Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

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In the 1977 theatrical version of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a moment of human honesty caught me off guard: as protagonist Roy Neary sculpts a mound of mashed potatoes into the blob-image that haunts him, his elder son watches with silence and tears. It offers a glimpse of the pain that Neary has brought to his family, but writer-director Steven Spielberg will soon reassure us that a family's pain counts for nothing. The one thing that matters is Dad's rapture into heaven as a Chosen One.

When I saw this film in 1977, I hated it. Watching it now, I respect its technical merits. It looks great (with five expert cinematographers, it should), and the visual effects by everyone from model-maker Greg Jein to the legendary Douglas Trumbull ensure that visually, at least, the film will grab its audience. At the same time, Spielberg shows genuine skill with direction. He knows how to set up elaborate crowd sequences without losing focus on the placement and movements of the central characters, how to block action with clarity, and where to place the camera for maximal impact. These once-common skills can be hard to find in the Age of Marvel, and I appreciate them here.

What troubles me now is what troubled me in 1977: the failure (the refusal?) of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS to explore the implications of its evangelical message, along with the failure of any character in the film to suggest that religious adoration of alien beings might be short-sighted.

Any first contact would leave impact craters on human science, politics, philosophy, art, on all aspects of human existence. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS turns away from this, and instead, looks at one man's religious conversion. Not a bad concept, and much could be done with it, but Spielberg has no concern for the implications of ideas; he wants a rock concert light-show, and thanks to his team of technical geniuses, he can provide it. But story-telling films live or die by drama, and what this film lacks is a doubter to pose the obvious questions: Should we assume that superior technology means a superior culture? Why, against all biological odds, do these alien beings look so human, so childlike? If they can fly starships, why should they not be able to master human languages? Can we really trust these alien kidnappers?

Writers are not obliged to answer all questions (indeed, unanswered questions can make a story haunting), but I do expect writers to understand that questions will arise. I would have been less uneasy with CLOSE ENCOUNTERS if someone in the film had put up a hand, and said, "Excuse me. Excuse me! Have we really thought about the implications of our choices? Aren't we assuming more than we actually know?"

These questions would have turned CLOSE ENCOUNTERS into science fiction, but like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS playing on TV in the Neary house, Spielberg's film remains, at heart, religious. Other viewers have embraced its blank-eyed innocence, but I see a failure of imagination, a lack of dramatic development, a refusal to confront the implications of running away from your wife and children to join a cosmic cult. The result is akin to Neary's mound of mashed potatoes: it might have meant something in Spielberg's head, but here, on the plate, it looks more like a unfinished blob.

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"You are a fucking idiot."

With terse precision, a Mr D on Facebook assessed my comments on CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. He continued:

"It's a movie. An action=adventure piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment. About ufo's and aliens. It's nothing more than that."

This is where he and I disagree. Films that tell any kind of story are necessarily statements of meaning. This meaning can sometimes be hard to specify; it can be plural and contradictory; it can be dramatized, so that we know how certain characters think and feel, without necessarily finding ways to transpose their personal meaning into an overall meaning for the film. But in certain cases, the meaning is presented with simple clarity, and this is often true of "crowd-pleasing entertainment" films.

Mr D implies that we should never look for meaning in popular entertainment, but as I see it, films that reach a wide audience often tell us about the unspoken assumptions, hopes, or dreads of that audience. For this reason, I think a close look at certain films can bring widely-held public attitudes to light, and sometimes, these attitudes can be disturbing. They can suggest unaddressed issues, hidden resentments, or troubling limitations of thought and feeling.

Mr D concluded, in summary:

"Get a life."

Perhaps he rejects the examined life as not worth living, but I would say that looking under public stones and peering through dusty public windows can be worthwhile, if only to see what cobwebs writhe in the shadowed spaces of our times.

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Mr D encouraged me to share his comment:

"Please do. It would be a pleasant surprise for everyone if you posted something intelligent."

I suspect I might have disappointed him again.

John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL Revisited

As a Jacobean-mad teenager forty-five years ago, I read John Webster's THE WHITE DEVIL for the first time. I applauded its brilliance, but I also wanted to take a hot, soapy shower to wash away the grease of all that evil.

FRANCISCO:
Brachiano, I am now fit for thy encounter.
Like the wild Irish I'll ne'er think thee dead
Till I can play at football with thy head.

= = = = = = = =

[A man with a set of pistols threatens two women, and he means it]

FLAMINEO:
Look, these are better far at a dead lift
Than all your jewel house.

VITTORIA:
And yet methinks
These stones have no fair lustre, they are ill set.

FLAMINEO:
I'll turn the right side towards you: you shall see
How they will sparkle.

Above all, in the world of THE WHITE DEVIL, power counts for everything, people count for nothing.

FLAMINEO:
He was a kind of statesman, that would sooner have reckon'd how many cannon-bullets he had discharged against a town, to count his expense that way, than how many of his valiant and deserving subjects he lost before it.

= = = = = = = =

[A child, a mere child of murdered parents, has claimed the throne]

GIOVANNI:
Away with them to prison and to torture.

A world of power is a world of horrors.

BRACHIANO:
Look you; six gray rats that have lost their tails,
Crawl up the pillow....

= = = = = = = =

BRACHIANO:
O thou soft natural death, that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber: no rough-bearded comet
Stares on thy mild departure: the dull owl
Beats not against thy casement: the hoarse wolf
Scents not thy carrion. Pity winds thy corse,
Whilst horror waits on princes.

VITTORIA:
I am lost for ever.

BRACHIANO:
How miserable a thing it is to die
'Mongst women howling!

Yet reading this play again -- for what, the fourth time? The fifth? -- I caught a hint of grey light in its darkness. There is goodness in this world, even if much of it endures in resigned sadness.

FLAMINEO:
I would I were from hence.

CORNELIA:
Do you hear, sir?
I'll give you a saying which my grandmother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o'er
Unto her lute--

FLAMINEO:
Do, and you will, do.

CORNELIA:
'Call for the robin red breast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flow'rs do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And (when gay tombs are robb'd) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.'

They would not bury him 'cause he died in a quarrel
But I have an answer for them.
'Let holy church receive him duly
Since he paid the church tithes truly.'
His wealth is summed, and this is all his store:
This poor men get; and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you all good people.

FLAMINEO:
I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray leave me.

This night I'll know the utmost of my fate:
I'll be resolved what my rich sister means
T'assign me for my service. I have liv'd
Riotously ill, like some that live in court;
And sometimes, when my face was full of smiles
Have felt the maze of conscience in my breast.
Oft gay and honour'd robes those tortures try:
'We think cag'd birds sing, when indeed they cry'.

Yet along with resignation comes defiance, in particular, the courageous defiance of women. This hits a peak during Act 3, Scene 2, with an arraignment of the heroine, Vittoria, whose only crime is that men want her. She will not be cowed by accusations: instead, she argues back, brilliantly, and gains approval from the court's witnesses.

VITTORIA:
Find me but guilty, sever head from body:
We'll part good friends: I scorn to hold my life
At yours or any man's entreaty, sir.

ENGLISH AMBASSADOR:
She hath a brave spirit.

Her defiance, and the defiance of certain women around her, never fades, not even at the end.

VITTORIA:
'Twas a manly blow.
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant
And then thou wilt be famous.

In THE WHITE DEVIL, defiance often snarls with bared fangs, but it remains courage, and as a light against the darkness, admirable.

Darkness obscured the critical consensus on Webster for decades. Even after Shakespeare had been revisited and rehabilitated from his long neglect by British and German Romantics, Webster was hobbled with the reputation of Horror Sensationalist until the end of the 19th Century, when critics like Swinburne and John Addington Symonds came forward to defend him. His rehabilitation continued in the 20th Century, thanks to critics like Rupert Brooke and F. L. Lucas. They pointed out what should have been obvious right from the start: John Webster was not only a great poet, but a great dramatist.

A great poet, a great dramatist. Marlowe was a great poet, but not exactly a good dramatist. Chapman could write beautifully, but dramatically, his plays, especially BUSSY D'AMBOIS, were unconvincing, inconsistent messes. Ford was often fine as a dramatist, and as a poet, often very fine. Above all, however, as dramatist and poet, stood William Shakespeare, and along with him, John Webster.

Webster's poetry differed from Shakespeare's in its precision. Shakespeare seems to have thought in metaphors, and he rarely used one or two when he could use twelve or fifteen; Webster showed more constraint, which enhanced the power of those metaphors he carefully chose. Webster's drama differed from Shakespeare's in its range of people and emotions. While Shakespeare understood all kinds of people, and covered a vast emotional range, Webster focused on angry, bitter people, ignored, passed by, denied promotion and money despite their qualities. It would not be exaggeration to call Webster a Poet Of Resentment.

Yet as THE WHITE DEVIL makes clear, he was also a Poet Of Defiance.

LODOVICO:
Dost laugh?

FLAMINEO:
Wouldst have me die, as I was born, in whining?

GASPARO:
Recommend yourself to heaven.

FLAMINEO:
No, I will carry mine own commendations thither.

For John Webster, defiance represents courage: a daylight strength against a world of brutal midnight power.

The Past Glides On. We Lurk Within Its Currents.

450 million years ago, I studied classical guitar. (I failed at this, but my teacher, an Ottawa University student named Terry Gomes, quickly became my closest friend.)

At this time, I read a book by a famous rock session player. I can't recall his name, but I've lived by his advice. He wrote that the best way to learn was not to study your favourites, but to study the favourites of your favourites. For each of his "guitar gods," he traced back lines of influence to their "gods," and this taught him far more about guitar playing, and about music, than he would have gained by focusing on current players only.

Tracing back a lineage can be not only educational, but transformational. E. T. A. Hoffmann is rarely mentioned these days, but his impact on European and Russian fantasy was a nova-level event. When I studied German (again, 450 million years ago), I was able to read Hoffmann in his own language, and the impact shook me. Any readers of today who go back to "Der goldne Topf," or "Meister Floh," will be astonished by how "modern," how creative, how thrilling these old stories remain. In many cases, the work of originators has not only been passed down over the centuries, but watered down by would-be imitators, and this is obvious with Hoffmann.

Hoffmann is hardly alone. Thomas Browne left impact craters not only on English prose, but on English vocabulary; his books remain glorious. Dramatists, poets, and writers of intensely-felt fiction have looked back at Elizabethan-Jacobean geniuses like Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, and Tourneur (or whoever it was who wrote THE REVENGER'S TRAGEDY, and no, I do not believe it was Middleton). I have no classical Greek, but not even French or English translations can hide the power of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Euripides (whose THE BACCHAE remains a sinister, full-blown horror story 2,400 years later).

The past glides on. We lurk within its currents, and our efforts to drift along with it, to swim against it, to swallow it, or to spit it out, become a dialogue with dead people and thriving methods. To focus only on the writers and stories of today is to fall into a crippling trap, is to accept, all-too often, imitation and mayfly mediocrity. Anyone who desires more, who wants to learn, who struggles to develop an individual voice or perspective, will gain more from a study of the past than from the postmodern, postliterate, corporate-academic market place of today's instantly-forgettable exemplars.

In truth, we have many good writers today, often ignored, often buried under piles of garbage. Yet the best way to understand what makes them good is to pay attention to writers of yesterday. Pay attention, celebrate, learn. Become yourself.

The Strangeness of the Symbolists

For years, now, I have to tried to understand the Symbolist movement that appeared in France during the late 19th Century, that went on to influence art, poetry, fiction, and theatre in Europe, in the United Kingdom, and especially in pre-revolutionary Russia. My difficulty was that no one seemed to have any down-to-Earth, non-contradictory definition that could match the work of so many varied poets and writers. Any attempt to define Symbolist intentions felt like pouring raw egg yolks into an open picture frame, and then mounting that frame on a wall: the result, inevitably, was a mess.

Book after book failed to give me any firm concept of what the Symbolists had tried to do, but I gained a sudden insight when I returned to a book I had read earlier in the century, and had, for the most part, forgotten: THE TECHNIQUES OF STRANGENESS IN SYMBOLIST POETRY, by James L. Kugel (Yale University Press, 1971.)

Kugel admits that the term "Symbolist" is vague, contradictory, and perhaps inappropriate. Yet what the Symbolists did have in common was an evocation of Strangeness:

"These... poems have within them the seeds of two central ideas.... The first, briefly stated, is this: that the mysteriousness [of these] poems is a peculiarly Symbolist phenomenon -- that, in fact, after seventy-five years of this kind of verse, what we mean by the term Symbolism is this poetic strangeness.... The second idea is that... Symbolism changed our whole notion of what poetry is, changed the reader's expectations in approaching a poem, and that is where modern poetry begins."

Kugel offers, as "the first poem to achieve this symboliste effect in the French language," a well-known verse from 1853:

EL DESDICHADO
Gérard de Nerval.

Je suis le Ténébreux, -- le Veuf, -- l’Inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie :
Ma seule Étoile est morte, -- et mon luth constellé
Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du Tombeau, Toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé,
Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phœbus ?... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Syrène...

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la Sainte et les cris de la Fée.

[GÉRARD DE NERVAL ŒUVRES I. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Librairie Gallimard, 1960.]

My roughest of rough translations:

"I am the tenebrous -- the widower -- the inconsolable, the prince of Aquitaine in the destroyed tower: my one Star is dead, and my constellated lute bears the black sun of Melancholy.

"In the night of the Tomb, you, who comforted me, give me back Posillipo and the sea of Italy, the flower that pleased so much my desolate heart, and the trellis where the Vine and the Rose unite.

"Am I Love or Phoebus? Lusignan or Biron? My forehead remains red from the kiss of the Queen; I have dreamt in the grotto where the Siren swims...

"And twice, as conqueror, I have crossed Acheron: modulating, in turn, on the lyre of Orpheus, the sighs of the Saint and the cries of the Fay."

Kugel explains that the poem is full of "allusions to nowhere." Before the Symbolists arrived, poems often alluded to historical, mythical, religious places, events, or figures that readers would have recognized. As an example, he quotes from Shakespeare's THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Literate readers would understand this passage as a reference to THE AENEID:

"In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love
To come again to Carthage."

What Gérard de Nerval has done, instead, is to mention people and events for which readers have no reference. He offers no clues to context or meaning, no way to make sense of his clearly-stated yet mysterious allusions. This makes the reader feel like an "eavesdropper" who has "caught snatches of a conversation" that will never become clear.

Kugel adds:

"This is the genius of Nerval's poem, and the fundamental discovery of the Symbolist poets. They were the first to seek out systematically this effect of witheld information, recognizing in mystery a source of beauty and depth not known in poetry before....

"The point of the poem is that we read it again and again, that we read it until the simple message -- veuf, inconsolé, Mélancolie -- is enough for us to glide on, until we can get so much into the poem that we can accept all its words and love their mystery."

Reading de Nerval's poem again made me think of a later poem, equally famous, equally filled with "allusions to nowhere":

THE LISTENERS
by Walter de La Mare.

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: --
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

[THE LISTENERS AND OTHER POEMS. Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1912.]

Like "El Desdichado," "The Listeners" explains none of its mysteries. Who is the Traveller? What was his promise? He seems aware of the ghosts, but what connection do these ghosts have to the people he had hoped to find? Where and when does any of this take place?

Walter de la Mare provides no answers, but his poem, like the poems of the Symbolists, remains lodged in the mind primarily through its denial of answers.

As I read Kugel again, I realized that I understood what the Symbolists had intended, because I had heard the echoes of their Movement all throughout my reading life. I had only needed one clear guide to show me what I already knew.

Too Stupid to Understand Symbolism

Because I lack the intellect to be intellectual, I read essays and manifestoes on some aesthetic movement (in this case, 19th Century Symbolism), only to find vague terms, contradictions, definitions that go 'round and 'round until they plunge into their own event horizons, and a linguistic fog that gives me a clear impression of misty conditions, but of not much else.

"What do you see out there?"
"Nothing."
"That's the weather."

As a result, I find more value in looking at methods. Methods, at least, are clear on the page; methods, at least, can be studied and applied. What sort of words does a writer use? How are they used? Are the words abstractions, or specific nouns? Are they specialized, common, technical, archaic? Is the prose or verse primarily visual, primarily sonorous, or a mixture? Highly metaphorical, or plain?

These approaches can be taken apart, examined, learned, even by someone with my own limited intellect. So please forgive me if I set aside scholarly books of academic intent, and read what the writers and poets have to say in their own stories and poems.