selenak

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Philipp Larkin's poem Annus Mirabilis has been much on my mind lately due to various lively discussions with

naraht, who created this wonderfully apropos icon (poor Brian!). When I watched Clint Eastwood's film J. Edgar last night, it inevitably crept up in my subconscious as well, and not just because 1963 is actually the year in which the film starts. (Different associations for Americans and Europeans: for Americans, it's the year of the Kennedy association first and foremost, not the year the Swinging Sixties started.) It goes backwards and forewards from this point onwards, and Eastwood isn't always success pulling off the non-linear time structure, but for the most part, it works for me. And seems to fit Hoover very well, circling round and round around his obsessions. Not so coincidentally, when he gets to choose a time period himself, he goes the Lindbergh case and trial, the Thirties, the Thirties as he sees them, with heroics, clear good-bad divisions and himself admired in the heroic role. He's progressively more ill at ease later; by the time he dictates a hate filled "anonymous" letter to Martin Luther King, even his life long loyal secretary is aware Edgar has lost the plot.

The film, I find, does a good job of not postulating all of Hoover's behavior is due to the fact he's a gay man with a lot of internalized homophobia living in an oppressive society which he helps making even more oppressive. (Note: the script is by Dustin Lance Black, who wrote Milk.) Nonetheless, there are of course connections, in the way Hoover responds to listening to King having enthusiastic sex, in the way he mockingly reads a love letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to a female lover, only to keep it long beyond blackmail use as it says something he himself can't bring himself to say out loud. It's definitely too late for J.Edgar. And then again, he does manage a life long relationship with the long-suffering, gorgeous Clyde Tolson.

It's a relationship that visually lives in restraint, making the touching of fingers or Clyde handing over a hankerchief for Edgar to press against his lips breathtakingly intimate. (Not that Eastwood plays coy subtext cames; when Hoover contemplates marriage out loud, Tolson reacts as you'd expect a lover to, and what connects them is spelled out physically as well as verbally.) Gestures say a lot in this film in general; when Hoover's mother, played by Judi Dench at her most icy, say "I'd rather have a dead son than a daffodil", she and Edgar are both looking in the same mirror, and later, after her death, he looks in the same mirror again, wearing her dress, and it's to Eastwood's and di Caprio's credit that this scene doesn't come across as a man-in-drag joke but as saying it all about what Hoover carries with him from his mother.

Throughout the film, though, this isn't presented as excusing what Hoover does to other people, or rendering the paranoia, the megalomania and the thirst for publicity glory (as Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who shot Dillinger, found out to his peril) harmless. Young Edgar bonding with his future secretary Helen Gandy over a passion for order and new filing systems is endearing and ominous at the same time, because thanks to the film's non-linear structure you're all too aware where this is leading too. The 1919 bombs are real enough, but not too long after you see Edgar observing two of his men beating and kicking a suspected anarchist, and the US post 9/11 parallels are rather obvious as you've got Hoover seeing communist in everything and everyone he feels even the slightest bit discomforted by for the rest of his life.

In terms of Eastwood as a director, this isn't in a best of category, but it's good enough (Bridges of Madison County level, I'd say, only here it's a m/m relationship at the center). It's neither a J'Accuse nor an Apologia Per Vitam Suam; though you do end up feeling sorry for Hoover as well as for everyone else. Not because 1963 was too late for him, but because it always was, throughout his life.