[recommendation] sparce and sequential

some months ago, the times magazine, in a bold demonstration of everything laudable and infuriating about the paper, began running "the strip," a weekly feature serializing new work by a prominent comics artist, who gets a single page's space (actually 4/5ths of a page, the top fifth being reserved for a brand-friendly declaration of what is to follow) in which to tell each installment. none of the artists chosen thus far have much, if any, experience working in this idiom; despite the department's title, they seem to be featuring not comic strip artists, but graphic novelists, which is to say (because i know these terms teeter on the edge of utter meaninglessness), folks who are used to working in a longer and more contiguous format. the first three participants, chris ware, jaime hernandez, and seth, all accomplished and well-regarded (at least in the insular comics world), seemed not quite up to the task of telling coherent individual stories that contributed to a larger narrative in so little space. (i don't mean to disparage the stories themselves, which i suspect will benefit from collection into single units, but the experience of reading them episodically was disappointing.)

this week saw the launch of a new serial by artist meghan kelso, a relative newcomer compared to the paper's previous choices. although i'm yet to find anyone who doesn't consider her a talented storyteller, it was nonetheless a reasonably bold decision, and one that i imagine was motivated by exactly the problem bemoaned above. kelso is often compared to alice munro for her impressive concision; her extremely short stories, while deceptively quiet and uncluttered, manage to render memorable and emotionally complex characters in the little time and space they demand. the first page of "watergate sue" does demonstrate that she is at least somewhat better suited to the challenge than her predecessors. from eight panels of simple dialogue, subtle background details and clever chromaticism, we already know a lot about three characters (an aging hippie and her two adult children, probably in the pacific northwest) and the relationships between them. whether this is all interesting enough that we'll have any idea what's going on when we come, at the end of another long and distracting work week, to the next installment, we'll have to decide on sunday.

so while awaiting next week's page and forgetting this week's, allow me to direct you to the squirrel mother, kelso's 2006 collection of short stories. it's a little different from any other contemporary comics i've read, and it will introduce you to the author's opinion of richard nixon, which i imagine will be pertinent to "watergate sue." and it's quite good. so read it, and we'll talk.

[postscript: new yorkers can pick the book up this week at the union square strand, where a discounted stack sits on one of the comic tables upstairs.]

the way it is

according to the ancient rabbis (some of them, anyway), the world's host of demons and frightful things resulted not from some treachery of the morning star, but by the cavorting of lilith, the first of adam's three wives, with the beasts in eden. this theory is surely correct.

for what is a monster but an unholy union of the most mundane elements? take the riddling sphynx, for example, who comprised the legs of a lion, the wings of a bird, the head and (far more horrifically) intellect of a woman. or the dragon; so much salamander decorated with the wings of a bat and the disposition of a chief executive officer. or mike wazowski, a human eye atop the legs of a chicken, dressed to the nines in gucci alligator skin.

"the hybrid object," explains chronically self-stimulating scholar homi bhaba, "retains the actual semblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues its presence by resisting it...." in better words, the monster realizes potentials which are not available to the creatures whence came its various components, particularly us human creatures, in our dreary periods of consciousness. thus the enduring appeal of the monster: it is, by definition, more than the sum of its parts, more powerful than the thing that composes it. the impregnable lines that delineate our waking hours are no obstacle to the monstrous incarnations we dream up for ourselves. the possibilities, if not endless, are as vast as the known universe, and every permutation into which the human mind may distort it.

this is what makes monsters inc. more or less the best movie ever. it is a proper cartoon, animating what cannot be given life in the waking world. which is to say, animation is at its best when it concerns itself with the monstrous, and this is animation at its best. like all pixar films, it envisions impossibilities just the way everyone knows them to be.

so if the ending seems "tacked on," it is not, i think, a concession to hollywood convention, but a necessary amendment. are we supposed to accept, as roz explains, that this is "the way it has to be?" that a door, supernatural, symbolic, metaphysical, or otherwise, can ever be truly destroyed? we have just swung on their frames through a dingy, disorganized used bookstore of the soul to shame the entire network of "amazonian" warehouses, wherein every country ever inhabited or invented by man awaits discovery. and they would speak to us of the way things are?

no, that simply will not do. when the credits roll, we will return to our cars, turn on the radio, and let sixteen-year-old girls who have already made more money than we will amass over our interminably long careers tell us how life is. we'll drive past countless doors that are irreparably unopenable, and go home to lie in bed thinking of others. but until then, do not detain us with trifles like impossibility. we have paid $8.75 for ninety minutes of liberation from such concerns; monsters, inc. is that rare film that gives us our money's worth.

the walk

discussed:
my darling clementine, 1946; dir. john ford
high noon, 1952; dir. fred zinneman
stagecoach, 1939; dir. john ford

Writes Ronald L. Davis in his biography, John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master,

Film students have dissected virtually every frame of My Darling Clementine, pointing out the tension between the community and the individual. Critics have interpreted the scene on the hotel porch in which Wyatt Earp, the outsider, balances himself on one foot, then the other, while tipped back in a chair as showing Earp's tentative position with tombstone society. "If you told Jack Ford that, he'd have punched you in the nose," Iron Eyes Cody declared. (188)

Davis, on Ford's behalf, advocates the intuitiveness of the director's filmmaking; the man was not only uninterested but violently disinterested in such trifles as themes and subtext; he cared only about making an engaging, dramatically exciting film. He invariably denied claims of his artistry, asserting instead that he was merely a working man making a living.

Then again, Ford also claimed that My Darling Clementine was an almost entirely historical document, allowing that he had taken liberty only with the time of Doc Holliday's death. Apparently, the climactic shootout had been described and cartographed to Ford by Earp himself, "so in My Darling Clementine, we did it exactly the way it had been." (Tefertiller, 338)

In "Inventing Wyatt Earp: His Life and Many Legends," an examination of the relationships between the historical Earp and his various literary and cinematic incarnations, Allen Barra troubles Ford's story. "Wyatt may or may not have talked to Ford about the gunfight--" writes Barra, "it seems doubtful that he would have told a movie director what he held back from his own biographers--but he never told him it happened like that. Nor, really, did Ford think that it did." The shootout had actually taken place near, not in, the corral. Neither Finn nor Old Man Clanton, who had been killed a few days earlier, were among the Clanton's ranks, and two others, The McLaurys, were. Furthermore, no Earp brothers were killed until after the O.K. corral; the former was actually retribution for the latter, a causal relationship reversed in the film. "Ford knew pretty much what had happened at the gunfight, and if he didn't, Stuart Lake's bestseller was there to tell him." (347)

In fact, Lake's "biography," Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, which was itself, outside of the battle in question, almost entirely fabricated, was never consulted by either Ford or his screenwriter, Winston Miller. (Lake was included in Clementine's credits because of the terms of a contract the author had negotiated with Fox for an earlier movie.) Nor was it quite as unlikely as Barra suggests that Ford had conversed with Earp. Earp did serve, toward the end of his life, as an advisor to several films, and was described as being difficult largely because he would not retell deeds he had not done. Frustrated with the world's total lack of interest in the facts of his life, Earp took briefly to telling stories he had read about himself, and it was possibly at this point that Ford encountered the living legend. Ford was not then a director but a prop boy who, he claims, got Earp coffee and a chair and was in return regaled.

Nonetheless, it is true that Ford could not possibly have believed in the historicity of his film. Wherever he got his facts, he got too many of them right to have been unaware of those he had skewed. There is one element in particular of My Darling Clementine that exposes Ford's utter willingness to distort, amend, and rewrite history ("Do you want good history or a good movie," was one of his mantras) as a means to explore the very themes of which we film students accuse him. This element is Clementine, who has no historical antecedent whatsoever, nor does she appear in any previous Earp "history." "Ford had to know that he was creating a grand romantic fantasy," concludes Barra, "but in all the interviews he gave in later years he vehemently insisted on the historical veracity of his Earp movie." (348)

It is initially baffling that the film drew its title from an a-historical supporting character with so little screentime that Jeanne Crain, the star actress for whom the role was initially intended, had to be replaced with an unknown. True to form, Ford maintained that he had suggested the title to Miller because he liked the song.

The obvious conclusion is that Hollywood movies simply need a romantic subplot, and Clementine was inserted to fill that need. The title, then, was probably intended to lure prospective audiences. It amounts to no more than typical hollywood studio generica, overlain upon an otherwise unconventional masterpiece with more pressing concerns.

The obvious conclusion is wrong. Clementine offers nothing like a classical hollywood romance. Earp is distracted by the former lover of his (albeit tenuous) friend and fighting companion Doc Holiday. His exact moral liability here is difficult to appraise, but it is clear from Henry Fonda's lowered head that, regardless of our own final judgements, he considers his character's thoughts covetous. While there can be no mistake that Earp is enamored of the urbane Clementine, there is very little evidence that his feelings are reciprocated. At the film's close, Earp rides off into the fade-out without ever having received so much as a kiss on the cheek or amorous glance from the object of his affections. In 1946, such a troubled and unsatisfying romance was far from customary. (Shane, which was considered highly unconventional for developing a strikingly similar triangle, was released seven years later.) Had the box office necessitated the fabrication of a Clementine, it would have been a far jucier fruit.

What's more, the historical Earp did in fact seduce the wife of another man in Tombstone, an act which contributed in no small way to the tensions that led the Earps and Clantons to the O.K. Corral. Neither member of the couple is given any mention in Ford's film.

Both Barra and subsequent biographer Casey Tefertiller agree that there was ample drama, intrigue, and romance in the historical Tombstone, and are baffled as to why Ford would have concocted what they consider an appreciably less interesting tale. But the director's elusive motivations become clear, I think, after Holiday instructs Clementine to leave the town. He sits at his own bar, drinking himself into a terrible funk and exacerbating his tubercular condition. Under the guise of altruism, Earp decides he is going to get the good doctor to go to bed. He criticizes Holiday's foolishness for turning Clementine away, and, to drive the point home, knocks the fool unconscious.

Give us your best shot, Jack, you're not fooling anybody. Earp, who is in all respects the paradigm of rugged individualist masculinity we have come to expect from a "westerner," would apparently be willing to give it all up for the love of a cultured, civilized eastern lady. She even gets him to go to church.

The sheriff sits introspectively on the porch of Doc Holiday's, having just received a haircut and a shave. Despite the Barber's insistence on the magnificence of his work, Earp is unsettled by how gentrified (to be read as emasculated, according to most scholars of the western) he looks. To make matters worse, the barber sprays him with something fragrantly botanical, and Wyatt admits to his brothers that the smell of home they believe they are imagining is in fact emanating from him.

The occupants of a passing carriage invite him to church, but he declines, stammering out a rather unimpressive excuse. It is not until Clementine emerges from the inn and asks the sheriff to escort her that he changes his mind. The two embark on a long, quiet walk through town.

It is a scene which both Ford and the genre prolifically recreated, and for which both are famous; the outsider walks through town with his heroine on his arm. Film historian Michael Coyne identifies Stagecoach's "lonely walk down Main Street" as the prototype for the ensuing stereotype. (19) The Ringo Kid, in an attempt to "break out of prison and into society in the same week," strolls through Lordsburg alongside his prostitute fiancee. She is on her way to the town's mini-ghetto, and he; either to be killed by his rivals or sent back to jail, and yet the pair proceeds as an ordinary couple on an ordinary night. Dallas recognizes the farcical nature of their evening constitutional, but Ringo does not.

Clementine's walk, while unable to claim prototypical status, makes its dramatic function somewhat more explicit. Earp is clearly uncomfortable with the idea of belonging to a community (he has, after all, just left his position as sheriff in Dodge City to raise cattle) and is especially inept at anything that might be called "civilized." He has no trouble antagonizing Chihuahua, the Mexican prostitute, but stammers attempting to make polite conversation with Clementine. He is perfectly confident at the gambling table on saturday night, but recedes into the nonexistent corner of the church on sunday morning. He looks like a prince with scruff along his jaw and a disheveled mop atop his head, and a thinly guised pauper with a shower and a shave.

Like Ringo, Earp is playing dress up. He is trying on civilization like a new pair of boots. He walks through town as if he were the kind of person who did things like walk through town. Unlike Ringo, Earp sees the irony.

Of course, the word "long" means something very different when applied to a shot in a movie than it does in most other circumstances. Wyatt and Clementine's walk lasts no more than twenty seconds, which, in terms of screen time, is practically interminable. This dichotomy is magnificently not illustrated by High Noon.

Director Fred Zinnemann has said that High Noon is not so much a western, but a drama of a more generic nature with the trappings of a western. The point has been reiterated by numerous American critics. And yet, Phillip Drummond, author of the British Film Institute's High Noon companion, calls the film "a 'western,' with all the mythic meanings of tales set in the history of the North American west...." Proponents of either persuasion seem to consider their position self-evident.

Certainly, a number of tropes we have come to expect are missing. There is no desert, no mountains, no sweeping panoramic shots that dwarf the characters against their surroundings. In fact, the shot of which Zinneman was most enamoured, "the boom shot," as he proudly referred to it, pulls back from our hero to reveal... a town. There are no ranches, no cattle, and no one ever mounts a horse. There is no frontier. There is no John Wayne. In short, there is no West. There is, however, a long, lonely walk down main street.

And it's long. High Noon is shot very nearly in real time. Such a respectful relationship with time is unusual in a western; temporal impossibilities are probably the genre's most generic flight of fancy. A westerner does, after all, have to be able to draw faster than the man holding the gun to his head can pull the trigger. (This phenomenon is hyperbolically demonstrated by the removal of several frames from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in order to give Robert Redford a superhuman draw.) Furthermore, dramatic moments (like deaths) are often extended well beyond a reasonable duration. Shane, for example, can draw and shoot in an immeasurably short period of time, but takes a good ten seconds to throw a punch. High Noon is guilty of very few such distortions.

In fact, the whole film is disappointingly plausible; another fact which sets it apart from the bulk of its genre. Unlike Shane or Ringo, who basically defeat their opponents by using their magical cowboy powers, Will Kane wins by strategizing and hiding, and with the invaluable help of his wife, who rather unchivalrously shoots a man in the back. What kind of western makes its heroes resort to such realistic means?

The town through which Kane walks, though, is an undoubtedly western town. It is laid out fairly similarly to Tombstone. Both have every manner of tradesman, including a fantastically multi-talented barber, set between a hotel bar on one end of town and a church on the other. The ambivalence displayed by Kane and Earp toward their respective walks is in both cases because the men are on their way to church.

The main difference, of course, is that Kane has a church to walk to. In Tombstone, there is just a wooden frame where the would-be congregation will eventually meet. Since they do not yet have a minister, they are not actually holding a service; instead they are holding a dance to raise the funds necessary to complete the church. When Earp arrives he is well-received. Smiling men and women step and spin across the screen.

But things have changed. There is no dancing at the service Kane interrupts, nor is there even a smile. No one is happy to see him, and the minister even questions his right to be there. The children twitch in their seats, and when they are dismissed, they cheer with ignorant bliss.

The active community has become passive. The excitement felt at the prospect of civilization has been lost with its actualization. We are given to understand that when Kane first ran Miller out of town, it was a very different place. The very men that now turn him away then rallied behind him to fight Miller, just as those in Tombstone offer their help to Earp. Those that have not are willing to fight to make their town "a decent place to raise women and children," but those that have simply want to protect what they have.

Meanwhile, at the dark end of Main Street, further changes have taken place. The promiscuous, ethnically-other anti-heroine now owns her place of business, the hotel wherein once upon a time her stock character was just another whore. "The viewer expects to learn that the nonwhite Helen Ramirez is a prostitute," writes feminist critic Gwendolyn Foster, "bent on the destruction of the good girl who takes her man." (94) We expect it because this is the treatment normally given her character; Foster has, after all, just perfectly described Chihuahua.

Nonetheless, despite the scrappy, voluptuous Mexican's uncommonly empowered position in the town, and the docile, white-clad white woman's final show of competence, let us not overestimate High Noon's egalitarian project. Both women still mean the same thing they always have.

Doc Holiday, by rejecting Clementine in favor of Chihuahua, rejects also the civilized North-eastern world from whence the former came. He insists that she leave town because he knows that she brings civilization with her; at the film's close we find that she has become the new schoolmarm. Holiday understands what Kane takes an hour and a half to discover; there will be no place for him in a civilized world. He tells Amy she does not belong because she does not. Chihuahua belongs.

Conversely, Kane makes the transition from town-taming gunslinger to store-keeping gentleman by concluding his affair with Helen Ramirez and marrying Amy. Amy is the same peaceable, refined character who did not belong in Tombstone, but in Kane's post-tamed town, the tables have been turned. It is Ramirez who must go.

Ford had initially envisioned a funeral scene for Chihuahua. It would begin with the casket being led only by a madame and the other prostitutes. As the casket passed through town, the shopkeepers would look out their windows and be struck by a bout of conscience, until one by one, every man in town joined the procession. The scene was cut because it did not fit into the flow of the film, but nonetheless sheds a good deal of light on how Ford envisioned Tombstone. Ramirez leaves town because she knows no one will lift a finger in her defense when Miller returns. Even the man to whom she is selling her business, who claims a debt of gratitude, makes no show of being endebted. The world has changed.

If a western is so geographically bound as its designation would suggest, then High Noon does not seem to qualify. Unlike most other films in the genre, it is not a tale that has grown out of the historical curiosity that was the American frontier, a curiosity the likes of which our crowded planet will never see again. The innumerable historical parallels critics have drawn, alongside our nation's current darkling political scene, suggest that High Noon tells a tale which is sadly in no danger of extinction. Zinnemann himself, resentful of the close readings the film has received, nonetheless identified his "primary concern" as the dramatization of "contemporary history for the large American audience and to make them understand in emotional terms what the world outside looks like today." (Prince, 83) High Noon is not a film about the west.

And yet, if that's all there is to a western, then Barra and Tefertiller have a good point. Why did Ford change the Wyatt Earp story? The real shootout resulted largely from the peculiar sociopolitical climate of the fledgeling Oklahoma; it was in all a far more "western" tale than the vengeance/romance by which it was replaced.

Drummond is not the first non-American to suggest a less geographically oriented schema. Andre Bazin argues that westerns are just a transplanting of ancient mythological themes and archetypes into a new setting, and the spaghetti western phenomenon should probably be considered an argument in his defense. Of course, Bazin is wrong, but he nevertheless establishes that there must be something more to westerns than blind americana if so many others feel they can lay claim to it. Even Coyne, who rejects Bazin's appraisal, refers at length to the "odyssey western," naming half of the genre's output after the first literary figure ever to struggle with a simultaneous longing for home and need to be free.

High Noon is not a western by accident. Whether or not Zinnemann knew it, his tale belongs to the genre because it concerns everything that westerns are about. Neither, then, was fords historical revision arbitrary; he was turning the Earp legend into a western. Westerns are not merely about the west. They are not about mountains, but the relationship of a mountain to a man; not forests but the relationship of a forest to the town that was built from it. Likewise, High Noon is not a film about a town but about the relationship between a town and the towns that preceded it. Zinnemann need not show his society's antecedent for the same reason he does not need to show mountains or saddles; his employment of the western motif makes them implicit.

Although My Darling Clementine and High Noon portray civilization in two very different stages, they make essentially the same final appraisal of the institution. It is something akin to, "damned if you do, damned if you don't." The uncivilized world is not suitable for women and children, and the civilized world is not suitable for men. Westerns take place in that liminal place that is no longer one and not yet the other, the brief historical moment in which everyone belongs.

boys

discussed:
pinnochio
a.i.

I have a place where dreams are born
And time is never planned
It's not on any chart
You must find it in your heart
Never Never Land

"A robot that dreams?" questions one of Hobby's employees, repeating the Professor's words exactly. That's how you know it's a really important line.

Professor Allan Hobby has proposed that his company build a machine that can love, as a child loves its mother. This android child would transcend the boundaries between machine and man, and would perhaps be, in some qualitative and, as another employee points out, morally problematic sense, real.

Hobby wants to build a real boy. What his colleagues and employees debate is how real a boy it is possible to manufacture, and how real a boy it is wise or profitable to manufacture. While Hobby speaks of a technology in its infancy, his ambition is far from new, and the debate surrounding it is far from unique.


Six costly months into the production of Pinocchio, Walt Disney called the project to a halt, dismally unhappy with the product his animators were turning out. Pinocchio's look had been based largely on the illustrations in various publications of Carlo Collodi's text, all of which had depicted the character as a walking, talking marionette. While this conception of the character served well in static illustrations, it could not be set in motion believably. It was too cold, too lifeless, and simply not loveable enough. Pinocchio was redesigned to be more human in appearance; to be more like a real boy. His cheeks were rounded and reddened, and his eyes made wider. The accelerated adult voiceover to which he had thus far been syncopated was replaced with a reading by an actual boy.

Pinocchio's personality was revamped as well. He was stripped of his mischievous nature and left as something of a moral blank to be filled; thus he only does wrong when he is lead astray by outside forces. It was this kind of cleaning and romanticizing of his sources for which Disney would come to be so roundly criticized, but it seemed to him an absolutely necessary amendment. An inherently bad Pinocchio was too hard to relate to, too hard to care about.

While Disney was finally satisfied with the look of his lead, Collodi's tale had yet a series of narrative revisions to undergo. Disney's removal of Pinocchio's less appealing characteristics had left the character rather uninteresting. "Without a conscience...," explains Bob Thomas in Disney's Art of Animation, "he had none of the boyish humanity that would induce sympathy in his many travails." (81)

So the unfortunate little cricket who warns Pinocchio to cease his deviations only to be crushed beneath the puppet's foot was gradually transformed into Jiminy cricket, the protagonist's conscience and loyal familiar through all his misadventures. A cast of seductive dastards was developed to take turns playing id to the insect's superego, and thus the otherwise amoral boy-to-be was given a complex human psychology.

After thus turning a lifeless puppet into a real boy, Disney reassembled his team of animators and started over. Utilizing a number of new technical innovations and artistic techniques, they created the most haunting, believable, life-like cartoon anyone had ever seen. Pinocchio was considered much too frightening for children, and lost one of the 2.6 million dollars that was spent on it.


Disney is not the only one to have enacted the Pinocchio myth in his attempt to retell it. At some point during the twenty years of intermittent planning Stanley Kubrick did for the movie that would eventually be called A.I., the auteur decided that, ideally, the robot should be a robot. He actually built an entirely animatronic lead that was, as Spielberg described it, "a disaster." Which is not to say that it wasn't a fantastically impressive machine; but we humans remain by far the most complicated machines there are, and we are not yet capable of producing anything that can even approximate our own intricacies. Neither could a believable boy be animated. In either case, the result is simply not real enough.


"Did you see him? He looks so real," exclaims David's soon-to-be mother. It is this fact that she seems to find most unsettling. And it is this fact that ultimately proves to be David's salvation. Many of the mecha at the Flesh Fair exhibit human responses. One delivers an angry tirade about the lot of their species, while another attempts to weasel his way out of being destroyed. But David really looks like a boy, and the people believe. Even the fair's producer, who knows David is mecha, is seduced by how life-like he is. "Craftsmanship like this," he declares, "you don't throw out with the rest of the trash."

This is what Disney and Spielberg both understood. If audiences are to relate to a fake boy, if they are to sympathize with him, and if they are to care about him, he has to look real. And so, Spielberg got himself a real live boy, like Disney before him, and Giapetto before him.
An uncanny coincidence? Of course not. That's what artists do.

It might be miles beyond the moon
Or right there where you stand
Just keep an open mind
And then suddenly you'll find
Never Never Land

"Only Orga believe what cannot be seen or measured," explains Gigolo Joe. "It is this oddness that separates our two species." In other words, mecha don't dream.

But David dreams. Though he does not once close his eyes, not even to blink, until the end of the film, he most definitely meets Joe's criteria for what it is to be human. He believes so strongly in the impossible that he travels to the end of the earth in search of it.

Apparently, he also meets Professor Hobby's criteria for what it is to be human. He and his staff are so astounded that they play along, feeding cryptic clues to an electronic wizard. Hobby, of course, is the man behind the curtain. He is the very good man who disguises himself as the very bad wizard, sending his petitioners on an impossible quest amidst promises he does not have the power to keep. And in the end, all he can do is tell David that everything he had wished for he already had, right there where he stood. "But you are a real boy, David," he announces with astonished delight.

What he means is that David has transcended his programming. It is something that none of the other Mecha do. "Why do you do that?" David asks as Joe dances about. "It's what I do," he replies, none too confidently. Joe does not ask why. But David does, repeatedly. "Why do they do this to us?" he asks at the Flesh Fair. "Why can't you bring her back?" he asks the future robots. "Why can't the Blue Fairy turn me into a real boy," he reasons throughout. David is one of a kind because, unlike other mecha, he is unwilling to accept his limitations.

But David was not programmed to question his ontology, nor to believe in the unseen. He was simply programmed to love. Not as a man loves a woman, nor as a woman loves a man, nor even as a parent loves a child. David is programmed to love as a child loves its parent.
What's the difference? Perhaps it is that the love of a child is a selfish love. It is a love that needs and wants and takes. David wants his mother to himself, and grows jealous of her affection for Martin and Henry. David destroys another David shouting, "You can't have her."
Pinocchio is also selfish. In fact, he must overcome this selfishness in order to become a real boy. Once he learns to be selfless, he will be human.

After all, isn't that the way in which we humans transcend our programming? Don't we defy our instincts, our biology, and do what is not in our best interest for the benefit of others? Indeed, we do. Out of stupidity, maybe, or maybe out of insanity. But perhaps it is something else. Perhaps it is out of love.


It should probably not be as surprising as it is that Kubrick and Spielberg based their telling of Pinoccio to a much greater extent on Disney's version than on Collodi's. Most significant is the character of Teddy, who is very closely modeled after Jiminy Cricket. Like his predecessor, Teddy's original literary incarnation is destroyed by the protagonist early into the second act of his story. In "Supertoys When Winter Comes," David dismantles Teddy to see if he is "real." But the celluloid Teddy is in for the long haul. He accompanies David throughout the film, always finding his master again when the latter loses him.

Brian Aldiss's Teddy does not so much advise David as simply comfort him. When David asks for help with the letter he is writing to his mother, Teddy tells him that it's fine the way it is. But Spielberg's Teddy is David's guardian. He tries to keep David out of danger and to prevent him from making foolish decisions. He is a less moralistic guide, of course, than Disney's, but he serves the same literary function.

It should not be surprising That A.I. reworks a Disney film because that's the way folktales work. Each telling is a modification of the last. But it is surprising, because Pinocchio is not a folktale. It has a credited original author and a definitive text that does not vary from region to region or age to age.

It was, however, designed to look like a folktale. It reads like a folk tale, and its narrative arcs like a folk tale. And if more children are familiar with Disney's version than the original, and Kubrick considered it canonical, who's to say that the story hasn't transcended its author's design, and taken on a life of its own? Perhaps Pinocchio is turning into a real, live folktale.

You'll have a treasure if you stay there
More precious far than gold
For once you have made your way there
You can never, never grow old

"Will you still love me when it's all gone, " Monica asks Henry, and he comforts her with the appropriate platitudes. She is referring to a bottle of perfume that is no longer available, but the subtext is clear. Henry is human; he changes and grows as long as he lives, and his love with him. And when henry is gone, so will be his love. We people are not so dependable as we would like to be.

But David will, and does love Monica when it's all gone. When the world has frozen over and the human race disappeared from the planet, when David can neither move nor see, when everything is gone, still he loves Monica. "A love that will never end," explains Hobby.
The professor is haunted by and obsessed with eternity. He has lost a son, and evidently models David after him. David's love cannot be lost, no matter how hard one may try to lose it. It is this quality that Hobby feels would make a loving mecha such an asset to mankind. "Always loving, never ill, never changing," is how Hobby describes him.

"Always there, always smiling, always awaiting him," is how the narrator describes the blue fairy.


Both Pinocchio's and David's adventures end with a dream. Pinocchio is visited by the Blue Fairy, and awakes to find he is no longer a marionette but a real boy. David, however, does not need to wake; the dreaming itself proves his humanity. Like all fairy tales, A. I. ends with an "everlasting moment;" and David sleeps happily ever after.

And that's my place where dreams are born
And time is never planned
Just think of lovely things
And your heart will fly on wings
Forever
In Never Never Land (Martin)

"And so, David... went to that place where dreams are born," concludes the narrator. And that's the end.

But in the beginning, didn't God create man to love Him? Perhaps it's not so much a moral question as it is one of syntax: did God create man that he might love Him, or that He might love him. Certainly, Giapetto did the latter, as did Hobby, and Disney, and Kubrick, and Spielberg. This is why David had to be realer, and Pinocchio more like a boy; so that people would relate to, would sympathize with, would care about what they had made. Were man to try and make something that could love him, it would only be a means to an end. The ultimate ambition will never, never change. We are trying to make something we can love.

Despite his misguided profession, the Flesh Fair's producer understands. "A lot of love went into you," he concludes after a careful examination of David.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. (Yeats 18)

When reading Aldiss's "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," the story that, in the author's words, "greatly affected Stanley Kubrick," it is hard not to notice a peculiar fact: the story is neither terribly unique nor particularly good. Why was it this episode, and not Vonnegut's EPICAC, or any work of Asimov's, or any one of a thousand others to which Kubrick paid two decades of attention?

Of course, A.I. has a number of sources, cited in a variety of ways. Some are quoted directly in the dialogue (Pinnochio) and the narration (Peter Pan), and some are recognized with faint paintings on the wall of the cryogenics lab (Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin) and some can be identified only by narrative similarity (Hansel and Gretel and The Wizard of Oz). But only Aldiss's tale makes its way into the credits.

My guess is that it was precisely because the story is basically unremarkable that it caught Kubrick's eye. It is a story that has been told a million times before, and will be told a million times again, and if each telling is slightly different from the last in its details, it remains the same tale in a deeper, harder to articulate way. It seems that despite the modern marvels of copyright law and literary scholarship, authorship remains a troubled affair, and the folktale lives on.

When Kubrick first presented Aldiss with a copy of Pinocchio, the author didn't see the connection. After years of collaboration with Kubrick, he continued not to see it. Upon Kubrick's death and the republication of his original "Supertoys" along with two sequels, he still didn't see it. "Never consciously rewrite old fairy stories," went Aldiss's refrain. (xi)

And though Kubrick eventually relieved Aldiss from the project, he seems basically to have agreed. It was this issue of consciousness, I think, that prompted the auteur to request that Spielberg take over the project. As Spielberg explains in one of the many "making of" featurettes to be found on the A.I. DVD, he does not make his directorial decisions for philosophical or verbally expressible reasons. He claims he is simply telling stories, and doing it by intuition.

Had Kubrick lived to make the film, it probably would have played more like a visual essay, as do 2001 and, to a lesser extent, A Clockwork Orange. But when he explained his idea to Spielberg, the latter announced that it was the best story the former had ever had to tell. It is clear from Kubrick's obsession (much to Aldiss's chagrin) with various fantastic tropes, from the fairy godmother to the sunken city, that he did not wish his film to be simply about fairy tales; he wanted it to be a fairy tale. Spielberg is in the fantasy business. Kubrick was obsessed with E.T. and Close Encounters, and apparently felt Spielberg was the man for the job.

Aldiss tells of a concept he and Kubrick had happened upon and quickly abandoned in the early eighties, in which the Soviet Union collapsed and the U. S. sent in robots to "save what could be saved." (xiv) It was not the robot army but the politics of the U.S.S.R.'s downfall that were too implausible to be developed into a film. After a brief description of how the collapse actually came about a decade later, Aldiss makes the following observation:

And if we had put all this on the screen in 1982? No one would have believed it. Even SF is the art of the plausible. So, critics might say, there lies SF's weakness. It is real life which takes on the art of the incredible, as it did at the end of the nineteen-eighties - and continues still to do with the rise and expansion of the European Union. (Aldiss xv)

The sentiment is neither terribly unique nor particularly well-put. Mark Twain wrote, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." (Schmidt)

And why must our fiction be believable? Why all the effort put toward making it more real? Because we wish to believe it, of course. Unlike any other machine, we orga believe what cannot be seen or measured. What makes David human is his unwillingness to accept that he is merely a machine; that there is no more to him than what can be empirically demonstrated. To this end, he cites his emotions and desires, as philosophers have done for as long as their art has existed.

David dreams, not because he is programmed to do so, but because he has to. The world is simply to full of weeping to manage without a fairy to take us away; without a fairy tale into which to be taken. What we ask of our authors, artists, and auteurs is to make us believe that there is better than what can be seen, and more than what can be measured.

If science fiction has replaced the fairy tale as a robot bear replaces a cricket, it too serves the function of its predecessor. The blue fairy does not change because fairy tales do not come and go as do their tellers. David does not change because the dreams of little boys do not age with their dreamers.

on shrinking

The suspicion that man's productive ambitions will be punished is as at least as old as the Tower of Babel, and Jack Arnold's The Incredible Shrinking Man is, in a sense, a retelling of this myth, wherein alienation is the result of progress. As Vivian Sobchack observes, "Scott's wife and brother become increasingly less sympathetic, their humanity dwindling as they physically loom larger on the screen until they are obliterated by a kind of visual synecdoche: a huge foot on the cellar stairs." The film thus demonstrates the resurrection, in 1950's America, of a very old fear.

It did not take long for most people to discern that nuclear testing heralded a significant change in man's relationship to scientific progress. People were clearly attempting to harness a force far beyond their means to control. There were those who had raised this argument against the airplane and the automobile, and even the locomotive, but never before had the potential consequences been so profound. The real destructive capacity of humanity's newest toy could really only be guessed at

Mass destruction once required a mass to bring it about. Suddenly it could result from one trigger-happy finger. It was also immediately evident that the various instructions as to how people should conduct themselves in the face of nuclear disaster were quite ridiculous. Should a nuclear attack occur, any given individual was absolutely helpless. It's enough to make a man feel pretty small.

Certainly, this is the effect it had on Scott Carey, whose rapid diminutization results partially from a chance run-in with an atomic dust cloud. The Incredible Shrinking Man is very much concerned with these issues of power and control. As Carey shrinks, he must constantly re-evaluate just what he is capable of dominating.

At first, it is merely other people against whom Carey is at a disadvantage. He can't be taken seriously, and he can't keep the hordes from his door. He begins to feel increasingly powerless, and he compensates by exacting a more and more dictatorial rule over his wife. His Napoleon complex is apparently inversely proportionate to his actual stature.

Next Carey falls prey to his own house cat. The cat was a domestic animal; Carey had been its master, and has become its dinner. His wife can no longer even hear Carey's demands, and thus he loses even the sense of power her dutiful adherence to her vows afforded.

As Carey sits alone, stranded in his basement and threatened by a tarantula that once he could have eliminated by accident, he is forced to reconsider the meaning of his "humanity." Man, he decides, is by definition master of his domain, and thus Carey resolves to conquer his basement prison. He finds himself nourishment in his new environment, builds bridges over the treacherous terrain, and kills the insect that is both his predator and the sole contender for his food.

But Carey continues to shrink. Eventually, he becomes so small that he can slip through the iron grating into the outside world. His decision to do so evidences a major change in his thinking. The basement was something like a controlled environment, but the ever-diminishing Carey is unlikely to enjoy such good fortune outside its walls. But Carey no longer wishes to be master of creation, but merely a part of it.

The proposition that as a man grows smaller he moves closer to free is, to say the least, counterintuitive. Until its close, the film exploits our inherent association of size with power. And, of course, this is the same fallacy to which the mysterious men of power in Wagner's retelling subscribe. In human affairs they cannot be bigger than they already are, and thus resolve to make everyone else smaller. The vanity of which Wagner, as a feminist writer, is accusing the patriarchy is clear: size matters.


Joel Schumacher's The Incredible Shrinking Woman has all the trappings of a remake. Like The Incredible Shrinking Man, it uses the tale of a diminishing individual as an allegory for the state of man (or, more acurately, woman). It employs the same narrative devices, and even much of the same narration, as its predecessor. It seems to follow the basic plot of the original, with a few obligatory twists and variations, and of course, a new surprise ending, for the old one is no longer a surprise.

But these ultimately superficial similarities are all that is shared by the two films. While Arnold's film is itself fairly "soft" sci-fi, it does voice a genuine and, at the time, widely-held concern: we just don't know what the effects of "atomic" power will be. While there is no hard science or cold equation to support the feasibility of the film's plot, The Incredible shrinking Man is nonetheless ultimately concerned with man's relationship to science and the natural world.

This is not, I think, screenwriter Jane Wagner's concern. True, Pat Kramer's problems do result from her exposure to a strange variety of new, ostensibly harmless chemical formulas found in household products. But her husband is not a chemist; he's in advertising. The real source of her woes is revealed as doctor Eugene Nortz lists the various detergents and glues that have collectively produced such unusual results. "We helped name half those products," she admits. It is not science, but consumerism, that is shrinking Mrs. Kramer.

Thus we are given only a meek and not terribly plausible explanation for how this curious phenomenon might occur, and yet we are treated to chorus after rousing chorus of the Galaxy Glue jingle. "What would we do without Galaxy Glue," it asks, and then provides its own answer: "Life would go to pieces without Galaxy Glue." The song, like so much actual advertising, attempts to convince the potential buyer that she "needs" this new wonder. As people grow increasingly dependent on all these "things," they become less than what they are. We are, in a very real sense, shrunk by our reliance upon commodities and our belief in advertising.

Given this legitimate fear, Wagner's switching of the protagonist's gender, which may initially seem a cheap concession to contemporary sensibilities, is justified. It is the long-held opinion of the American advertising industry that women are, on the whole, more susceptible to their wiles than men. Hence the soaps, detergents, shampoos, conditioners, sprays, and creams parodied by Shrinking Woman, alongside our time-honored image of the dutiful 1950's homemaker, whose life is so delightful since she bought the latest miracle to hit the market. An advertiser's job was, and largely still is, to convince women that their lives could be so much better than they are, and for such a reasonable price, that they would have to be crazy to go on without some small, simple, and yet remarkable thing.

The real trouble, however, with the sexist belief in women's responsiveness to propaganda is that, biased and inaccurate as studies tend to be, the stereotype is statistically supported. Ad campaigns aimed at women are simply more lucrative. It is this fact that inspires Kramer's look of horror as she realizes her complicity in her own decline; by believing the lie, by consuming the products, she has helped to "name" her assailant.

Finally, the two versions of this story draw quite different conclusions. Arnold's film concludes that the world has changed, but acceptance of these changes brings us closer to something cosmic. Contrary to the Babel hypothesis, our strivings to be closer to God will indeed bring about the desired effect. Progress is still progress.

Wagner is, of course, unwilling to accept circumstances as she perceives them. While Kramer claims to experience a feeling of peace similar to that of her predecessor as she approaches the infinite, she is all the while calling out instructions to her friends concerning how to fight the man once she is gone. She does not disappear, however; she falls into another mass of household wonders which reverse the process. If it momentarily appears that Wagner and Schumacher playing with the "good science is the cure for bad science" motif, she quickly puts this suspicion to rest. Kramer is now getting bigger. All these wondrous new conveniences really do, we see, is replace one problem with another.

the madman and the fool

"I confess," wrote William Archer in 1884, "that Malvolio has always been to me one of the most puzzling of Shakespeare's creations." (Varorium 399) The ambiguity with which the Bard handles, or mishandles, as it is often suggested, Malvolio has frequently been a point of confusion and dispute for critical readers. The trouble seems to be one of dramatic convention. Twelfth Night is classified as a comedy, which, in most cases, indicates that all ends well, with misplaced characters returned to their appropriate station, deeds rewarded and misdeeds repaid, and, most importantly, a marriage.
Indisputably, the play delivers most of what we expect: Cesario turns back into Viola, who needs traipse about in her brother's garbs no more. She is reunited with Sebastian who ceases pretending at a class below his Birth. Malvolio, in turn, is disabused of his aspirations to a higher degree. The play ends with not one but three marriages; those between Olivia and Sebastian, Viola and Orsino, and Maria and Sir Toby. Thus we are inclined to believe the punishment exacted upon Malvolio is, at least to the author's mind, just. If it is not so, then the show we have just witnessed is not a comedy.
Also at issue is the narrative function of Sir Toby. He begins the play as half a classic comic duo. He is carefree and jolly and clever in his jests, and every time he appears on the stage, it is as a relief from the melodramatic natures of Olivia and Orsino. If he is well performed, he is a remarkably endearing character.
Malvolio is immediately established as the antagonist to all the merriment associated with his Lady's drunken cousin. Every time there is laughter or song, Malvolio appears in an attempt to stop it. The audience knows immediately not to like the stodgy butler, for he seeks to prevent all of the play's entertainment. He even advises Olivia to send away the fool.
With these two characters fitting so neatly into our reductive notions of "good guy" and "bad guy," we are inclined to stick with our first impression. But the characters' roles are reversed; the oppressed becomes the oppressor, and the abuser is abused. Even more problematic is the nature of Toby's revenge, which seems not at all suited to the crime. The good guy has proven the more villainous. Were the knight a more major character, his change of heart would be easier to accept as a dramatic twist, but rarely does a member of the supporting cast act thus as a protagonist. Apparently, Malvolio is not the only one who fails to know his place.
These narrative anomalies have long been the source of much critical debate. In 1845, British scholar Joseph Hunter published a book entitled New Illustrations of Shakespeare in which the dutiful servant is read as the author's means of taking out his aggressions toward the Puritans, "and of exposing to public odium what appeared to him the dark features of the Puritan character." He describes the many ways in which Malvolio resembles such a zealot, from his unfaltering gravity to his distaste for frivolity right down to the "Quaker-like plainness" of his dress. The textual basis for this last piece of evidence is, at best, unclear, but Hunter felt the killjoy's position as the antagonist was meant to be perceived "the moment he entered." Through Malvolio, Shakespeare was exercising a personal vendetta against the Puritans, who so detested and disapproved of his art. "In Malvolio's general character," writes Hunter, "the intention was to make the Puritan odious; in the stratagem of which he is the victim to make him ridiculous." (Varorium 397)
Half a century later, the whirlygig of Twelfth Night's plot led J. W. Hales to an appreciably different conclusion. The severity of Malvolio's punishment at the hands of Sir Toby, in which Hunter finds no trace of irony or hypocrisy, represents the over-harsh treatment to which the Puritans were subjected. "Thus Shakespeare took no part in the Puritan-baiting that became a favourite dramatic pastime," writes Hales. "And this forbearance is to be accounted for not only by the general fairness and comprehensive sympathy of his nature,--by his splendid incapacity to believe ill of a large section of his fellow-creatures and his fellow Englishmen,--by his innate repugnance to mere abuse and vilification, but also by the fact, that at Stratford he was brought into such close and intimate contact and acquaintance with so many specimens... of the Puritan breed." Again, a certain amount of editorial license is presumable. Hales goes on to hope that the "fanatical temper" of Shakespeare's contemporaries, as well as readers since, managed to be influenced by the poet's premature enlightenment. (Varorium 401)
Archer, who is perhaps not so quick as Hunter and Hales to bend the text to his will, quickly tosses both these positions aside. "The theory... which makes of [Malvolio] a satirical type of the Puritan as Shakespeare conceived him, will not hold ground for a moment." Sir Toby chastises Sir Andrew for threatening to beat the servant when Maria calls him a Puritan. Furthermore, he identifies this comment as the only textual evidence for claims of Malvolio's allegorical nature. He does not deny the material pleasures of this world, and makes not a pretense toward doing so; in fact they are his primary concern. "No one who reads the play without a preconceived theory can find in Malvolio the slightest trace of a zealot." (Varorium, 400)
Therein lies the trouble. No one reads the play without a preconceived theory. It is doubtful whether anyone reads anything without bias, but it is without a doubt a luxury for which a Shakesperian text cannot hope. Schoolchildren are familiar with plots, characters, and even quotations from Shakespeare's verse long before they ever read any of it. We come to the text with the theories we have inherited. Either Shakespeare was the finest playwright in the classical tradition, and would not dare to leave a narrative structure unconcluded, or he was the first modern dramatist, and therefore broke every imaginable convention, ridding the world of stale, lifeless drama. Either he was a staunch defender of the theatre and the arts, and thus despised the Puritans who sought to eliminate them, or he is history's finest example of a humanist, and could never be accused of racial or religious bigotry. The matter is further complicated by Shakespeare's failure to leave any self-defense. There are no stage directions, nor character notes, nor any other provision for the maintenance of the author's "vision."
Lest we think our enlightened times have provided a satisfactory means of cleaning up the Malvolio mess, I call into question two much more recent critical approaches to Twelfth Night. The first is Kenneth Branagh's production in 1988 for the Renaissance Theatre Company, a primarily faithful and literal staging of the play (so much so that it is actually set at christmastime). The second is Trevor Nunn's 1996 film, which takes a good deal of textual and thematic liberties.
Both of these films are marked by an attempt to literalize the subtext of the fool. In neither does he wear the jester's cap and bells, pointed collar, and stockings, as early criticism indicates was traditional. (This is indeed how Feste appears in the earliest film version of Twelfth Night, a twelve-minute silent film made in 1910 by American director Charles Kent.) However, there is little similarity in the character derived by each of the two directors, particularly with respect to their dramatic relationship to Malvolio, who is the victim of the fool's final foolery.
Concerning the fool there is historically much less dispute than that surrounding Malvolio. Scholars seem to agree that he is the play's thinly veiled source of wisdom and commentary. He baits the other characters into verbal contests and outwits them, and somehow turns this into a source of income. As Viola observes, "He is wise enough to play the fool." (Riverside, 458) What does seem to trouble critics is how, with his superior intellect, knowledgeable repartee, and various talents, he came to be the fool. Writes C. W. Hutson, "Feste's versatility and his reminiscences of scholastic training make one suspect that he must have been educated for the Church and have ruined his prospects by some wild prank." (Varorium, 405)
While somewhat irrelevant, it seems a similar suspicion guided Branagh's interpretation of this jester. He seems to have been picked off a street corner on the way to the theatre, donning tattered clothes and fingerless gloves, and forever swinging a bottle of wine. He further problematizes the play's status as a comedy because he is a decidedly tragic figure. He gazes into the audience with a pathetically dismal stare, unless he becomes drunk, at which point his general dissatisfaction breeds belligerence rather than sorrow. At the end of the second act, he passes out and must be carried off the stage by Fabian. He sings slow, dolorous melodies which continue on without him between scenes, lending to the whole production an unusually solitary mood.
Branagh's Malvolio (Richard Briers) is portrayed in a far more traditional manner. He is stiff and serious and grave, he stands straight and speaks clearly and conducts himself with pride. To Hunter, Malvolio's "tragic flaw" is the "self-love" of which Olivia declares him sick. Hales suggests that the character's misfortune is the result of his environment's flaws, which is, of course, exacerbated by the aforementioned conceit. Branagh seems to side with Hunter in this debate. As Maria says, her fellow servant believes himself "so cramm'd... with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him...." (Riverside, 452) It is against this "vice" that Maria concocts her scheme, and it is that scheme that brings about Malvolio's imprisonment.
Nunn's Malvolio, played by the versatile British actor Nigel Hawthorne, is a much more sympathetic character. He remains stiff and certainly no fun, but he demonstrates a genuine concern for his lady and her house. When she accuses him of self-love and rebukes him for deriding Feste, Malvolio appears genuinely baffled. He has advised what he believes to be in Olivia's best interest. Branagh's Malvolio indicates no concern for anything other than himself and his station.
Significantly, the two Malvolios speak against very different fools. When Branaugh's Malvolio claims to have seen Feste "put down the other day with an ordinary fool who has no more brain than a stone," (Riverside, 447) he appears to be kicking a man when he's down. He is advising the wealthy countess to turn away a beggar.
But Nunn's Feste does not beg. The textual instances of his doing so have all been removed. His speech about Cressida, designed to double Viola's donation to him, has been replaced by a tall, strong, foreboding man (Ben Kingsley) leaning against a wall, silently extending his hand before he will make himself useful. The scene in which Feste petitions for Orsino's "bounty" is removed entirely.
Not only does Kingsley's Feste fail to beg, but neither does he bow, or dance, or take orders. He yells when he is angry, and glares when he is unimpressed. The Dramatis Personae identifies him as a servant of Olivia's, but none other of her servants are greeted with an embrace. In fact, there is little left about him to identify him as a fool at all, except that the other characters refer to him as such.
One of Nunn’s most liberal revisions is a scene in which Orsino and Viola approach each other as if to kiss while listening to the fool’s song. This addition serves to do more than merely establish their romantic tension; it reverses the implicit power dynamic of the play. The fool’s askance glances reveal that he is very much aware of his music’s effect, and he ends the song just before his audience members’ lips meet. He is clearly manipulating the pair for his own enjoyment. The clown is in control, and his patrons play the fool.
Significantly, the Duke and his Cesario have come to the fool’s house, dashing through the pouring rain, seeking his talents. While the script makes brief mention of this dwelling, it sets no scene there. By doing so, Nunn has given the fool territory, a realm over which he is master. The Duke is a visitor in his dominion, requesting a service. This arrangement is appreciably more empowering for the clown than was that which it replaced.
Branagh's production leaves the number in its original setting, Orsino's home. The Duke sends for Feste, who seems when he enters to have been interrupted from the drowning of his sorrows. If Nunn has somewhat disregarded Shakespeare's text in his enacting of the scene, Branagh has attended it a bit too closely. The fool's claim that he takes pleasure in singing is interpreted as a refusal of payment. Orsino protests, but Feste leaves without recompense. (Admittedly, this seemingly over-literal reading enjoys a good deal of critical support.)
This Feste refuses pay again, after pretending to be Sir Topas. He does not wish to be a part of the prank at all, but he is ordered by Maria to don a beard and visit the prisoner. Nunn's fool never refuses payment, and is always the master of his own actions. Not only does he take money for his part in the charade, but he does so in an extra-textual silent exchange. He shows no particular generosity to anyone, and performs no deed without reward.
Thus when Malvolio speaks harshly of him, he speaks of one who is at least his equal in self-importance and pride. He is not demonstrating his superiority over one of society's victims, as his stage counterpart seems to do. After all, they are both technically in Olivia's service, but Maria tells us the fool has been long absent. Malvolio does not understand why Feste is nevertheless looked upon so fondly by his lady. Malvolio has been present and loyal and in his service (at least to his own mind) beyond reproach. Why slay the fatted calf for the prodigal fool?
Another important point of departure is the two productions' handling of Malvolio's smile. Both his incarnations require a great deal of preparation, and must coax their lips into a curl. Once the smile is achieved, however, Hawthorne wears it comfortably. "I will smile!" he declares jubilantly, dancing about the garden like a schoolboy. His movements quicken and become less deliberate, and his voice rises in pitch. By the time he approaches Olivia in his infamous cross-garter'd yellow stockings, he is positively giddy. He does not notice his lady's aversion to his actions because he is drunk on his delight.
Brier's Malvolio undergoes no such physical transformation. He never loses his self-control, and his smile never ceases to be forced. When he resolves that he will smile, it is begrudgingly. Certainly his demeanor changes, but there is no indication that the news of his lady's love means anything more to him than a promotion. In fact, he is more self-absorbed and condescending than before.
Perhaps this is why when Sir Toby recommends binding the servant and leaving him in a dark room, nobody protests. One can see how the pranksters might get thus carried away, for it does not seem so cruel a joke to play on a Malvolio who gives no evidence of emotion. Maria and Fabian laugh merrily at the notion until Sir Andrew enters, providing another venue for their jests.
With some minor editorial changes, Nunn alters this scene drastically. "Come," proposes Toby, "we'll have him in a dark room and bound." Maria, who is still laughing from the group's last exchange with Malvolio, pulls herself quickly together, and gives Toby a look of confusion. "Why, that shall make him mad, indeed," she protests. (Nunn) Shakespeare had these words spoken by Fabian, and two lines earlier. In Branagh's more faithful version, Fabian is not expressing reservation, but anticipation.
Even more than Branagh, Nunn refuses to be confined by the play’s traditional genre classifications. While several scenes would meet a modern definition of comedy, this exchange between Maria and Toby is but one of the many opportunities for humor he willingly forgoes in favor of thoughtful, disquieting drama. For example, there is little of comic value in the Fool's taunting of Malvolio, although the dialogue is clever and full of foolery. To the same effect, Nunn renders Orsino’s flowery, angst-ridden treatises on love absolutely laughable. In doing so, he shifts the primary subject of the play from romance to class and station. The film portrays love and courtship as a farce; what it considers seriously is the relationship between servants and masters.
The line is a blurry one, because of all the friendly intermingling that takes place between the two sides. The fool is embraced by Olivia upon his arrival, and he dances and jokes and causes a ruckus with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. Maria plays her practical jokes on Malvolio alongside Toby and Andrew, and they all run and fool and laugh together.
And yet the line is drawn. Nunn establishes its boundaries by having Maria defend Malvolio. We are repeatedly reminded that Maria is still of the servant class. When the fool sits in the kitchen, singing for the drunken nights, Maria joins him with a harmony. The soldiers do not. They are being entertained, and they will not diminish themselves to the role of their performers. Similarly, when all the fooling at Malvolio’s expense is done, Toby coldly orders Maria to his bedchamber without allowance for refusal. Though he has praised her and even prostrated himself to her, he ultimately still thinks of her as an inferior and a servant.
Toby, Andrew, and Fabian seem to think that servants are only valuable as a means of amusement. They speak well of the fool’s singing and foolery. They curse and deride Maria until she makes them laugh, at which point she begins to enjoy their esteem. They have no need whatsoever for Malvolio, and so make entertainment of him. They turn him into something they can use.
Curiously, Maria and the fool conspire together with the knights toward Malvolio’s misfortune. It is clear that either participates for a different reason, although Branagh and Nunn have rather conflicting opinions of just what those reasons are. The former presents a Maria who is as offended by Malvolio's "Puritanism" as her co-conspirators. Branagh concludes that Malvolio really is as bad as his detractors say. He is arrogant, superficial, and cruel.
Nunn's Malvolio is clearly a more ambiguous entity. Maria thinks her fellow attendant is something of a spoilsport, but holds no real animosity against him. She recognizes that he is basically well meaning. Her compliance is probably motivated by her affection for Sir Toby. She does not realize that no matter how highly he regards her, she will continue to be his niece’s servant.
The fool is distinguished from the other servants when he accepts payment for playing Sir Topas. He is not trying, like Maria to win favor with his masters, or to climb the social ladder like Malvolio. He works for himself. However, his ferocity in his unmasked dealings with the prisoner suggests that he has reasons beyond the monetary.
Archer, Hunter, and Hale all cite Olivia's critique of her servant as the basis of their own, and concur that he is indeed sick of self-love. Branagh's production supports the claim, as does Kent's silent one, in which Malvolio is never imprisoned and storms off nonetheless. Nunn is alone in his apparent recognition that Olivia has not proven herself the best judge of character, and is not necessarily to be taken at her word. According to the film, Maria has gotten it exactly wrong.
In the final scene, the fool gives a convoluted speech that seems to argue that Malvolio has brought this punishment upon himself. Indeed this is the case, whether or not it was a just dessert. Malvolio’s cow-towing, his dependence upon the esteem of his superiors, and his foolish belief in the repeated statement about achieving greatness are what made him vulnerable to the misfortune that befell him. Despite the various character's opinions, Malvolio's true flaw is actually his lack of pride, dignity, and self-concern.
During the closing number, we look down at Malvolio as he departs Olivia’s estate with his belongings over his shoulder and a posture and demeanor closely resembling that of the fool, who is singing the words “by striving could I never thrive.” (Nunn) By his own ambition was Malvolio rendered the real fool. His masters are not interested in his loyal service. While he was looking out for Olivia's interests, he should, like the fool, have been looking out for his own. The clown has taught Malvolio self-respect the difference between service and servitude. The latter is now, like the former, his own master.
Antonio, too, would profit from such a lesson, for his drama runs parallel to that of Malvolio. Antonio also devotes himself to an ungrateful master. He endangers himself to serve Sebastian, and this is his undoing. Both He and Malvolio end up prisoners for the love of their masters.
Branagh's Antonio is set free amongst the madness of the play's conclusion. Branagh's Toby does not order Maria to his bed. The director is trying to make the play fit its advertised form. Poetic justice is reserved for those who have done wrong. In Nunn's revision, it is the loyal and selfless who end up the worse for wear.
Ironically, each production has an ending that is more suited to the other's overall tone. Branagh's Feste performs his final song with an anachronism complementary to his dress. The accompaniment is so thick with atmosphere that it more closely resembles soup than a song, and the listener can be sure there is nothing light about the lyrical levity. One by one, the company clears the stage until, at the end of the number, Feste stands alone peering between the wrought-iron bars of Olivia's gate like a starving child waiting for a photojournalist. Everyone has been married off or otherwise taken care of, except for Feste, whose world is unchanged. The fool loses.
In Nunn's film, the song's tempo is accelerated, and the key is major. The melody is imbued with an appropriate Irish flavor, making it a more reasonable approximation of a seventeenth century performance. However, the fool’s words are accompanied by a non-diagetic orchestra, complete with soaring violins and rolling tympanis. The fool may have to play for everyone else, but the world (at least the world of the film) plays for the fool. When he reaches the last line of his song, the fool turns to the camera in a filmic adaptation of the theatrical device. He repeats himself and pauses and then, as if adding the final touch to a play that has been incomplete these last four centuries, says what Shakespeare could not afford to. “Ha.” Every character has been tricked, deceived, or cheated by the narrative, except for Feste, whose world is unchanged. The fool wins.
Yet even though Nunn has reversed Branagh's power dynamic, and developed a fool who is the master rather than the victim, both men have come to the same conclusion about Shakespeare's text: the fool is what's important. He does not have the most lines, or get the girl, or undergo any change as a result of the play's action, and yet he is the focus of both productions. They use the conventions of their respective mediums to establish Feste's predominance.
Like Nunn, Branaugh employs non-diagetic music to indicate that Feste is somehow favored by his environment (by which I mean a stage). All the other characters seem to think they are in a comedy, laughing and jesting and engaging themselves in frivolity. But at the end of each scene, the tone changes as the transitional music plays. It is sad and quiet and slow, and Feste is sad and quiet slow. It is not he, but all the others, who strike us as foolish. Significantly, Feste sings along with music that does not exist within the world of the play. Often it continues on without him, giving the impression that the fool is in tune with some truth greater than that accessible to those around him.
When a film begins and ends with the same character, he is as a rule either the protagonist or the narrator. The opening and closing figure of Nunn's Twelfth Night is some combination of the two. The film does not have one protagonist, and only the first scene is narrated, and yet we do seem to be getting the story from the fool’s point of view. It is he with whom we are intended to ally ourselves. The first thing we hear is the play's last song, which is no longer a minstrel’s folk melody, but a slow, dolorously delivered tune that seeks to emphasize Shakespeare’s melancholic lyrics. Immediately, it is made clear that Feste is not the comic relief. Malvolio’s exit at the end of Nunn's version is so unsettling that the extravagant party that follows feels sour, and the credits begin to roll on what seems to be a terribly unsatisfying ending. We do not care about the foolish Dukes and Dutchesses and Knights. Neither does Nunn. He has given us a false ending. It has become a common trick in Hollywood to save some tidbit for after the credits, to be enjoyed only by those who stay to appreciate the work that has gone into the film. Demonstrating a similar kind of elitism to that of his Feste, Nunn thus reserves the real conclusion. After the players and company have all been given their due, we are returned to the true subject of the film, the madman and the fool.
In either production, the traditional roll of the clown, to be laughed at, is rejected. And while the two directors produce different interpretations of every detail and intricacy, their choices seem driven by the same motivating factor: something is wrong with this play. It's supposed to be a comedy. The good guys are supposed to win. The bad guys are supposed to lose. We don't even know which guys are which.
Branagh attempts to sort these things out for us. Malvolio is nasty, so he's a bad guy. His persecutors are therefore justified in their actions; they can be good guys. Feste doesn't want to play Sir topas, and he eventually delivers Malvolio's letter, so he must be a good guy, too. The fool's troubling final exit complicates matters, but Branagh's production remains a comedy with a twist.
Nunn takes a different approach. While he deletes or alters a good deal more, he does not try to eliminate the show's ambiguities and paradoxes with his omissions, or to minimize them with his untraditional character direction. The original play's inconsistencies are the subject of Nunn's revision.
And yet his changes are not without foundation in Shakespeare’s original script. At the play’s close, the stage is cleared of all its cast with the exception of the fool, who remains to address a song to the audience. He seems to be recounting some kind of dismal autobiography, until the song’s last two lines, when the subject suddenly becomes plural. “But that’s all one,” he sings, “our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day.” (Riverside 474) Shakespeare has ordered the demolition of the fourth wall, and in doing so has identified himself and his players with the character of the fool, who is now speaking on their behalf. It is not surprising, then, that his speech is laced throughout with a sharp wit and a concealed wisdom, as when he reveals the hypocrisy of Olivia’s mourning. The devious implication is that the “clowns,” in the broad, Ingmar Bergman sense, are the intellectual betters of those they serve.
Bergman also did a fool-exalting reading of Shakespeare in 1955 with his film Smiles of a Summer Night, a reworking of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a story of proud aristocrats who try to maintain their false dignity in situations that reveal them as fools. As in many of Bergman's films, the clowns (an epithet willingly adopted by two servants of the aristocrats) are the only characters who neither take themselves seriously nor expect to be taken seriously. Since life is inherently ridiculous, this is the only honest, respectable attitude to assume.
Nunn takes this inversion further, rendering his clown the only character who can be taken seriously. The subtle claims of superiority are stripped of their innocuity by a jester who cannot be ordered, and refuses to bow. As Orsino and Viola run from his little house, the fool shouts bitterly words of praise, making overt the speech’s subtextual resentment. The statement “I would have men of such constancy put to sea” is no longer veiled.
In this play, constancy is no virtue. H. Ulrici writes that the play "contemplates life as a merry Twelfth Night, in which everyone has, in fact, only to play his allotted part." (Varorium, 403) Those who cannot do so reap disappointment. Malvolio is not a bad servant, but merely a misplaced character, dropped into the wrong play. As Charles Lamb points out, "he is opposed to the proper levities of the piece." His role is not suited to his setting or situation, and Malvolio clings to his standards too stubbornly to change his role. For this reason, he cannot get what he wants.
Sir Toby enjoys a relatively happy existence for the first half of the play. However, when circumstances change, and it is no longer time for merriment, he is still a drunken old fool. He ends up put to bed with a bleeding head.
Neither Orsino nor Olivia will give up his unrequited love. They stand by it stubbornly, and fight for what they desire. But they should listen to their friendly neighborhood fool, for one cannot thrive by striving. While both find relatively happy endings, neither achieves his intended ambition.
But not every character leaves the farce disappointed. Viola, who changes identity when it is auspicious for her to do so, and plays her part masterfully, gets the Duke she pines for. Upon her arrival in Illyria, she realizes what Malvolio cannot: there is no place for a Viola there. Olivia will not accept her into service, and the Duke will not accept her into his heart, which is already occupied. Thus she becomes Cesario, and does not return unto her original costume until she creates a dramatic space for Viola to occupy. Similarly, Maria plays the game, and is rewarded with Sir Toby.
The fool is made the focal point of both Branagh and Nunn's productions because he exemplifies this kind of versatility. He can be Topas, or he can be Feste. He can sing songs of love or long life. He does not strive, or rail against harsh circumstance; he simply becomes what that circumstance requires. As Viola can see, "He must observe their mood on whom he jests,/The quality of persons, and the time,/And like the haggard, check at every feather/That comes before his eye." (Riverside 458) In other words, he plays to the crowd.
Twelfth Night is a play that has proven its own thesis. Why, after four centuries, does it continue to be debated and revised? Time and again, we hear Shakespeare's longevity attributed to the same qualities: his unfaltering ability to perceive the nature of mankind, and to reveal universal truths, which we as readers then may extract from his scriptures. But what sense does such a comment make when at no point in history have readers been able to agree on what the author meant? Is the truth revealed by Twelfth Night that Puritans are no good, or that they're pretty much okay after all, or does it perhaps have nothing to do with Puritans at all? Is it best to play the fool, or is that simply the lot of those less fortunate? What good is Shakespeare's truth if it is not accessible to us?
Like Feste, Twelfth Night has thrived by being malleable, by becoming what various interests have wished it to be. Like Feste, Shakespeare was a performer, and earned his living by becoming what was wished of him. He was acutely aware of his audience, and knew how to please his clientele. Thus his protagonists are royalty and noblemen, and his villains are bastards and over-ambitious commoners. But, like Malvolio, Shakespeare was still a servant of the aristocracy. When witnessing Sir Toby’s mistreatment of Sir Andrew, or the veritable torture inflicted upon Malvolio for mere sport, one is likely to be stricken by the uncomfortable feeling of torn allegiance. The bad guys don't seem that bad, and the good guys don't seem that good. This authorial ambivalence so dominates Twelfth Night that it not only allows but drives the peculiar extra-textual interpretations of Branagh and Nunn.
.Nunn's thematic alterations seem major, but they evidence the same awareness of audience as does the original play. The entertainment industry now caters to the very people who were then the butt of its comedy. A large-budget film needs to be hugely popular in order to make back what was spent on it, and the vast majority of movies fails to do so. The motion picture industry must cater to the masses, hence Nunn's working class hero.
Branagh's fool commands less respect, and his idle aristocracy is not nearly so harshly treated. Coincidentally, theatre tickets cost about six times what movie tickets do. Furthermore, it was made in 1988, the year the United States elected George Bush, Sr. to the presidency. Sally Struthers appeared on our television screens every fifteen minutes to enlist the help of the fortunate in providing nutrition to the less fortunate. When Fabian carries the unconscious Feste from the stage, we see1980's American ideology of liberals and conservatives alike enacted upon the stage: society's failures are a burden that, for better or worse, falls upon the shoulders of the more successful members of that society.
Nineteenth century scholars, who were primarily concerned with contextualizing Shakespeare historically and uncovering his sources could perceive in the play the struggle between the Puritans and the hostile society in which practiced their unpopular faith. In retrospect, these claims seem irrelevant, and more related to the interpreter than his subject. However, the same could be said of Nunn's adaptation. Had it not so well become its time and place, it would accurately be called a bastardization. I maintain that it is interpretation and not integrity that is Shakespeare's legacy. The lack of stage directions or character descriptions or clear morals does not merely invite the reader's interpretation, it demands it. Everyone gets to play. Whether we need a humanist champion, or a class warrior, or a scientist of human nature, we have it in Shakespeare. We can make of him what we will.