In which a great cast and an award-heavy scriptwriter still don‘t manage to produce something that holds together as a miniseries, leaving me to conclude it ought to have been a movie instead, or a theatre play.

( Detailed and spoilery observations )

Very enjoyable, but not quite what I'd hoped for, by which I mean I wanted to love it and didn't, though that might partly been to having had wrong expectations.

What I thought I would get: first of a series of detective novels starring Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children.

What this is: one off novel about Harper Lee's and Truman Capote's childhood friendship. In the course of which they also play detectives (this, btw, was a rl thing, complete with cosplaying Holmes and Watson), but in the way children do, i.e they're looking for a mystery but when they eventually hit on a "mystery", it isn't really one, more of a shaggy dog story their imagination makes into more, though they come up with a few correct conclusions in between. At any rate, it's not the main plot of the novel, which is very reminiscent of, say, Tom Sawyer in the way it's structured, i.e loosely connected anecdotes and a few lingering plot threads.

I should add that it takes enormous guts to tackle the childhood of these two writers, since they've milked it for their own fiction. Which means at least part of your readers will have fictionalized alter egos of two masters of their art in their heads, though this book definitely is written primarily for children as readers. (Who presumably wouldn't have read Capote, even if they should have watched the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Neri wisely doesn't try to imitate either of their narrative voices, and sticks to third person, sometimes in Nelle's and sometimes in Tru's perspective, though as an appendix he has fun with some Capote and Harper Lee pastiches in the form of first person narrated short stories his child heroes have supposedly written during the course of the novel. (As he mentions, the real short stories were lost, so he gives his versions, which are fun to read, and good natured stylistic exercises to boot.)

Purely taken as a novel for children, it provides them with a pair of misfit heroes, with Tru the more unusual of the two, because tomboy heroines have been popular since decades, but as far as I recall, defiantly "sissy" boy heroes are not. If I were Neri, I'd have trusted my youthful audience more to get the point, because he repeats at least three times that part of what makes the Nelle and Tru friendship is that neither of them fits into gender roles (i.e she's seen as too much of a boy for a girl, he's seen as too much like a girl for a boy), but that doesn't take away from the charm of the combination. (Especially since neither does Nelle get more "feminine" nor Tru ore "masculine" in the course of the narrative; that's not how they influence each other.) Other than not fitting gender roles, our young heroes are also united by passion for books, a wild imagination and having living but absent mothers (Nelle's has mental health problems, Truman's is Holly Golightly a narcissist who can't stand having a child when she yearns to make it in the big city, and specifically can't stand this particular child - as Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke once wryly noted, at least his mother ensured he'd never have a "am I gay?" Identity crisis as a teenager, because she told him he was way earlier than that.) Their fathers, otoh, couldn't be more different - Nelle's is her later model for Atticus Finch, Tru's is a charming conman who never pulls off a succesful con. (And isn't much around.)

The 1930s US South setting means the novel has to deal with race as well. There are two poc characters with lines and personality, a boy a bit older than our heroes, and the cook at Truman's aunts' house where he lives. The boy is the occasion for an early scene where Tru and Nelle face the local bullies; note that Nelle is incensed by the unfairness of the situation because she knows the black boy can't fight back (it's unthinkable), and that's why she intervenes, which I think as a way to signal both institutional racism and that Nelle, with the best of intentions and bravery, isn't free from some assumptions herself, it works. As for the cook, Neri tries his best to avoid the "Mammy" cliché, but of course she is an older black woman being roped into helping two white kids in an endeavor (and knowing she'll be held responsible if it goes wrong), and we're in the kids' pov, so while there's enough narrative information to make it clear she has her own life going on and doesn't live for young Truman, we still don't see her outside of how he relates to her. The Ku Klux Klan shows up twice in the novel, the second time in what I automatically assumed was an invented occasion in order to pay homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, because Nelle's father gets to face them down, but no, upon checking, the second occasion actually happened: when eight years old Truman was called to New York to live with his mother for a while, he threw himself a big Halloween farewell party (of course he did), and the Klan, objecting to the presence of the earlier mentioned poc characters among the guests, showed up. (KKK, Monroeville edition, deciding to crash eight years old farewell party is the type of thing that would be called hopelessly over the top if invented, so I should have known it really happened before googling.)

Sidenote: Because I read Go Set a Watchman last year (and of course To Kill a Mockingbird ages ago), I couldn't help but notice that the depiction of racism in Monroeville is markedly different in the prequel/rough draft compared to the other two. In Tru and Nelle, it's there, it's unfair, but most townspeople are benevolent, and the KKK are bumbling bullies and fools whom the good people naturally oppose. There's nothing like the creeping horror when in GSAW, in the adult Jean Louise's pov, she realises that it's everywhere and far from limited to unpleasant brutes.

Back on reviewing track, technical details: Neri gives the child Nelle a Southern accent to be phonetically transcribed, but not the child Truman (though Nelle's has disappeared by the end of the novel from her dialogue) - no idea how accurate that is. Some of the other characters talk in it, too, which is always a bit tricky for me as a foreigner to read. I couldn't help but notice that when they play out their Sherlock Holmes scenarios, Nelle is Watson while Truman is not Holmes but Sherlock, and here I cried foul and clear influence of not one but two more recent tv incarnations. :) (She would have called him Holmes!) This being said, it only made me wish more for the child detective series I had imagined this to be the start of, because I could have read tons more about these two fighting crime.

In conclusion: I liked but didn't love, and now hope for fanfiction providing more and going deeper. This is such a delightful friendship through the decades before the two lost each other in the wake of In Cold Blood and Truman's alcoholism-fueled assholery and self destruction. And in addition to the fighting crime tales, I want the superheroes AU. Because clearly Nelle would have made a great superheroine (complete with shock realisation about mentor) and her withdrawal from the public eye was so she could superhero undetected. Truman provided the intelligence in their investigations by befriending every supervillain ever and making them spill the beans.

A few years ago, when watching the film CAPOTE - which fascinated me - made me read In Cold Blood and Gerald Clarke's biography of Truman Capote (more about those books here. Back then, I noticed that Clarke called Truman Capote's profile of Marlon Brando, written for the New Yorker, in some ways a trial run for In Cold Blood. But lacking interest in Marlon Brando - look, I don't deny that his iconic performances (bookoended by Stanley Kowalski and Don Corleone, with some more good ones thrown in among a lot of rubbish) are really all they're claimed to be, but I never found him compelling as a person, which btw actors don't have to be - I never checked it out. But now, confined to the train a lot of the day, I did. The New Yorker thankfully put the entire text online (unlike the Guardian which presents a cut version, hmph): The Duke in his Domain. And even if, like yours truly, you are no Brando fan, it's worth reading.

First and foremost, of course, because of Capote's command of language. In 1957, Brando was already beyond his zenith - we know that now, his contemporaries didn't - but Capote was just getting there, and it shows. What he can do with English makes me green with envy. Some choice samples:

It was as though he'd dozed off into a disturbing dream; his eyelids twitched, and when he spoke, his voice—an unemotional voice, in a way cultivated and genteel, yet surprisingly adolescent, a voice with a probing, asking, boyish quality—seemed to come from sleepy distances.

And, after a quick reminiscence of having seen the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire after running briefly into the young actor before that in the late 40s:

Not the least suggestion of Williams' unpoetic Kowalski. It was therefore rather an experience to observe, later that afternoon, with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character's cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated—just as, in this Kyoto hotel room ten years afterward, my 1947 memory of Brando receded, disappeared into his 1957 self.

And

He was good with the children, at ease, playful, appreciative; he seemed, indeed, their emotional contemporary, a co-conspirator. Moreover, the condoling expression, the slight look of dispensing charitable compassion, peculiar to his contemplation of some adults was absent from his eyes when he looked at a child.

Now, the reason why Gerald Clarke called this a trial run for In Cold Blood isn't the magnificent style. And of course Brando was neither a killer nor a victim of same, nor a citizen of a small Kansas town. But he was notoriously buttoned up towards the press, and originally hadn't planned to spend more than the minimum amount of time with Truman Capote. Who did what he later did with one of the killers, Perry Smith: he used something extremely painful from his own life to get under Brando's skin. He even used the same thing. What all three men had in common was that they were sons of mostly absent fathers and alcoholic mothers who drank themselves to death. And so Capote's profile of Brando builds towards this climax which makes for as disturbingly intense reading today as it must have done then:

Brando has not forgotten Bud. When he speaks of the boy he was, the boy seems to inhabit him, as if time had done little to separate the man from the hurt, desiring child. (...). “But my mother was everything to me. A whole world. I tried so hard. I used to come home from school . . .” He hesitated, as though waiting for me to picture him: Bud, books under his arm, scuffling his way along an afternoon street. “There wouldn’t be anybody home. Nothing in the icebox.” More lantern slides: empty rooms, a kitchen. “Then the telephone would ring. Somebody calling from some bar. And they’d say, ‘We’ve got a lady down here. You better come get her.’ ” Suddenly, Brando was silent. In silence the picture faded, or, rather, became fixed: Bud at the telephone. At last, the image moved again, leaped forward in time. Bud is eighteen, and: “I thought if she loved me enough, trusted me enough, I thought, then we can be together, in New York; we’ll live together and I’ll take care of her. Once, later on, that really happened. She left my father and came to live with me. In New York, when I was in a play. I tried so hard. But my love wasn’t enough. She couldn’t care enough. She went back. And one day”—the flatness of his voice grew flatter, yet the emotional pitch ascended until one could discern like a sound within a sound, a wounded bewilderment—“I didn’t care any more. She was there. In a room. Holding on to me. And I let her fall. Because I couldn’t take it any more—watch her breaking apart, in front of me, like a piece of porcelain. I stepped right over her. I walked right out. I was indifferent. Since then, I’ve been indifferent.”

The last sentences (from "I didn't care anymore") were the only part of the profile I had been familiar with before, as Clarke quotes them in his biography. I don't think I've ever read something that encapsulates the emotional numbness reached with an addict parent so devastingly.

Of course, Brando, who hadn't intended to lay his psyche bare like that (his PR people, quoted by Capote in the same article, go on about what a lovely woman his mother was), was absolutely furious once The Duke in his Domain was published, but it was too late then. As this article about the interview and its results, called, sure enough, In Cold Type, states:

It is hard, perhaps, for the modern reader to get a sense of just how stunning Brando’s personal revelations would appear to an audience of the time. Today we are used to—and have even grown cynical about—tawdry stories of the rich and famous. But in 1957, the Hollywood studio system that for so long had carefully controlled the images of its stars was just coming to an end. Intimate details of an actor’s personal life had been confined to disreputable scandal rags. Never before had the inner psyche of a star of Brando’s magnitude been served up for public consumption, much less by a writer of Capote’s stature. This was something new.

(Another good retrospective on the article and what it meant is here.)

It's tempting to look at the ghastliness of intimate confessions at Ophra's and reality tv and say, Truman, that's your long term fault. But leaving that aside. Writing about living persons always has this intrusive aspect to it, not that it keeps us, and I include myself, from doing so. Now in the Brando-Capote case you could argue fair play. Brando had been a star for a decade at that point (and one who didn't care too much for pretenders to the throne; the article contains some terse, ambiguous remarks on the subject of James Dean), this was anything but his first interview, and Capote was visiting with the explicitly stated goal to interview him for an article. So anything he said was his responsibility. And yet. I can't imagine how it would feel like to have something this private laid out to the public at large. Then again, I can't imagine, in Capote's position, not writing it. Because, let's face it: take that climax away, and the article, beautiful language not withstanding, because just one more "interview with actor on set promoting their latest movie" exercise. There is a part of me, and usually the victorious one, that thinks: if you have a story in you that you regard as worth telling, then tell it, and tell it as well as you can.

Until, of course, I imagine myself as the subject of a story instead of the writer, and can't stop cringing.

Another film I've recently watched in the cinema was Coco avant Chanel - "Coco before Chanel" - starring Audrey Tautou as Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel. Tautou was great, but the film itself reminded me of the ongoing frustration dodging many a biopic (or film based on a true story, if you like) centred on a woman, as opposed to films portraying a male historical figure: most of them focus on the romance, with the work which made the woman in question famous being given just a nod or two. In this particular case, the film is, forgive the metaphor, wearing its colours up, in its title, so I didn't get in with the expectation of seeing Coco Chanel, professional woman. And I thought it was remarkably honest in the depiction of the mistress system, in lack of a better term. When young Gabrielle gets rebuffed in her initial attempt to get on the stage, she invites herself to the mansion of an earlier admirer, and she's quite aware she'll be expected to provide sex and entertainment to earn her keep. Her initial position, sometimes eating with the servants, sometimes presented to the guests, makes the economic and social dependence blatantly obvious, and the film doesn't romantisize it. And yes, we do see her take an interest in clothing, critisizing the Belle Epoque style which doesn't allow women to breathe, developing her own style through the picture. But the focus is still firmly on her love life, her two big relationships; in the last five minutes, she becomes an independent designer, but we never see any of the struggles from that period because it's all done in montage.

And this is fairly typical for a movie about a famous woman. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen has a few discreet mentions of Denys Finch-Hatton, but no more. Out of Africa, the film, makes the Karen/Denys affair front and center of the story. Camille Claudel? Is all about the Camille/Rodin affair, with Isabelle Adjani not allowed to age to boot so you could be forgiven for assuming Camille goes from being Rodin's student to sculptor to nervous breakdown and getting locked up in an asylum within two or three years instead of twenty. One of many, many reasons why, Cate Blanchett notwithstanding, I disliked the first Elizabeth movie so much I didn't even bother with The Golden Age are such clunkers like the "my queen rules with her heart, not with her head" line (this about Elizabeth Tudor!) and here, too, the focus on the affair with Robin Dudley who wasn't even presented as very interesting (which the real thing was). One of many reasons why I admire the 70s series Elizabeth R (with Glenda Jackson as Elizabeth) is that they had the great idea of letting the first episode, The Lion's Cub, start with teenage Elizabeth literally keeping her head and fighting for survival in the aftermath of the Seymour affair (instead of making it about Seymour), and then proceeding through Mary's reign focused on the relationship between the sisters, again not on Elizabeth's love life. Which gets its place later in the series, but we're not introduced to Elizabeth as the heroine of a romance, or through her qualities as a lover as opposed to those which later kept her on the throne and assured her success.

Back to movies about women. I think the time where I'm not just irritated but revolted was with Artemisia, about baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Now, if you've heard about Artemisia but aren't very familiar with her work, chances are you do know two things - her violent Judith paintings, such as this one, and the fact she was raped by the painter Agostino Tassi who was sued and found guilty in a seven-month-trial. (This trial is a gruesome example of how the burden of proof was on the victim; Artemisia was interrogated using a device made of thongs wrapped around the fingers and tightened by degrees, an especially cruel torture for a painter, to ensure she spoke the truth.) Yet in the movie Artemsia, her relationship with Tassi is presented as a passionate love affair, with her father as the villain who sues Tassi out of jealousy, Tassi (who already had been guilty of raping his sister-in-law and one of his wives) as a gentleman who accepts the blame rather than letting Artemisia suffer through the trial... and of course there is precious little about Artemisia's work, let alone her post-Tassi career.

Now I was all set to rant about the patriarchy, but the director of Artemisia and the director of Coco before Chanel are both women. Moreover, a recent essay at ship_manifesto made me wonder whether the extreme focus on romance in movies about women isn't also part of the same phenomenon that informs fanfic being overwelmingly dominated by shipping, both het and slash-wise. In said essay, which is about Jo/Laurie from Little Women, the description of the original reception of the novel runs thusly: With no other outlet for their obsession, readers flooded Alcott and Thomas Niles with letters expressing their love for the book. And what did the Little Women fandom write about? How much the Marches reminded them of their own sisters? How scared they were when Beth was ill? How they knew exactly how the girls felt about having a father away in the War? How much they admired Jo for pursuing a career and resolving to support herself and her family instead of being concerned with snaring a rich husband and how they wanted to follow her example of independence? No. All the fans wanted to know was: when does Jo marry Laurie? Children’s writers and other media producers are used to this reaction by now, how it’s all about the shipping, and are even able to occasionally laugh at it. However, this was a new phenomenon to Miss Alcott, and her journals clearly show she was appalled: “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only end and aim of a woman’s life” (Journals of Louisa May Alcott 167)

Ms. Alcott, I feel for you. Also, fandom hasn't changed much in a century or more. And of course directors and scriptwriters, be they male or female, are aware of this. (Also tv producers, one assumes, hence the presentation of John/Aeryn and removal of any non-John-related storyelements for Aeryn in Farscape's season 4 and Roslin/Adama and (nearly) any non-Adama related issues for Laura Roslin in BSG's 4.5. Grrr, argh.) Still, I can't help and contrast and compare. A relatively recent film like Milk certainly makes its hero's love life an important part of the story (all the more important as his sexual identity is crucial to the story it wants to tell), and both Scott and the hapless Jack get their share of screentime; how Harvey relates to them is crucial for his characterisation. BUT Harvey's romances still don't dominate the picture; you can't say this is what Milk is about. The political activism, the struggle to get elected, the proposition 6 campaign, all this gets more attention than Harvey's love life, and justly so. Or take another film from recent years based on real events, Capote. Again, we get to meet Truman Capote's partner (played by Bruce Greenwood). And the relationship Capote forms with Perry Smith isn't without its subtext. But the focus in the later is more on the bizarre twist on the writer/muse constellation this presents, and the paradox that Capote in order to be able to tell Smith's story has to wish it to be ended and Smith dead, and Capote's long-suffering boyfriend (another Jack) is important to the story for what he comments on this writerly behaviour; he doesn't have any "let's discuss our relationship" scenes. Now, were fanfic to be written based on Milk or Capote - I have no idea whether or not it is - I'd still expect it to be shippy in nature, focused on the romances or potential romances, not on the political activism or writer ethics respectively. Because fanfiction really is this way. But in that case, it would not mirror the emphasis from the source material.

We're still getting snowed in here in Munich, thalia_seawood came to visit on Sunday, and I watched the Oscars. Not having seen Brokeback Mountain or Crash yet, I have no feeling one way or the other, but I was glad about the best actress, best supporting actress and best actor awards, as they had all been candidates I had been rooting for. (Oh, and George Clooney winning best supporting actor was nice on general principle, since I like him, but I didn't think that role was much of a stretch - though Syriana was a good movie.) Jennifer Garner tripping and carrying it off with aplomp by quipping "I always do my own stunts" was adorable.

This reminds me: I haven't gotten around to posting my thoughts on Capote yet, which I saw last Thursday.

( Man and Muse )