Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry the 1976 documentary by Donald Brittain that I saw so many years ago, that first introduced me to Lowry and his book Under the Volcano – a book I never read.

The doc is in many ways superior to the John Huston adaptation of Volcano in capturing the book, the mood of the book, the flavor of the book. The problem in making a movie out of that book is that there is a story, but the story is secondary to the manner in which it is told. And the primary impulse in adapting it to film must be to tell the story. For a Hollywood movie, the story is the main and primary thing.

Huston at this point in his life was in failing health. He knew just what he wanted to do, but he was not in total command of his set. More: the movie was shot on location, and the budget was such that Huston and his crew could not remake Mexico. And yet for all that, I thought that the shots of the volcanoes in particular were much better in the documentary than in the film, even though Gabriel Figueroa was a great cinematographer.

The doc quotes extensively from the novel. And it has the great good fortune of Richard Burton’s voice to read all passages quoting Lowry. There is no better voice for the job; it makes me wish for an audiobook edition of Volcano done by Burton. Not only did Burton have a great voice, and a wonderful mastery over his voice, not only was he a great actor, but he knew a thing or two about drinking and alcoholism himself.

But watching it tonight, I was struck by something else. I caught myself wondering how Albert Finney (who starred in Huston’s movie as the semi-autobiographical character of the author) would have read those passages. It seemed to me that Finney would have brought a bit more humor to them – a lot more humor. Even whimsey. This is in keeping with how Finney played the Consul, of course, and it’s quite possible he would have read the book with a heavier take on the thing; but the subject of the tale, of a drunk man’s dying day, is so heavy in and of itself, that the lightness, almost jollity, Finney brings to the part, would have helped a lot with reading the novel.

Burton now began to strike me as overly dramatic, too heavy, too gloomy, almost demonic, almost hateful. Surely there must have been self-loathing in the Consul’s soul, but self-loathing can also be expressed with playful irony. And in one passage Burton read, the Consul is trying to express how it’s important to see the fun of it all, or else we will never understand the appeal of the liquor.

There are many other pieces to the documentary, of course – biographical bits covering Lowry’s family, his school years, his years after Mexico (I was shocked, actually, to learn that Lowry spent only 20 months in Mexico that first sojourn, when he conceived of the story and wrote most of the first draft – it seems as though the Consul must have been there for decades, and that Lowry too must have steeped himself in Mexico for years and years) and the triumph of final acceptance and publication, followed by years of bitter humiliation and defeat, unable to write anything else that was decent, that was even publishable.

I should give you some idea of the shape of the doc also, because shape is everything to a doc; the doc is really written in the editing room as you know. So they begin with Lowry’s death, and they leave it open, unanswered, just how he died. Was it heart failure, was it choking, was it suicide, was it accident? Had he swallowed sleeping pills and overdosed, had it just been an accident that he took them, had he not taken them at all? Had he drowned in his own vomit? Nobody, it seems, knew; the court inquiry came down with a verdict that it was an accident, ‘death by misadventure’ in the legal term.

The doc then takes us to Lowry’s birth family and upbringing, and goes forward, in linear fashion, to his end. Along the way there are many horrors, and Brittain’s crew films the important places Lowry visited in his life – the public school, Oxford, New York, Mexico, Vancouver, and finally back in England. But rather than use archival footage, Brittain does something bold and quite evocative: he films those places as they are today. So the students at Leeds public school have long hair as they did in the 1970s; but they are shown doing all those things that they did in the 1920s (or 1850s for that matter). In New York we see the homeless drunks and the seedy bars Lowry would have known; they are the drunks and bars of 1975 and yet we get much of the flavor of what Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have known – what I imagine Lowry would have felt about it.

Bellevue, the notorious mental hospital where Lowry was committed, is only shot from the street; I guess they didn’t give permission to shoot inside; but Brittain shows us a strange man walking down the sidewalk in front of Bellevue carrying a sign, I KNOW and shouting to the world, ‘Do you know your name? Do you know what to sign? When you go to work? I know!’ It’s chilling.

From New York the doc follows Lowry’s trail to Mexico, Los Angeles, Vancouver, finally back to England for the final years of his miserable life. There at last the doc resumes the question of his death, offering us more details (though Lowry had cut way back on drinking, on the night of his death he drank half a bottle of gin, got in a great ripping row with his wife, she smashed the gin bottle, he attacked her with a chair, she spent the night in the landlady’s place, and Lowry swallowed two entire bottles of sleeping pills) and determining, to the satisfaction of Brittain at least, that it was most definitely a suicide. (Oddly enough, though he interviews Mrs Lowry on camera, he shows us nothing of her comments on Lowry’s end; did she refuse to talk of it? Or did she not give the answers Brittain wanted to hear?)

So we have a circular or ‘ring structure’ in which the movie comes returns at its end to the starting-point. This I find is often used in biopics, especially when the end of the subject’s life is seen as meaningless or unchosen (see Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi for other examples of this).

The title An Inquiry Into the Death, etc. supports the notion that the movie is aimed at settling this question. But really – who cares about that matter, whether Lowry jumped or stumbled on that last night? He’d been ‘dead’ literarily speaking for a decade; indeed he was only ‘alive’ to the world of letters for the two brief periods when he put forth his first novel, Ultramarine to ridicule and swift oblivion, and then ten years later or so, the eight years of working up Volcano.

Other choices for structure might have been to begin and end with Volcano itself: great literary éclat – what about this book, now? Who wrote it, under what circumstances, why? Then trace Lowry in Mexico, intercutting bits of backstory – the whirlwind courtship in Paris to the wife who soon fled back to New York, years in New York then down to Mexico, and so forth. From here we can then look forward to his failure to follow on, and then into the rising scholarly interest in the novel.

Maybe the autobiographical bits in Volcano and its intense quasi-self-portrait, interested Brittain more in Lowry than in literary matters. Beginning with the inquest is something of a hook for our interests, and the mystery structure holds up some glimmer of suspense to keep us watching to the end? I felt no suspense, however; I didn’t care whether Lowry suicided or had a heart attack; it was the evocative portrait of a squalid, wasted life filled with wretchedness fog and confusion, and illuminated by this one great flash of light, that appealed to me.

Here’s an interesting bit: I’d remembered the whole movie in black and white. Did I watch it on a black and white television? I don’t believe so. But in particular the Mexican footage I remember in grainy black and white, though it’s in Ektachrome gaudy color. Weird. But that maybe just me. Maybe my mind considers Lowry’s life in the light of The Lost Weekend and that time as only properly seen in black and white photography.

I still don’t want to read the book. Only, if the Burton audiobook edition exists, I would listen to that.

(11 April 2009)

The World’s Fastest Indian

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The World’s Fastest Indian a recent picture written and directed by Roger Donaldson. It’s based on the true exploits of New Zealand’s own Burt Munro, who raced motorcycles on the Bonneville Salt Flats to get a land speed record.

The story has old codger Burt, local clown almost, but a hell of a nice guy, in his small town in New Zealand. He has many pals and mates, but the neighbors don’t like the way he revs up his motorcycle at dawn, or won’t mow his lawn. But their kid Tommy idolizes the guy.

Burt’s dream is to go to America and try for a speed record on his Indian motorcycle, which was originally built in 1925 (time frame of the movie is 1963). Of course Burt has tweaked and modified the machine plenty. With only 5 days before he could take ship to leave, Burt has given up on the idea that he’ll go this year. Then he suffers a heart attack and is told his motorcycle racing days are over.

No way. He takes a loan on his house to get the extra money he needs, and off he goes, serving as cook on the ship to pay passage, buying a car in Van Nuys, helped by a transvestite clerk at the Sunset Strip motel where he’s staying, helped by an old Indian along the way, by an old cowgirl on the way, and others. Everywhere he goes he meets some people who are mean, and some people who are skeptical, but he charms most all of them with his simple honesty and sincerity.

He finally does make it to Utah and the Salt Flats, only to learn that in order to race one must register months ahead of time. No luck. And his motorcycle isn’t safe enough, and he lacks proper safety gear himself, and he’s too old. They won’t let him race! But he makes friends who are just impressed at the notion that this old guy has so much determination, and has come all this way, with so little money. So at last – they let him go.

He has some problems with the bike. He has a lot of problems. He suffers a couple heart attacks just getting to Utah. And nobody back home in New Zealand really thought he could do it anyway.

But he does. He goes 201+ mph, a new speed record (for his class motorcycle). Then he crashes. His leg is badly burned, and he lies there on the salt, muttering, ‘I did it, I made it…’ Then his eyes close…

Back in New Zealand, his neighbors get the call – it’s from Burt! He tells Tommy he broke the record, and when he comes home, he is welcomed by all his neighbors.

A final title card tells us that Burt went back to Utah again, a total of 9 years’ running, and broke many speed records, and that his 1967 record for streamlined motorcycle under 1,000-cc still stands.

A charming movie full of heart, obviously a labor of love for Donaldson. Anthony Hopkins plays the old guy, and his accent isn’t quite New Zealand except for a word here and there. For the accent, Hopkins and Donaldson try an old trick: in the first couple of scenes, Hopkins tries to do the accent right, and of course his fellow actors, all Kiwis, speak their native accent just fine. Now having established this ‘flavor’ of accent as it were, Hopkins reverts back to closer to his normal manner of speaking – well actually he does his patented ‘old codger’ accent, which is less refined than how Hopkins can speak.

This switch in accent might also have something to do with setting: Hopkins might have tried a bit harder to do a Kiwi accent when he was shooting the scenes in New Zealand with the kiwi fellow actors, then relaxed it when shooting the American scenes.

‘Heart-warming’ is the term usually awarded movies like this. Great for old men to watch. No anger to speak of, full of love and trust that people after all are, on the whole, good and will respond to goodness if given half a chance. It might also be a tribute to New Zealand courage and determination and patriotism.

(30 March 2009)

Fog of War

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched ‘fog of war’ a doc by Errol Morris about Robert Macnamara who was Sec. of Defense during the Vietnam war. it’s very interesting how much Morris can get to the ‘opposing argument’ when he only interviews Macnamara, and includes some archival footage. He doesn’t interview Macnamara’s critics, or other experts – just Macnamara. And yet I did get the sense of an alternative viewpoint.

Morris is famous for sitting the subject in a chair, facing the camera, asking him one question, and after the subject answers, staying quiet. The subject feels the pressure of the silence, and he assumes his answer was not satisfying, so he says something else on the topic. And some more. Morris stays quiet, and the subject begins to ramble, ramble, talking more and more, and eventually, Morris hopes, he says something crazy – something that reveals the inner heart, not the public face the subject wishes to show us.

Usually Morris had done this with a fixed camera. Morris places himself right next to the lens so when the subject looks at Morris, it seems that he is looking at us, in the audience. This time Macnamara seems still to be looking at us, but the camera shifts a little, gets closer, pushes Macnamara’s face screen left, then screen right. It’s a bit offputting, but more varied and bearable than the same composition for an hour and a half.

Macnamara was the statistician attached to the unit that fire-bombed Japan in the war. He tells something I had not realized, just how extensive and brutal the fire-bombing campaign was. The first night of it, in a raid on Tokyo, they killed 100,000 Japanese civilians. One night! Macnamara goes on to talk about percentage of cities destroyed. A lot. His final estimate is between 50 and 90 percent of over 60 Japanese cities was destroyed in those campaigns – all before the atomic bombs were dropped.

And he adds, that he and General Lemay, the man in charge of that unit, both realized that if the us had lost the war, they would both have been charged and convicted of committing war crimes.

He also asks rhetorically, ‘Why does an act become a war crime if you do it and you lose, but not a war crime if you do it and you win?’

But on Vietnam he’s less honest. All the same, it’s clear that he tells us one big lesson there: he, and the presidents, did not know what was going on in the minds of the Vietnamese; the Vietnamese didn’t know what was in the minds of the Americans. The Vietnamese were quite certain that the Americans had simply replaced the French and were trying to subjugate Vietnam as a colonial extension; the Vietnamese were fighting for independence and unification. Macnamara was quite certain the Vietnamese were wrong, were only tools of the Chinese and Russians.

But I think that all those American wars had elements of imperialism to them, even if it was not in the minds of the commanders. it’s just that ‘imperialism’ as Macnamara was thinking of it lay in terms of the British Empire, rather than selling Coca-Cola, and Firestone Tires getting rubber plantations, and the like. But Ho Chi Minh saw Coca-Cola and Firestone as arms of imperialism; he saw how American imperialism was different from the british model.

(written around 7 March 2009)

La Vie En Rose

Hi Aki,

So I watched la vie en rose and I didn’t like it. Man, I was confused – it’s as though You’re already supposed to know everything that happened in her life. This first struck me when she walks up this long staircase, into a big room, where there’s a body on the floor. Somebody offstage says, ‘It’s all her fault’ and she leaves, and meets a guy who says, ‘Come with me,’ and he’s a cop and ask her ‘Do you know Albert? How about manny the sailor? And him, and him, and him?’

Man, who died? What happened? I guess the French know all about that. But I don’t know shit.

Then it’s jumping all over the place, New York, California, Paris, 1920, 1947, 1960…where are we? When are we?

And what happened to ‘Daddy Leelee’ Gerard Depardieu, the guy who gave her the first cabaret job?

And who was the pimp she was paying, but refusing to turn tricks for? Is she a hooker or not? If she’s not, why is she paying him?

I didn’t know though that ‘Je Ne Regrette Rien’ that song we mentioned before, came so late. it’s like the end of her career already!

And every scene was like the climax of another movie. she’s high, she’s drunk, she’s crazy in love, she’s crazy, it’s the most important night of her career, it’s the worst night of her career.

Some of it was so over the top it was like a parody.

It’s weird: some scenes required you to already know her life story, but in other scenes they tell you everything.

Basic problem of the movie is that she lived too full a life. Her life story is enough for 20, 30 movies. You can’t put it all into one like this, because you end up with ‘greatest hits’ of super-highs and super-lows just like this guy did, and she comes off as a parody of the show-business rise-and-fall story.

One other interesting thing: the movie avoids the second world war entirely. that’s one good aspect to jumping around like they did, they could just ignore those 8 years. I imagine they ignored those years because Piaf did things then that even these guys didn’t want to admit.

Another problem with the film is that it treats an artist, but you’d never know she was an artist. The guy who introduces her in his cabaret makes her practice; the guy who trains her for music halls and concerts trains and instructs her ruthlessly; but we never see her taking her art seriously. She remains the drunk, drug-addict little girl who sings on street corners for pennies, and might be turning tricks at night too.

It’s like the National Enquirer version of her biography (with the war left out)

… I checked Wikipedia: Papa Leplee, Gerard Depardieu, disappears…because he’s the body on the floor! I didn’t even recognize who it was! Amazingly bad work, although maybe in cinema I would have seen his face better.

And the war years are controversial: some called her a traitor for singing to the Germans, she claimed she was a secret member of the resistance, and maybe it was just too complicated to get into. But it remains a big gap, for that period is soooooo important to France.

Oh, here’s another thing that bugged me in the film. Marilyn Cotillard did a very good job at acting especially, teamed with the makeup people, in aging from 20 to a very-decrepit looking 44 (she looked more like 80) – but when she sang, although she matched lips perfectly, her throat didn’t move. It looks fake, and it’s worse when you have a closeup on a singer who is only known for belting out the songs with great emotion – there just isn’t the life there when you don’t see the throat muscles working and the veins bursting.

(written around 7 February 2009)