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Date:         Fri, 11 Dec 1992 11:53:18 -0500
From:         FAC_JCLARK@JMUVAX.BITNET
Subject:      Re: The Cook, The Thief, His Dogs, Its Fleas etc.

Alex,

Thanks for your further response to my comments on this film; let's see if
I can go a little farther here.  I'd agree that any "morality" the film
may embody (intended or un- by Greenaway) wouldn't be anything we would
usually point a finger at.  I really meant to be hedging on what I consider
right now only an impression (not having worked out Greenaway's abstractions
in detail yet), which is why I used terms such as "moral force" or "sense"
and did some general dancing around the issue.  About the clearest thing you
can say about this moral perception that's overall-obvious is in looking at
the film's general contour: a genuinely despicable man gets his just desserts,
and in a way that practically addresses his flaws in particular.  Now it
could be that Greenaway would tell us calling him despicable and in possession
of "flaws" is our interpretation of what he is; to Greenaway, his only interest
is in the gangster's qualities considered as ideas and worked out like a
formula through interactions with the other ideas represented through the
other characters and objects of the physical world he's set up for them.
But the gangster (or thief) does indeed seem more than just "unsympathetic,"
genuinely despicable and redeemed only by occasional flashes of real wit
(even if a cruel wit at the expense of others), which for me is the main
touchstone of his humanity.  Anyway, what he is certainly helps to "objectify"
*him.*

A little more about the "ascetic" quality of the film.  Beyond the clear
application in set design in the modern bathroom, I did mean this as an im-
pression of the feel of the entire film in all its elements, the purposely
paring away of everything not related to the working out of Greenaway's
abstract formula of meaning.  (Sorry if that's foggy, I can't seem to do
better at the moment.)  Human behaviors in this film are very realistic in
their essence (just what people might do in some of these situations) and
often in their social details ("real to life"), but they're put in an entire
mis-en-scene that distances and distills them, making them for example unreal
to how you think they'd unfold in a real restaurant (what *is* going on with
all those other patrons, before they start being assaulted?), leaving them
without any "grace notes" in the film experience--things that just occur not
because they're integral to the theme or plot, but because they enliven it
and make it more involving as a human experience the viewer can warm to and
say "Yeah, I've known moments/experiences/feelings almost exactly like this!"
(As an aside, one of the things I can't stand about TV productions--social-
issue-based-on-true-life movies of the month, that sort of thing--is their
total lack of grace notes.  Every plot detail is a working out of some aspect
of the issue that can be generalized to a statistical portrait of the problem
being portrayed, and even in simple character interactions nobody does any-
thing that proves to "go nowhere" later in the story, as merely an insignifi-
cant detail that personalizes them instead of keeping them an illustration of
a theme-paper-on-film.  You might say, but isn't that what you're talking
about with Greenaway; and I'd reply yeah, sort of--but Greenaway's film actually
   has some real aesthetic impact and substance. TV don't usually.  And I'll
have to leave it at that, here.)

Before finishing up my verbal bumbling here, one more point on how an "abstrac-
tionist" like Greenaway might view his characters.  Like a PoMo-head of the
metafictionist ilk in literature, he'd probably remind us that after all,
his "people" are only patterns of light and darkness on the screen; we form
them into characters from the perceivable qualities he gives them (what their
actions represent and mean to us; what the words he's given to them tell us
to supplement those actions)... and, inevitably, from how we "flesh out" those
people by reading more into them, especially when the character strikes an
especially sympathetic or distasteful chord in us (ooh! I know someone like
that...). Like the metafictionist who says his characters are just aggregates
of words on paper that produce a magic illusion in us, Greenaway might add:
all right, go ahead and flesh'em out, but it's not my intention to give you
any help in doing so... and if I end up going off in a direction that you
aren't expecting--well, maybe there's a lesson or even an epiphany in the
experience.  --But lord no!, don't let's get back to this darn PoMo thing!!
Enough on Cook.

Chaplin.  My negative feelings, I have to admit, are a bit too unexamined and
perhaps unjustified for me to make a final decision about his work.  Yes,
he's often too sentimental, and yes, I agree with those who find him consider-
ably less "cinematic" than Keaton (despite what some revisonists have written):
these things reinforce my feeling about his art.  But initially I never
felt a real rush of sympathy toward the Little Tramp character the way I
did toward the lower-brow Laurel and Hardy (still among my favorites).  And
in film school, as I began to read and study more about film, I suppose
there's some resentment about how Chaplin's been held up as the greatest that
helped stiffen the spine of my negative resolve. So I'd like to give him more
of a chance.

Jeff Clark
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