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)

Nobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai)

Hi aki,

Tonight we watched Nobody Knows a 2004 movie directed by Hirokazu Koreeda. Original title comes up at imdb.com as Dare mo shiranai.

Very effective, though long, film. I think it’s too long, but the length works both to make me meditate on what’s unfolding, as well as to make the process seem endless.

A mom who’s a bit weak, leaves her four kids alone in the apartment, and goes off with her boyfriend. The eldest child, Akira, is only 12, but he has to take care of the others. Because the mom also told the landlord it was just her and Akira, none of the kids can go to school or even leave the apartment. Months after mom is gone, though, they all start going out. They need to; The gas and electricity and water have all been turned off.

Finally the youngest, little Yuki, dies in an accident. Akira and Saki, a neighborhood girl, take the body to haneda and bury it there. Life goes on for the survivors. The conclusion to the story would naturally be the discovery by the authorities, charges against the mother, the kids in foster or group homes or whatever they do to such kids in Japan, and finally getting into school and some sort of future. But that conclusion is withheld from us. This is less satisfying but more powerful.

The director shoots in a documentary style, and gets good performances from the kids. They are practically the whole cast. The camera is almost always static, and almost every transition is a straight cut; The only expressionistic scenes involve dead Yuki, first on her birthday when she makes Akira take her to the train station to greet mom – who doesn’t show up of course – and for awhile Akira and Yuki stand below the monorail and he promises her one day he’ll take her to see the airplanes; then near the end as Akira has a fantasy or memory of walking with Yuki down the street, and she’s still alive. (Supposedly Koreeda oroginally planned to end with a fantasy of the whole family, mom and dad and all four kids, united in a sort of heaven, or at least happy household).

Lots of the film is shot and cut in a doc style with closeups, and cutaways, and offhand compositions. These telling details convey a lot and build, taking some pressure off the kids to perform. Every effort is made to keep away from big emotions, everything is lowkey, normal, everyday. In part this makes it so real, so haunting, so believable.

Do you remember the true case this was based on? I remember something like it in the news, but it was only a few years ago, and one of the comments on imdb.com said that Koreeda worked on the screenplay for 15 years – that would push back the incident to late 1980s. Or were there more than one such incident in Japan?

Of course it’s hard to talk about such a movie without talking about the wider social implications of the story – how could mom do this, how could the kids live without being detected, what kind of a world do we live in? but I’m only talking about the movie.

(27 March 2009)

PS — to read Aki's translation of this post in Japanese, click here.

FLOW – For Love of Water

Hi Aki,

Tonight I watched a doc on the global water crisis called FLOW: For Love of Water. This was an excellent doc in the advocacy genre. It does its job by giving us some very pretty (probably stock) shots, with interviews of passionate witnesses, from many countries, with snippets of stories of the water problems we face around the world – especially the problems that arise from privatization of the world’s water supplies.

First it makes you scared. Then it makes you mad – darned mad. Then it gives you hope. And it gives you some models of people who succeeded in defying the corporations, who here are cast as the villains.

No balance is offered: this movie was made by people who are mad and interested in action, now, before it’s too late.

(written around 12 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)