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SV BEKVALAC

THE BLOG

Reading Handwriting in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)

11/2/2015

 
The Internet was alive earlier this year with discussions surrounding diversity and the film industry. A UCLA report covered by the THR in March published an alarming statistic: female writers only accounted for 12.9 % of all Hollywood screenwriting. That means that in 2015 men still make up nearly 90 % of all writing generated in Hollywood. More recent press coverage of unequal pay in the film industry in general and in Hollywood in particular made me revisit these figures, and then it got me thinking about the presentation of female writers in Hollywood film – specifically in the classic Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950).  
     As well as being a send-up of the Hollywood studio system, the film is all about reading and writing. Sunset Boulevard paints a picture of a divided world: divided into readers and writers, and men and women. And at first glance, women are presented as passive (readers), while men write (actively). The narrator, Joe Gillis, is a screenwriter down on his luck. Nevertheless, he seems to be producing, churning out, he tells the viewer, up to two stories a week. The readers’ room at Paramount Studios, by contrast, is personified by Betty Schafer – a young woman who failed as an actress before becoming a reader; and then, of course, there is Norma Desmond (the film’s protagonist, an ageing star from the silent film era) who is so incapable of producing writing that she has to engage the help of Gillis in order to complete her epic screenplay, Salome. Schafer too asks for Gillis’ help to co-author a screenplay because, she states, she is ‘just not good enough’ to do it alone. A half eaten apple-core in the bottom left hand corner of the shot seems to wryly comment on this positively biblical separation of gender roles in the studio system.
     Yet, observed more closely, the film presents a much more nuanced picture. It can even be read as a subversive interrogation of these reader/writer roles. Betty Schafer might be employed as a reader, but she is really a talented writer who is forced to read. Gillis, on the other hand, talks a great deal about writing. He is, however, driven not by the written word, but by the acquisition of capital. He is not a writer; he is a gigolo. Gillis in his voiceover presents Norma as a grotesque – a figure to be pitied and despised. However, the mere fact that Gillis narrates the story in voice-over constantly foregrounds points of view, and implicitly questions his presentation of events. In fact, Norma always remains in a position of power; even when the dialogue puts dramatic expressions of her own weakness into her mouth. After all, she has money and Gillis is destitute; he is a lodger in her home, constantly at her beck and call; and, most importantly, she is writing and he is reading her work.
     More interesting than this division of the world into readers and writers, women and men, however, is the presentation of Norma Desmond: as a writer and an ageing woman in Hollywood. How and why does a woman like Norma write? The mode of production seems to be important. At the heart of Norma Desmond as a character is the autograph – the hand-written word. The film explores the distinction between machine writing (typing) and handwriting. Handwriting is aligned with the past and is associated with amateurs. It is linked to a bygone period with bygone stars. Like Norma, handwriting is an anachronism, replaced by more modern methods. In fact, it is scorned by Gillis, who uses the word ‘scrawl’, clearly expressing his disdain not only for Norma, but also for handwriting in general. Professional writers and young people have moved on to more modern modes of writing production. The process has become industrialised. Both Gillis and Betty Schaefer use typewriters. Norma, by contrast, has written her script of Salome by hand, in a spidery script, on thick sheets of parchment. It is interesting that Gillis calls her handwriting a ‘childish’ scrawl, when throughout the film it is Norma’s age, her association to death, and her maturity that he finds most repugnant.
     But handwriting, for Norma, is more than just a link to the past and to history. It is a question of identity. The actress spends a great deal of time signing pictures for fans by hand. She is constantly autographing. Her manuscript becomes an extension of this autographing process. The bundles of papers she tells Gillis she has been working on for years look like love letters. For Norma, writing is very personal: by hand-writing she walks the line between the self and the fiction. And she uses writing to create a more active role for herself in life. She writes herself as Salome.
     Another layer to this auto-fictionalisation is applying make-up, which can be seen as another kind of handwriting. In one of the film’s most striking and painful scenes we watch Norma writing on her own body, preening and mummifying, perfecting: crafting her own image – writing on skin. By the end of the film, we feel that she has written Salome onto herself and inhabits her. Her life has become her fiction. Whereas the biblical Salome is condemned for her role as a murderous harlot, Norma is portrayed as a human being, with passion, trapped in a system that has no place for her. Writing, for Norma, means writing herself back into the history of Hollywood. And, in a manner of speaking, she succeeds. Of all the failed writers in Sunset Boulevard, she comes closest to self-actualisation, to getting her script made. Not only does she re-enact the final scene of her script for the paparazzi that come to watch her arrest after Gillis’ murder. Indeed, she has already played out the storyline of her script – for the plot of Sunset Boulevard itself is a story of an ageing Salome. And while the legal system condemns her, the viewer’s response is less clearly defined. It is particularly poignant that the film allowed Gloria Swanson (a silent actress whose own career had really been dead in the water since the advent of sound) to work again, in a leading role, in a major Hollywood production. Life and art in Sunset Boulevard imitated each other.
     What if Norma has been allowed to write her epic for Paramount? I would have liked to see it. Sadly, her script belongs to fiction not history. Yet, in the absence of this mythic screenplay, Sunset Boulevard is a fitting stand-in, an open and complex exploration of the world of Hollywood fictions, writing, and gender, and one that remains relevant today.

Eulogy to Disappointment: Endings, Beginnings, and Everything Else

10/19/2015

 
Picture
Writing - a fool's errand
Writing is a losing game. Writing anything – other than say, a very short shopping list – can sometimes feel like an orgy of self-delusion. Weaving together what one thinks is a tapestry of text, only to be confronted by a scarf full of holes where you missed the stitches. Once completed, no matter how much time you’ve invested in it, you always feel you could have done more, better, and differently. And if you don’t, then someone else almost certainly will. Wouldn’t it be better if it were about something else, somebody else, or took place somewhere else? Wouldn’t it sound better if you had written it in French? Wouldn’t it be better, come to think of it, if you had never started it at all? You could have saved yourself the trouble. And what a lot of trouble. For, while endings and middles are sometimes confounding, there is nothing quite like the exquisite agony of beginning. A lonely vowel or consonant—an empty sign on a blank page. The beginning of a journey. One letter, and in it an infinite possibility, leading to one possible outcome: disappointment.
     In the 2014 film 'Winter Sleep', the protagonist Aydin (a retired actor who runs the hotel 'Othello') doesn’t even start his book, a book he talks about writing throughout the film, until the film’s final scene. Why doesn’t Aydin start? What holds him back? Fear of failure? Fear of success? Fear of himself? Boredom? Whatever the cause behind his faltering, Aydin’s great 'History of Turkish Theatre' is a book caught up in an endless beginning. Quite apart form a beautiful metaphor embodying the socio-political experiences of a nation, the film is an observation of the act of writing, or rather, the act of failing to write.
We watch and become engrossed in a series of moments before the great dramatic moment. We are caught in a cinematic preamble to something. The beautiful, snow-covered landscape of Cappadocia becomes a visual poem to disappointment and frustrated beginnings. Because, of course, once that vowel is down on the paper, or out there on the screen, once you have agonised over starting, whatever comes next can only be fulfilled potential – and potential fulfilled is necessarily a disappointment.
     So what is the point? Why write? After all, by the time Aydin begins writing his 'History of Turkish Theatre', he has already lived it: generational conflict; the social guilt that comes with land ownership; charity; morality; conscience; broken relationships; a journey to Istanbul which Aydin almost undertakes, getting no further than the local train station. In short, life happened while the writer was busy making plans to write. Yet false starts are, both on the level of plot and existentially speaking, what it’s all about. The film revels in them: almosts and not quites. Aydin is almost a good person, but not quite. His wife is too. They are almost conscious of social wrongs and almost unselfish. They are almost happy, but not quite. They are almost honest with each other. But not quite. They almost understand each other and the world around them. But not quite. Aydin is almost writing a great work on the Turkish theatre. But not quite.
     This obsession with unfulfilled potential and journeys that end before you even board the train, this persistence on almost, means that the beginning, when it finally comes (even if it is, chronologically speaking, the end) feels redemptive. After all, the first vowel, the first consonant, they hold within them the complete works of Shakespeare. Either that or nothing at all. Usually they contain nothing at all. But it is curiously comforting to think that all possible words are wrapped up in that one sign. Everything comes before that first letter and something will follow it. That first letter – and after it the first sentence – is the textual equivalent of opening your eyes. After a winter sleep. Even if what you see isn’t quite what you’d hoped for, isn’t it better than nothing at all? 

Disturbing Futures: Fiction, Technology, and Death

8/6/2015

 
There has been much talk in recent months of the evolution of artificial intelligence. Even the oft-derided idea of a machine uprising has been discussed, and by serious scientists no less! These discussions got me thinking about the idea of AI and creative writing. What if computers could write, not just simple, pre-programmed sentences, but entire novels, stories, plays, and screenplays?
     The French director Bertrand Tavernier (after the work of sci-fi novelist D. G. Compton) imagined such a world in his 1980 film Death Watch – a world where people no longer die of natural causes and where literature is written by machines. There is much critical (and other) literature on the subject of death in the film and its source text. Instead of dealing with death in Death Watch, I focus on the creative, generative aspect – writing, the idea of automated fiction.
     Katherine Mortenhoe, the film’s female protagonist, is a ‘programmer’ of romance novels. She is a writer – her sentences, similes, metaphors, and dialogue, however, are programmed. She writes code. Her computer, affectionately known as Harriet, then produces novels that are guaranteed to sell. On one level, the notion of a fiction ‘programmer’ is a clear acerbic comment on the formulaic nature of narrative-building in the genre others have called ‘chick lit’, or a wider comment on the nature of mass-market literature in general.
     But more than this, the exploration of the idea of automated fiction raises several important questions. None of which I can pretend to have an answer to.
     In the world of the film, the very literal death of the author is part of a dystopian future. But why? Why do we feel uneasy when faced with the possibility of artificial intelligence generating creative fiction? What is it in this notion that confines it to the realm of dystopia? Wouldn’t such computers be to writing what the camera was to painting? If a computer generated a perfect novel, haiku, or even bedtime story, could we enjoy these fictions? Might they be better than our own?
     Why does the notion of the machine-generated metaphor terrify me? It could be argued after all, that storytelling began, in the form of myths and legends, as a largely mnemonic practice, a way of storing information about collective histories before the invention of books, libraries, and 2 Terabyte Hard Drives. It’s not just because I’m afraid of computers taking over the world. Something – perhaps it’s the not entirely logical part of my brain (the part, incidentally, that doesn’t mind the odd bit of ‘chick lit’) – demands that I take notice as it screams: there is more to writing than words! -- Isn’t there?
     Is writing more than just collection – linguistic curation?
     Surely writing and reading fiction demand an understanding of imperfection and uncertainty? Both grammatical and syntactical, as well as metaphorical. Doesn’t writing and reading of fiction ultimately demand the presence of death? Can a machine with perfect memory, with no real foreseeable end point beyond built in obsolescence, a machine which is, to all intents and purposes, immortal, write stories for beings whose time is finite, whose memories are imperfect, and whose own stories have an inevitable end? Can a computer write metaphor and simile meaningful to a human being whose language (whatever the tongue spoken) lacks the clear mathematical certainty of 0s and 1s?
     Is Tavernier right? Is mechanised fiction as inhuman and impossible as immortality? In a world where death no longer exists, is writing too necessarily dead?

Language, Advertising, Dreaming: 'Boardwalk Empire' and a prohibition-era Pepys

7/20/2015

 
In the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014), Nucky Thompson’s Atlantic City is a world made of words. Advertising and signage are the building blocks of the boardwalk as well as key themes on the level of plot. Advertising masks things, provides them with an aura, attracts customers, and builds the American Dream. In business, organised crime, and organised politics, language is king: above boutiques and clubs, on bottles of bootleg booze, in slogans of political protest, and in the pamphlets handed out by the members of the Women’s Temperance League. One character re-appropriates these ubiquitous signs, images, ciphers, and sentences and begins to assemble them into more personal fictions. Richard Harrow the masked veteran – who, paradoxically, is the only man in Atlantic City who does not always wear his mask – is also the series’ diarist, a prohibition Pepys. In season two, episode one, we first see him writing. He cuts out newspaper advertisements and images from magazines and constructs a scrapbook for himself, a fictional family album. The book he chooses to paper over is an anonymous work by an anonymous author. It is a work re-written: between its pages Richard’s secret world writes itself. Here he fulfils his desire for love, friendship, innocence, and family. In his diary he builds his own reality, an individual dream. He pulls apart adverts (collective social fictions) and rewrites them, creating his own images. By using the signs he sees to build his own imaginary sentences, he blurs the line between reading and writing. While the very format of his imaginings belies their fictionality (they are, after all, saccharine images of an idealised world in a picture-book), in the very best fairy-tale tradition, Richard’s dreams really do come true. When he meets Julia, in season three, his wildest hopes materialise. He is granted his wish. Perhaps it is in deference to his position as creator of fictions that the series’ writers treat Richard differently. Although he dies a violent death shortly after his marriage, the diarist is, metaphorically at least, afforded that ultimate dignity of fiction: a happy ending. His dreams of a perfect family life do not spoil in the hot sun of a banal reality; his fictions are never proven false. He is never forced to wake up from his dreams – instead they continue to play, in all their rose-tinted perfection, between the pages of his scrapbooks. 

Death Sentences: Writing in Soderbergh’s 'Kafka'

7/7/2015

 
As might be expected from a film about one of the greatest authors of the last century, Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991) is full of visual references to the act of writing. Life, death, and writing perform a waltz on screen, a kind of Danse macabre. Many people don’t like the film – Roger Ebert certainly didn’t.[1] While its merits are debatable, the film is notable at least for its presentation of writers and writing. The nightmarish, sci-fi vision, combining Kafka’s life and literary work in a kind of phantasmagorical magic lantern show of free association, presents the viewer with an interesting analogy: individual as typewriter and consciousness as the production of text. As the dynamic opening sequences in a Czech insurance company suggest, a typewriter that functions is a metonymy for a thinking, working, productive individual – a consciousness, recording. Death, on the other hand, is the cessation of writing. A covered typewriter stands in for a murdered colleague; a life ends, clogging a printing press. If you are written about, or writing, you exist. If your life is missing from the archive (like that of the illusive Dr Murnau, in the world of the film) you do not; and if you write the wrong sentences, like the political dissenters Kafka falls in with, you will surely not exist for long. The shots of paper-filled archives, the endless production of text and documentation, anticipate the world of social media networks, where tweets and status updates confirm our existence as individuals, where Facebook accounts can be tended like grave plots when we pass away, and where we keep our own files and activity logs in a bottomless digital archive. When the writing stops, life ceases to be – just as, at the end of the film, when Kafka finally finishes a letter to his father he has been labouring over for the duration of the movie, he is already suffering from the Tuberculosis that we know will kill him. In a curious inversion of De Certau’s reader-consumer as producer, the world of Soderbergh’s Kafka is full of stenographers, printers, and writers. When the noise of the typewriter stops, the eyes close, the film ends, the world ceases to be.
[1] For Ebert’s full review of the film see: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kafka-1992 Accessed 06/07/15

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