Dear Jack,
It’s curious how sticky my thoughts on film seem to become now that I’m writing to you about them regularly. With all the stuff piling up in my mind, going around the corner once a week, embracing what comes and see my lucubrations thwarted almost feels like a relief. Shedding the parasite called cinematic imagination is sometimes difficult indeed.
Working on an essay, earlier this week I watched John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) on video, not planning to share any of this with you and keep my thoughts for the other text, but then already the opening scenes forced themselves upon me and into this letter. The title has already set the contract with me as a viewer, so it is clear that the “thing” (or should I say the “nothing”) is always already amongst us, the very stuff of our desire and imagination – the question is how to deal with it, or also: how to make film with it. In the first scene the camera follows a man with a rifle in a helicopter chasing a dog running across the endless snow flats of Antarctica – a flight not unlike Claire Denis’ sledge dogs spurting through the Northern winter landscape. Later on, the thing will invade a scientists’ community via the dog, and through an infectious kind of organic mimicry create a serious threat to biodiversity – which leads to interesting reflections on the way horror combines scientific discourses with cinema. But before we go into all of that, the second scene shows how the scientists have found a way to deal with the nothingness in the first place. Since it’s rather too cold outside, we follow the camera into the barracks and there we see the men playing… table tennis!
Now that a ping-pong ball, too, has found its way into our tennis game, I’m thinking of Woody Allen’s Match Point (2005), which revolves around tennis, but in one scene opts for the microdynamics, or is meta-perspective, of table tennis. The ping-pong game allows Allen to introduce his star actress Scarlett Johansson with a twist, since we’ll get to know her Nola Rice character as a lousy actress running from audition to audition, unable to get a job.
Tonight around the corner I saw Woody Allen’s new film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, a somewhat dull romantic comedy, certainly not his most inspired. Since Allen always manages to cast a few famous actors – and here we have Anthony Hopkins and Naomi Watts – I was wondering how they would be introduced in the film, especially seen the history these actors carry with them. How to avoid reminiscing of Hannibal Lecter when Hopkins appears, or worse, when he has pork chops or you know what for dinner? Allen solves the problem like this: in an early scene we see the divorced Alfie (Hopkins) in a posh apartment, eating take-out Chinese with a plastic fork! In tennis they call this a drop shot.
Waiting now for Naomi Watts to make her appearance, I realize she’s an even more complex case, since her imaginary shadows are already multiple. Her breakthrough in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), in which she plays an actress, owes particularly to the famous audition scene or screen test. Afterwards, Watts has been taking on many prominent roles, also in remakes, such as Michael Haneke’s Funny Games U.S. (2007) or Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005), and for 2012 she is scheduled to play the role of Marilyn Monroe. The theme of rehearsal also appears in Cooper and Schoedsack’s classic King Kong (1933), about which I wrote the following around the time Jackson’s remake came out in an essay on monstrosity:
“On the way to Kong’s island, filmmaker Carl Denham organises a rehearsal on the ship with actress Ann Darrow, who repeatedly puts up a horror-struck face in front of a virtual monster. The theme of the movie within the movie adds a meta-layer to King Kong as it doubles the gaze and the framing of Hollywood cinematography. Interesting in this particular scene though is the act of rehearsing. It is not so much about living in and through film imagery to rehearse for life. Not about rehearsing in the light of death to face its unrepeatable nature. But something in between: rehearsing to confront fear, driven by a belief in the power of make-believe. This preproductional moment announces a similar postproductional operation: in the movie theatre the spectators are invited to embrace fiction and its repetition as they rehearse to withstand their own anxieties and monstrous feelings.”
I haven’t seen Jackson’s remake of King Kong, so I don’t know whether it actually includes a remake of the rehearsal scene, but I do know that Naomi Watts plays the role of Ann Darrow in it, so as long as I haven’t seen the film, nothing prevents me from conflating my memories.
In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger the theme of repetition is played out through Gemma Jones’ character Helena, who talks a great deal about reincarnation, her former lives and the question of how to shake them off. Woody Allen is certainly aware of the cinematographic resonance of all this New Age talk, so his introducing Naomi Watts is not simply solving a problem but opening up a whole scale. This is the line Sally (Watts) says when she first addresses her mother Helena: “Please, can we not have to relive all of this constantly?”
Best,
Jeroen |
