Recs and fictionalized writers
Dec. 13th, 2011 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI've stopped reviewing Dexter and will stop watching once this season is over, but may I say, apropos the latest ep: 1.) Bad idea, writers/producers. Really bad idea. And 2.) Most unrealistic therapist ever.
On to actual reviews and more enjoyable fandoms. First a vid rec: Virgin is a fantastic evocation of Antony, Vorenus, Rome and Rome.
Then upon reviewing films and plays dealing with characters' lives, how they approach their subjects, and whether or not a satisfying story is the result:
It is a prejudice universally acknowledged that a writer must write about "what you know". And that was my lame Jane Austen misquote of the day. Jane Austen, of course, frustrates potential biopic scriptwriters by the utter lack of anyone resembling a Mr. Darcy in her life, or any kind of life-changing romance, full stop. I've never seen Becoming Jane because it sounded it solved the problem by basically inventing a plot with no basis on actual Jane's life, but Miss Austen Regrets I had heard good things about, plus Olivia Williams playing 40ish Jane sounded intriguing, and when I saw the BBCiPlayer offered it, I watched. I didn't regret it. The scriptwriter, Gwynneth Hughes, works in a lot of authentic Jane quotes from her letters, and Olivia Williams is great, with the result that this Jane is witty, sometimes bitter, charming and cynical in turn, a rounded character, most definitely a writer and no avatar/pastiche on her own heroines. Gwynneth Hughes frames the story of Jane's final years by letting her favourite niece Fanny be the character in search of a husband (or rather, as Jane observes, desperate to be in love, while uncertain whom to be in love with), as well as the reader/audience avatar insisting that surely, surely, Jane must had a love affair. Meanwhile Jane enjoys the chance to be silly with Fanny and to go partying but is plagued by financial worries (the financial dependence on her brothers, which is a problem especially when said brothers get into financial worries, the dissatisfaction with her book contracts - the books are in modern terms bestsellers, but the terms negotiated very very much to her disadvantage), and the question as to whether or not she regrets having turned down her share of marriage proposals is very much also a question of financial security, which however would have come with less/no opportunity to work had she gone for the wife-and-mother life. Jane isn't painted as asexual on either the writer or the age side - she enjoys dishy Doctor Haden (with genuine Jane quote from one of her letters), has fun flirting with dubious Mr. Lushington, and there seems to be some tender affection between her and old admirer Reverend Briggs (if the script goes for any parallels to Austen works, it's Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, not Lizzie and Darcy, but with reverse gender roles; Briggs is the one still carrying a torch for Jane and (with the exception of one outburst) suffering in silence about that while having a sad present day existence) - but at no point does the script go for the idea of a key love affair as the cause of Jane's genius, or that she would have needed one. It also makes the relationships between Jane and her niece, sister and mother as the core ones in her emotional lives (though with the question of marriage and love a recurring topic due to the Fanny-in-search-of-a-husband plot, there isn't much Bechdel test passing on the subject matter of the conversations).
Historical trivia moment of amusement: late in the film Jane is received by the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanley Clark, who tells her that the Prince Regent loves her novels while finding the works of Walter Scott and Byron unreadable. Thought I, I bet he did, given that he's mercilessly ridiculed in Byron's, along with the monarchy in general. Anyway, the script correctly makes clear Jane isn't too keen on the Regent, having taken his wife's side in the most famous marital fallout of a Prince of Wales and his spouse before Charles and Diana, but understands that royal approval is really helpful when negotatiating with one's publisher.
I had read a very promising review of this play a couple of years ago in the New York Times, but it was never performed anywhere I could see it, so I was delighted to come across the script at last. It uses the real life background of Lawrence and Graves meeting in Oxford, 1920, for a play around a question from one of Graves' poems: "What life to lead and where to go/ after the war, after the war?" Lawrence and Graves are both in different ways damaged by the war and at odds in and with the post war world, and Massicotte conveys all the necessary information in his play about that even if you've never heard of either man. Something I hadn't seen mentioned in the review and which was a most pleasant surprise for me was the way Graves' wife Nancy Nicholson was presented. Given that Graves' first marriage ended badly (nothing to do with Lawrence, though) and given that when a story focuses on the relationship between two men, and one of them happens to be married and/or in a close relationship with a woman, the woman often ends up either marginalized or vilified, I was afraid of something like this happening here. (I'm looking at you, Jean Anoulih, and what you did to Eleanor of Aquitaine in Becket.)
So all praise to Mr. Massicotte of not doing that. Nancy isn't perfect (that she refuses to let Robert talk about the war contributes to their problems), but a fully rounded, sympathetic character, with her own goals (she's an early feminist, which bw is historically true, refusing to use her husband's last name, and fighting for the vote), smart and given the same verbal wit as the male characters get, and while Graves and Lawrence frequently spar with the closest thing the play has to a villain, Lord Curzon (standing in for the all the "old men" from every British World War I poets' hate book), it's Nancy who gets the better of him when he tries to taunt her about the men's relationship and her own feminism:
Curzon: So how many of your husband's friends does he spend the night with on a regular basis?
Nancy: ...
Curzon: Such relations, in some circles, may seem to be a bit... how should I say this? Unnatural. (...) I do hope you pass on my greetings to Mr. Nicholson.
Nancy: Mr. Nicholson is my father.
Curzon: Oh yes, of course. My mistake. Matters of this kind are so confusing in this day and age. Mr. Graves is your husband. Mr. Nicholson is your father, and, of course, your brother. Unless your father was one of those unfortunate men whose wife bore him no sons.
Nancy: My mother bore my father a son. He was killed in France. Good day, sir.
Nancy and Lawrence don't encounter each other until the end of the play, but the conversation between them is the great emotional climax, with the goodbye between Lawrence and Graves as the gentle epilogue.
As you may gather from Curzon's taunt, Massicotte doesn't shy away from the homoerotic dimension of his two-damaged-men-try-to-fix-each-other-with-dubious-results tale, though between Lawrence's rape trauma and self loathing about his sexuality and Graves' own hang ups and shell shock, it never gets physical. There is also the larger question of what the hell to do with your life in general. They're both in transitionary stages, Lawrence - called by his first name, Ned, in the play - post-Arabia but not yet hiding under new pseudonyms, and Robert Graves before "Goodbye to All That" (in more than one sense), and the various belated undergraduate pranks they go through (all reported by Graves in Goodbye to All That as well as in his book on Lawrence) have an undertone of desperation beneath the fun. Massicotte also parallels those pranks with the global fallout of the Arab Rebellion, hence the importance ex-War Cabinet member Curzon, who is also Vice Chancellor of Oxford, as an antagonist, and while I'm not sure whether it always works in terms of history, it does work within the plays' own world. His version of Lawrence is layered, containing the manipulativeness and, to take a page out of Buffy Summers' book, the inferiority complex about his superiority complex in addition to the intelligence, the charme and the issues, while I find his take on Robert Graves a bit idealized (though probably justified within the chosen time frame; Graves' own shadow sides came into play later in his life). But again, those are nitpicks with the awareness of having read biographies; within the play, it works. Given that both men are busy writing through the play (Lawrence his war memoirs, Graves trying to write poetry again but for the moment failing), what also works is the verbal wit. Choice example, after their first encounter when Ned has quoted a verse from one of Robert's poems:
Robert: Please don't do that again. You have me at an disadvantage.
Ned: It's a habit of mine.
Robert: Reciting poetry or having the advantage?
Ned: Oh, must I pick between the two? THey're both very helpful at parties like this one. If you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, you simply begin reciting something from memory with a mystical look in your eye and you'll quickly find yourself blissfully alone.
Or later, after Ned (who actually grew up in Oxford) mentioned climbing on the roofs with his brothers (two of which died on the Western Front, which is an issue colouring his relationship with Robert) as a boy:
Ned : (...) THe only one we never managed was the ascent up the dome of the Radcliffe Camera. That was all a thousand years ago, sometimes even longer.
Robert: Awfully dangerous.
Ned: Awfully is my favourite kind.
Robert: Do you still climb?
Ned: It's awfully dangerous.
Robert: It's your favourite kind.
(At which point you may gather the reason for the title of the play.)
One more thing: the question of how to deal with memory. Curzon wants first Lawrence, who refuses, then Graves to give a speech for the first post WWI Remembrance Day, newly instituted. And the speech Graves finally gives is basically an anti-Remembrance Day speech: You may feel the things you saw burned into your memory forever. And like the newly minted monument outside this church you will feel that no one gazing upon it could ever forget. But it is as certain as the sunrise that your monuments too will gather pigeons and derelicts. Your glorious dead will be forgotten. Your heroes will be stale photographs. Your grief will just feel old graveyards. ANd out of all these things, the thing that will be most forgotten is why it happened. ANd war will happen again. You will say to me, 'no, not this time, not this time. Never forget, we will never forget.' And perhaps you won't. Perhaps your children won't. But theirs will. Don't be angry with your grandchildren. People forget. It's how they remember how to survive. We forget the horror so we can carry on.
Whether or not he's right about this is something the play leaves up to debate.
On to actual reviews and more enjoyable fandoms. First a vid rec: Virgin is a fantastic evocation of Antony, Vorenus, Rome and Rome.
Then upon reviewing films and plays dealing with characters' lives, how they approach their subjects, and whether or not a satisfying story is the result:
It is a prejudice universally acknowledged that a writer must write about "what you know". And that was my lame Jane Austen misquote of the day. Jane Austen, of course, frustrates potential biopic scriptwriters by the utter lack of anyone resembling a Mr. Darcy in her life, or any kind of life-changing romance, full stop. I've never seen Becoming Jane because it sounded it solved the problem by basically inventing a plot with no basis on actual Jane's life, but Miss Austen Regrets I had heard good things about, plus Olivia Williams playing 40ish Jane sounded intriguing, and when I saw the BBCiPlayer offered it, I watched. I didn't regret it. The scriptwriter, Gwynneth Hughes, works in a lot of authentic Jane quotes from her letters, and Olivia Williams is great, with the result that this Jane is witty, sometimes bitter, charming and cynical in turn, a rounded character, most definitely a writer and no avatar/pastiche on her own heroines. Gwynneth Hughes frames the story of Jane's final years by letting her favourite niece Fanny be the character in search of a husband (or rather, as Jane observes, desperate to be in love, while uncertain whom to be in love with), as well as the reader/audience avatar insisting that surely, surely, Jane must had a love affair. Meanwhile Jane enjoys the chance to be silly with Fanny and to go partying but is plagued by financial worries (the financial dependence on her brothers, which is a problem especially when said brothers get into financial worries, the dissatisfaction with her book contracts - the books are in modern terms bestsellers, but the terms negotiated very very much to her disadvantage), and the question as to whether or not she regrets having turned down her share of marriage proposals is very much also a question of financial security, which however would have come with less/no opportunity to work had she gone for the wife-and-mother life. Jane isn't painted as asexual on either the writer or the age side - she enjoys dishy Doctor Haden (with genuine Jane quote from one of her letters), has fun flirting with dubious Mr. Lushington, and there seems to be some tender affection between her and old admirer Reverend Briggs (if the script goes for any parallels to Austen works, it's Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, not Lizzie and Darcy, but with reverse gender roles; Briggs is the one still carrying a torch for Jane and (with the exception of one outburst) suffering in silence about that while having a sad present day existence) - but at no point does the script go for the idea of a key love affair as the cause of Jane's genius, or that she would have needed one. It also makes the relationships between Jane and her niece, sister and mother as the core ones in her emotional lives (though with the question of marriage and love a recurring topic due to the Fanny-in-search-of-a-husband plot, there isn't much Bechdel test passing on the subject matter of the conversations).
Historical trivia moment of amusement: late in the film Jane is received by the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanley Clark, who tells her that the Prince Regent loves her novels while finding the works of Walter Scott and Byron unreadable. Thought I, I bet he did, given that he's mercilessly ridiculed in Byron's, along with the monarchy in general. Anyway, the script correctly makes clear Jane isn't too keen on the Regent, having taken his wife's side in the most famous marital fallout of a Prince of Wales and his spouse before Charles and Diana, but understands that royal approval is really helpful when negotatiating with one's publisher.
I had read a very promising review of this play a couple of years ago in the New York Times, but it was never performed anywhere I could see it, so I was delighted to come across the script at last. It uses the real life background of Lawrence and Graves meeting in Oxford, 1920, for a play around a question from one of Graves' poems: "What life to lead and where to go/ after the war, after the war?" Lawrence and Graves are both in different ways damaged by the war and at odds in and with the post war world, and Massicotte conveys all the necessary information in his play about that even if you've never heard of either man. Something I hadn't seen mentioned in the review and which was a most pleasant surprise for me was the way Graves' wife Nancy Nicholson was presented. Given that Graves' first marriage ended badly (nothing to do with Lawrence, though) and given that when a story focuses on the relationship between two men, and one of them happens to be married and/or in a close relationship with a woman, the woman often ends up either marginalized or vilified, I was afraid of something like this happening here. (I'm looking at you, Jean Anoulih, and what you did to Eleanor of Aquitaine in Becket.)
So all praise to Mr. Massicotte of not doing that. Nancy isn't perfect (that she refuses to let Robert talk about the war contributes to their problems), but a fully rounded, sympathetic character, with her own goals (she's an early feminist, which bw is historically true, refusing to use her husband's last name, and fighting for the vote), smart and given the same verbal wit as the male characters get, and while Graves and Lawrence frequently spar with the closest thing the play has to a villain, Lord Curzon (standing in for the all the "old men" from every British World War I poets' hate book), it's Nancy who gets the better of him when he tries to taunt her about the men's relationship and her own feminism:
Curzon: So how many of your husband's friends does he spend the night with on a regular basis?
Nancy: ...
Curzon: Such relations, in some circles, may seem to be a bit... how should I say this? Unnatural. (...) I do hope you pass on my greetings to Mr. Nicholson.
Nancy: Mr. Nicholson is my father.
Curzon: Oh yes, of course. My mistake. Matters of this kind are so confusing in this day and age. Mr. Graves is your husband. Mr. Nicholson is your father, and, of course, your brother. Unless your father was one of those unfortunate men whose wife bore him no sons.
Nancy: My mother bore my father a son. He was killed in France. Good day, sir.
Nancy and Lawrence don't encounter each other until the end of the play, but the conversation between them is the great emotional climax, with the goodbye between Lawrence and Graves as the gentle epilogue.
As you may gather from Curzon's taunt, Massicotte doesn't shy away from the homoerotic dimension of his two-damaged-men-try-to-fix-each-other-with-dubious-results tale, though between Lawrence's rape trauma and self loathing about his sexuality and Graves' own hang ups and shell shock, it never gets physical. There is also the larger question of what the hell to do with your life in general. They're both in transitionary stages, Lawrence - called by his first name, Ned, in the play - post-Arabia but not yet hiding under new pseudonyms, and Robert Graves before "Goodbye to All That" (in more than one sense), and the various belated undergraduate pranks they go through (all reported by Graves in Goodbye to All That as well as in his book on Lawrence) have an undertone of desperation beneath the fun. Massicotte also parallels those pranks with the global fallout of the Arab Rebellion, hence the importance ex-War Cabinet member Curzon, who is also Vice Chancellor of Oxford, as an antagonist, and while I'm not sure whether it always works in terms of history, it does work within the plays' own world. His version of Lawrence is layered, containing the manipulativeness and, to take a page out of Buffy Summers' book, the inferiority complex about his superiority complex in addition to the intelligence, the charme and the issues, while I find his take on Robert Graves a bit idealized (though probably justified within the chosen time frame; Graves' own shadow sides came into play later in his life). But again, those are nitpicks with the awareness of having read biographies; within the play, it works. Given that both men are busy writing through the play (Lawrence his war memoirs, Graves trying to write poetry again but for the moment failing), what also works is the verbal wit. Choice example, after their first encounter when Ned has quoted a verse from one of Robert's poems:
Robert: Please don't do that again. You have me at an disadvantage.
Ned: It's a habit of mine.
Robert: Reciting poetry or having the advantage?
Ned: Oh, must I pick between the two? THey're both very helpful at parties like this one. If you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, you simply begin reciting something from memory with a mystical look in your eye and you'll quickly find yourself blissfully alone.
Or later, after Ned (who actually grew up in Oxford) mentioned climbing on the roofs with his brothers (two of which died on the Western Front, which is an issue colouring his relationship with Robert) as a boy:
Ned : (...) THe only one we never managed was the ascent up the dome of the Radcliffe Camera. That was all a thousand years ago, sometimes even longer.
Robert: Awfully dangerous.
Ned: Awfully is my favourite kind.
Robert: Do you still climb?
Ned: It's awfully dangerous.
Robert: It's your favourite kind.
(At which point you may gather the reason for the title of the play.)
One more thing: the question of how to deal with memory. Curzon wants first Lawrence, who refuses, then Graves to give a speech for the first post WWI Remembrance Day, newly instituted. And the speech Graves finally gives is basically an anti-Remembrance Day speech: You may feel the things you saw burned into your memory forever. And like the newly minted monument outside this church you will feel that no one gazing upon it could ever forget. But it is as certain as the sunrise that your monuments too will gather pigeons and derelicts. Your glorious dead will be forgotten. Your heroes will be stale photographs. Your grief will just feel old graveyards. ANd out of all these things, the thing that will be most forgotten is why it happened. ANd war will happen again. You will say to me, 'no, not this time, not this time. Never forget, we will never forget.' And perhaps you won't. Perhaps your children won't. But theirs will. Don't be angry with your grandchildren. People forget. It's how they remember how to survive. We forget the horror so we can carry on.
Whether or not he's right about this is something the play leaves up to debate.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-13 02:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-13 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 10:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-14 03:29 pm (UTC)