72. Sacred Monsters: “La Valse”, “Dune” and “Pessoa”, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
When Albertine requested last week that electronic chips be implanted in Louise’s twenty-one champion felines, our employer could have had a stroke. The ostensible reason for such invasive treatment of her prize wards was, according to Albertine, to be able to locate them electronically should they “lose their way” at their MoMA debut. (That is, if MoMA agrees to the proposed event in its new performance space.) Albertine’s new form of cat wrangling: with implants, it would be easy to track each errant puss, wherever – amid the many galleries, mega-gift shops, or (God forbid) air ducts and ventilators of the vast museum complex and its high-rise apartment tower. Just imagine the chaos! But Louise kept her cool and quickly put the kibosh. Al and husband Paco replied to the refusal by calling Louise a “sacred monster”. (Louise smiled silently at that one.) Immediately, Mme Sesostris and Belle leapt to their friend’s defense. “Sacred, yes! But never a monster,” cried Belle, who should know since she officiates at a Florida megachurch with regular “cosmogonic prophecies”. And “Look who’s talking: a Monster-Mistress!” added our elder psychic. Actually, teammates Mme and Belle are rather envious of the charge. Each confessed to me privately that a secret ambition is to attain the title of sacred monster for herself. I, of course, maintained throughout my usual august silence, secure in the knowledge that my darling pet Murr is the only s-m in my life and quite safe from invasive implants. As Samuel Johnson would put it, “But Murr shan’t be wired: no, no, Murr shall not be wired.” Albertine has gone back to preparations for a scheduled showing of her animal act in our newly outfitted, in-house performance space on Ebersdorf Tower’s thirty-third floor. Wish us luck. Master Raro will make a video of the event, come what may.
I’ve always seen the Tanaquil Le Clercq role in Balanchine’s La Valse as a version of a young sacred monster. Over the years, we’ve encountered so many performances in which the dancing of the ballet was unsupported by a faceted conception of the lead role. We’ve seen the belle of the ball portrayed as a lovey, as a witch, as a hell-cat. The film records of Le Clercq suggest her character knows exactly what risks she is taking, lost in the perfume of the waltz at its most disorienting and fateful. There is a suggestion of a high-pitched delight in taking the curves at ninety miles an hour.
During the recent three-week Koch season of New York City Ballet, I caught Sterling Hyltin’s performance. (The company has returned to its Koch home with the audience in masks.) Hyltin is expert at representing courage against reckless odds. Her performances attain a nobility through avid self-testing, a relish for meeting the artistic challenge, whether interpretive or technical. She takes the viewer into her confidence about the parameters of a role, so when this ballerina has a success, we can exult with her at the accomplishment.
In La Valse, Hyltin is severe with her partner (here it was Joseph Gordon) in their introductory Eighth Waltz of the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. When Gordon enquires in mime what she might desire, Hyltin makes clear that this woman needs nothing but his partnership in their dance. (Her beauty and brilliance are sufficiently demanding in themselves.) But the young man is not the adventurer that the ballerina will become. The NYCB audience is reminded what a social adventuress can require. You think of those irrational heiress figures in 1930s romantic comedies, but here the ending will be neither marriage-bound nor happy.
Balanchine’s climactic ball (set to Ravel’s La Valse) achieves its metaphysical side. We have watched the first couple’s dance with its suggestion that the boy and girl are newcomers to its waltz rhythms. They have an ingenuousness that can’t help but seem unearned and therefore eerie. The second pairing presents two happy technicians – look at those leaps with which they cap the dance competition. The dark side of Balanchine’s ballet will use such achieved lubricity. It is the third couple that removes the stable floor from the vast ballroom – the ballerina here is prime candidate for victimhood at the next ball. Toward the end of her solo, she gets a little dreamy – a little distracted -- and abruptly abandons her partner to the Three Fates who opened the ballet. A party may have its surprises, including the callous variety. When the lead ballerina now arrives to have her extended interview with her partner, we have been prepared by the three preceding waltz couples: the perfumes of a dangerous innocence, a near-cynical facility, and a magical vanishing can now ceremonially anoint the lead ballerina for her destined sacrifice upon the social altar. This very evening, would she have it any other way?
The most interesting character in the new movie entitled Dune: Part One, adapted from Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic, is the Lady Jessica, the mother of the young hero, Paul Atreides. She is played by Rebecca Ferguson, who is magisterial in the role and a reason to see the movie despite the giant scale, the bombast, and the unstinting bloodiness of its spectacle. Herbert and the film’s director, Denis Villeneuve, have given Jessica more doubts and hesitations than any other figure in the narrative (including her busily studious son, played by Timothée Chalamet), and her various dilemmas become the through-line of the film. As soon as I saw the name Jason Momoa among the actors, I was en garde. Here was the performer who helped make Aquaman so unendurable several seasons back. But, luckily, Momoa plays a subsidiary character (Duncan Idaho) and dies a self-sacrificing death, thus taking up less screen time. All the adult male characters are either nobles or bravos, and I can take only so much of this sort of blustery thing. Two elements won me over.
The central character of Dune is the omnipresent desert of the planet Arrakis. Not since Lawrence of Arabia have we encountered protagonists defined by dust and wind to such a degree. Villeneuve has made an ecological manifesto in which the human beings have only political intrigue to offer in contrast to the shaping powers of their desert environment.
The other redeeming element is Lady Jessica. She is a member of a secret women’s organization, the Bene Gesserit, which has seeded the universe with promptings for the birth of a Messiah who will solve all political problems. Jessica is thus a votary of the feminine mysteries. Her son, Paul, may be the long-awaited savior. (I was reminded of the endogamic snares and butchery of Jacobean drama at many points.) By the end of Part One, Jessica also appears to be pregnant: talk about tomb to womb! So there will be something to look forward to in Part Two. For me, the real turn-off of the initial movie is the way it builds to massive digital death scenes and one particular sequence in which Paul duels a desert enemy for his first confirmed kill – which will presumably make him ready for Leadership in subsequent movie sequels. I am basically bored with the idea of heroism achieved through ritual murder, even if the fate of the universe depends on it. But perhaps further narrative developments will explain all.
And Paul is Jessica’s son – he is a living extension of her doubts and ambitions. Somehow, the character of Jessica makes a kind of sense of the constant emphasis on bloodshed. Actress and director hold us in thrall despite all the boring bravado. Lady Jessica becomes a sacred monster in the process.
As Parker Tyler would note (and as our smart Master Raro pointed out to me): this is the third film in recent seasons to feature a predominate matriarchal line in its narrative arc. Hereditary suggested that Toni Collette’s Annie had achieved full irrational triumph in recognizing and hailing the advent of her son Peter as the reborn demon Paimon. In The Green Knight, Gawain’s sorceress mother stands behind his adventures. She is the mystic Morgause, directing his destiny. And now in Dune, Paul has a close, salvific relation with Jessica. As a Bene Gesserit hierophant puts it in the novel: “…for the father, nothing.” And the winners will thus be: Sacred Momsters? What does this tell us about the presumably patriarchal times through which we now live? Has the Great Mother slouched her way again to Bethlehem to give birth? You read it here first.
I recommend highly the new biography of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (no relation to our dependable super here at Ebersdorf Tower), written by Richard Zenith (Pessoa: A Biography, Liveright, 2021). Pessoa is most famous for the poetry he wrote not only under his own name but under the names of dozens of pseudonyms (Pessoa called them “heteronyms”) across twenty-five years of dedicated composition -- but highly restricted publication. Zenith’s biography accomplishes two things. First, it illuminates a life made up mostly of translation jobs to make ends meet and prose essays on Portugal’s fabled history and backwater present. Zenith provides a survey of twentieth century cultural history which throws Pessoa’s literary accomplishments into relief. Second, Zenith clarifies the nature and extent of the poet’s selfless creation of his heteronyms. (Pessoa saw himself as a vessel or vehicle for their arrival, not as their inventor.) Thanks to Zenith, it is now possible to grasp how the imaginary bardlings were aware of one another, how they praised and criticized each other, and how they provide a “chorus” behind Pessoa’s own lyric voice. (Yes, he sometimes did sign his own name to his verse.)
It could be argued (and Pessoa himself addressed the issue) that only Shakespeare created so many equivalent “voices” through dramatic necessity. The difference (beyond the use of theatrical structures to propagate Shakespeare’s vocal lines) is that Pessoa provided his main creations with biographies which illuminate their writings. What Zenith reveals is the strangeness of Pessoa’s imaginative largesse – especially his ability to characterize poetic voices so that they are distinct and memorable in their language. This is especially true of the three main heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos .
Caeiro is a modern pastoral poet, happy to see nature as it is, untransformed by the imagination. What is, is sufficient for this master. Reis is an Horation voice, expert at modern odes. Campos is the adventurer in travel, sex, and personal sensations of a Whitmanesque variety. Pessoa varies verse forms, vocabulary, and tone for each. The effect is virtuoso. I can recommend Zenith’s own English translations from the Portuguese (Pessoa and Co., Grove Press, 1998). What is missing from translation, of course, is any sense of music. And what is also missing from Pessoa’s verse appears to be sensuous details from the observed world. Pessoa and his heteronyms often think in generalities rather than specifics. This gives the poetry a philosophical aspect. But it also distances the poet’s observations, probably with full intention. Zenith comments that Pessoa’s verse is “infected” by philosophy. For example, Pessoa comments in a prose note to himself that he is less a “person” than a landscape. A landscape with many figures, perhaps? What is this tendency in modern art to privilege environment over characterization? As in Dune’s desert vistas, we see the individual defined and disciplined by his or her milieu.
For more such prose comments, you may also want to investigate Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (edited by Jeronimo Pizzaro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, New Directions, 2013). Here, in thousands of pensées, Bernardo Soares, yet another Pessoa heteronym, strips himself of all those comforting alibis that can seduce the individual in his isolation and sense of powerlessness. Here is an example: “The weariness of all illusions and of everything that illusions involve – the loss of them, the pointlessness of having them, the anticipatory weariness of having them in order to lose them, the pain of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing how they would end. The consciousness of the unconsciousness of life is the greatest martyrdom imposed on the intelligence.” I found I could only read a handful of these musings at a time.
If a poet can qualify as a sacred monster, Pessoa is your man. Or many men.
I can also recommend a related novel by José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which converts Pessoa’s heteronym of that name into a protagonist who records all the pressures – political, sensual, metaphysical – which may inspire his poetry. Saramago’s creation of the Lisbon of the 1930s is a convincing panorama of European urban life. And in English translation, I found the work to be hypnotic, rather like a “new novel” out of French theory.
I have to mention that the hefty Zenith biography is 1,088 pages in length, and the book’s binding (by Liveright) is so flimsy, the spine of the volume broke after only a few days of use. How can the publishing industry survive such loss of standards in physical production? Especially since it appears that books are getting longer and heavier. (At least the books that I like to purchase and read.) I have blown my whistle.
I must also report that projection of motion pictures in the reopened theaters around New York is not worthy of the best films now being released. At the AMC Lincoln Square cinema, only one theater (the Dolby) is equipped with laser projection equipment. All the rest have screens that are too wide for the amount of light that can reach their surfaces. This condition misrepresents the digital cinematography of the features: dim, dimmer, dimmest. There is an equivalent problem with the Dolby sonics, which tend toward a predominant ambient background in the sound design so that dialogue becomes difficult to make out at low levels. This technical failure, along with the tendency of movie directors to let contemporary actors drift into inarticulate mumblecore, makes picking up plot points a matter of catch-as-catch-can. I have verified these conditions with my colleague, Master Raro, who has especially healthy ears and eyes. Perhaps we will have to learn to read lips in order to follow Dune: Part Two. Perhaps we will have to wait until it is shown at a laser-equipped theater in order to see it properly. When even an IMAX showcase is guilty of dark images and inadequate sound, audiences will fall asleep through sensory deprivation no matter how many explosions blast from the speaker system. Could smaller screens and better equipment be the answer? I only ask.
P.H.
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