’s version of paradise (complete with occasional flame throwers to the face). In this oneiric echo chamber, momentarily shared by Lynch and Tarantino, Surrealism smiles down upon a vision of American blondness; muscle cars soaked in sunlight; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion; a confection of both eye and ear candy.
And yet, at almost the same hour, American cinema gave us evidence of an impending rupture that threatens the delicate membrane insulating the mythic Tate from her murderers; an ominous reminder of the gathering storm ahead. For transcendence took another route in 2019 when the mad catharsis of a deeply disturbed schnook in hideous clown makeup transformed him into an equally disturbed icon, lying unconscious atop a smashed police car. More emaciated than the Bible’s Nazarene, he rises from the dead as Nihilism’s glittering superstar, a murderous demigod of failure and inchoate class resentment, ready for his terrible fifteen minutes of closeup.
Stephen Sondheim wrote Send in the Clowns because the actress for whom it was written, Glynis Johns, couldn’t sing. Not to say that she was utterly without talent, of course. She just didn’t have much in the way of range or vocal firepower. “A lovely, sweet, bell-like voice”, he called it, that was nevertheless “breathy, and short-winded.” So the song that all but accidentally became, perhaps, his most enduring was deliberately composed in short phrases which enabled the singer, literally any singer in the world, to meet its demands with more authority than they could bring to the average show-stopper – the ease of its melody contrasting sharply with the compositional gymnastics evident in the rest of A Little Night Music’s score. For a songwriter of his stature, this was an incredibly democratic thing for him to do.
Send in the Clowns is a song of regret, and not one that those below a certain age are wisely advised to attempt; its structural simplicity notwithstanding. The wrong singer can, rightly or wrongly, seem to mock the thing, render it without the delicacy of emotional balance it requires. But coming from the right voice — Frank Sinatra, for example; one of the first to record it — it is a near majestic reflection on the end of love, free of bitterness and self-pity (a miracle in itself). Unfortunately, however, its ubiquity in the nearly five decades since its composition has cast it, helplessly, into that graveyard of popular culture, the Great American Songbook, where only a truly arresting rendition, one the ears cannot deny, could bring it back into life.
Admittedly it is the context in which Sondheim’s song is used in Joker (2019) which causes it to resonate in a wholly unexpected manner and not, strictly, the quality of its performance. As one of a trio of drunken Wall Street scumbags – princes of Capital (or at least servants to same); the residue of Wharton carrying on like they’re the cast of A Clockwork Orange as they enter a subway car and with all the impunity, real or imagined, of their class, begin to fuck with the passengers; finally zeroing in on poor Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), sitting there in full makeup after getting the heave-ho from his gig as a professional clown, all for dropping a .38 in front of a ward full of sick kids; sitting there laughing uproariously, uncontrollably, through an aggregation of despair that seemingly no one, least of all he, could begin to penetrate — Ben Warheit delivers Sondheim’s chestnut in the most literal sense of that word; carrying every line of it down the long subway car to its target; word by word, step by step, wielding the song not simply as a taunt (though it is surely that), but as something far more devastating before the three of them administer a savage beating to this wanton failure of a man.
The employment of music that is, on its face, contrary to the putative spirit of a scene or an image has been a regular occurrence in film since the 1960s. Its origins can be traced, with some precision, to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, with its Tab Hunter Fan Club biker gang decking themselves out in all their leather and chains finery to the strains of Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet. It was, on reflection, inspired — if somewhat less ironic than Anger had perhaps intended. Since then the technique has invariably been utilized for the purposes of either a cheap laugh, a cheaper irony or, sometimes, both (Singin’ in the Rain appearing in the course of a pivotal rape scene in Clockwork Orange doing yeoman’s service in this regard and, more than anything, contributing to that film’s everlasting moral dubiousness).
What is startling about Send in the Clowns, as it surfaces in this film, is that it is not in the least bit ironic, or funny, or even counter-textual. As the life of Arthur Fleck and that of the cesspool of a New York he lives in is about to change forever, Sondheim’s song is at once menacing and deeply haunting. It is as if this upper-class trash, in the last minute of his time on earth, were serenading this loser, telling him, ‘This is your life, peasant. You are this song: the unwanted shadow of regret; of everything that remains when love vanishes from existence.’ The sheer judgement of the moment is so merciless, such an existential death sentence, that Arthur pulling his piece just like Charles Bronson would, and blasting one, two, then three of them becomes as inescapable in its physical logic as one of Newton’s laws of motion; except this time that which has been down is about to go way up.
For it is here, when the victim strikes back, that something more than late 20th century American catharsis offered by the Death Wish franchise’s urban vigilante fantasia, or even Martin Scorsese’s more critically digestible chronicles of existential revenge (Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy) takes place. A fundamental disruption in the order of the film’s universe follows hard on the heels of this desperate act, and both Hollywood traditions are at once abandoned, like corpses left to rot in sanitary isolation, for an ironic deadpan that flirts with lending morality to the specter of mass violence.
Joaquin Phoenix’s richly deserved Oscar notwithstanding, there exists no known aesthetic enclave or canonical order that can fully comprehend the nihilism of Joker; discarding, as it does, the cinematic models which instantly informed the film’s almost terminally blinkered public reception.
Arthur Fleck’s execution of his tormentors has more obvious, and no doubt deliberate, parallels in the 1984 case of Bernhard Goetz, the man New York tabloids (always licking their depraved chops for the opportunity) dubbed The Subway Vigilante after shooting four fellow passengers, all Black, one a screwdriver wielding would-be mugger — that is, if you believe Goetz (not generally advisable). After being taken into custody, Goetz was catapulted to a species of fame and infamy that, particularly in New York, was very much of its time yet in some respects heralded, weirdly, our now-prevailing paradigm of 21st century media stardom.
By Daniel Riccuito and Tom Sutpen