82. Security: End-of-Year Movies and “Spare”, reviewed by Master Raro
Lockdown has a new meaning here at Ebersdorf Tower. Our dear Louise took one look at local news reports and pushed the panic button: she’s now dedicated to High Security. You will remember that Louise was contemplating a plan for a revision of the U.S. constitution? Which would mean her Tower would be invaded by politicos and V.I.P.s of all description. That project is now on hold because of violence in the New York streets, because of the mayhem threatened by zealots in our current Congress, and thanks to those images from Brazil of mobs protesting a recent election. Louise is protective of her prize felines, not to mention of her own safety (and that of her staff), and it didn’t help when the New York Times published a detailed map of Mar-a-Lago in a story on Trump’s stashing of government files. Louise can imagine her own domain laid bare. She sees the day when our aerie will be breached by animal rightists and Christian nationalists. (Talk about revising the Constitution!) Louise asked Belle, once a dedicated believer in full theocracy, to end her connection with a megachurch in Florida; whereupon Belle loyally has declared The Ballet to be her one and only religion and Louise her true revivalist! All plans for A&P’s cat ballet are postponed, at least for the moment. We hear that in Paris, Albertine is staging a Le Swing version of that creation, even flying in feral performers from Rome’s Palatine. Paco keeps baying: “Will be wild! Feral kitties!”
So concerned is Louise with securing our building’s safety, she has ordered steel panic rooms to be installed on the residential floors, just in case Republican evangelicals or Islamic terrorists should target her pets or their proud owner. This also means that, in addition to protecting herself (and us) from Covid, the building has an enlarged security team checking entrances and exits. Armed guards patrol the building at all hours looking for invasive types. Such surveillance creates a bunker atmosphere. We wear I.D. badges day and night. It’s Sequestration City!
My new duties involve making sure that access to the various safety rooms is facilitated on each floor and that they are fully stocked with food, water, medicines, retinol, etc. And that the internal oxygen tanks are dependably operational. The feel of the rooms’ interiors resembles videos of space station living quarters, minus the free flotation.
I can’t say that I blame Louise for her sense of looming violence in our land. All you had to do was watch the Friday night (January 6, 2023) votes for Speaker of the House of Representatives and witness Mike Rogers lunge toward Matt Gaetz in order to register the brutality of our elected officials yet again. And isn’t it interesting how the reported “lunge” of former President Trump toward a Secret Service driver is now missing from the January 6 Report? I am currently reading the full text of the Celadon edition of that Report where on page 591 the “lunge” has become a euphemistic “movement”, perhaps a rhetorical necessity thanks to members of the S.S. closing ranks around crucial details of that very interesting scene inside the Beast.
Now, exactly two years later, a Republican, Richard Hudson, not only had to restrain Mike Rogers from physical violence toward Gaetz; a hand was placed over Rogers’ mouth to censor his speech. Here, via streaming services, was a visual echo of the actions of the 2021 mob and of on-going Republican leadership. It is the rule of anger that links such acts to religious and ideological zealotry. Louise is on to something. Our Democratic Seal has been fractured. As Mme Sesostris puts it, a spiritus perniciosus hovers around and about American politics. And into panic rooms we go.
Or to the movies. The new emphasis on “security” can be found in current films, either as history lessons or tributes to a consecrated “family ideal”. Every end-of-year, we balletomanes use the holiday weeks to catch the movies which are opening or which we have missed. (Predictable casting of The Nutcracker provides ample opportunity for dereliction of duty.) A certain dissociation from everyday reality could be found in any number of motion pictures which I encountered at local theaters here in Manhattan. This cushion from the real is the promise of the tried-and-true, the formulaic, the very secure. Take, as an example, The Banshees of Inisherin. For safety from homeland conflict in dear old Ireland across the water, try living on an offshore island where everyone is inured to isolation. Two long-time friends are falling out. One (Brendan Gleeson) claims boredom with the conversation of the other (Colin Farrell). Each time a reconciliation is attempted, the Gleeson character cuts off one of his digits. You can see how conveniently the self-mutilation motif salutes that part of the audience which requires horror. The theme of security must be balanced by the threat of self-harm. (You are not even safe from yourself, get it?) Beyond Farrell’s sister, no islander seems to notice that somebody has become looney and dangerous to himself, not even the musicians who rehearse regularly with the fingerless dope. This little failure of narrative logic, along with the presence of black-clad symbolic crones (Irish banshees) on lone country lanes, creates a certain anti-realism. I’m a stickler for minimum logic in my fairy tales.
No motion picture director on earth is as eager to be declared an auteur as today’s indefatigable Steven Spielberg. His team is spending a fortune keeping his presence alive and well on Google News. And he insists on telling us about his upbringing in The Fablemans, in what appears to be a comfortable middle-class family, first in Arizona and then in California. The Spielberg matriarch supplies a touch of marital infidelity to keep the dramatic tension alive. Now and then she essays some pianism or an “interpretive” modern dance. (I kid you not: the American Gothic persists.) For a little ultraviolence, the theme of anti-semitism is invoked via horrific high school bullying. The big irony, however, is that a story about a young son’s escape from middle-class familial suffocation through a career in motion pictures is contradicted by The Fabelmans itself being perfectly middle class in style and form. Not only can you go home again; Spielberg has never left. His movie itself is suffocating. It just won a Golden Globe award.
On yet another cinematic island, the wealthy patrons of a celebrity chef are tortured by being locked up in his exclusive restaurant and forced to eat every last bite of his gustatory creations. Goodness knows, the pretensions of Fine Dining deserve satire, but The Menu uses a heavily parodic hand and what can only be called Food Horror. Some of the dialog is very funny – the audience around me laughed with holiday glee. But didn’t Jean Genet’s The Balcony do this kind of thing with more penetration and wit back in the fabled 1960s? I enjoyed the performances of Ralph Fiennes as the mad chef and Janet McTeer as the cruel food critic. Imagine an off-Broadway revenge comedy replete with lashings of dark chocolate.
Do not go to the new Babylon in order to learn about silent movies in the nineteen-twenties and the transition to sound film technology. Damien Chazelle’s effort conflates early cinematic history and misrepresents the particulars of that vivid mute art circa 1926. The beautiful Margot Robbie is game in her performance as a silent star but is given material on the level of a Judy Canova sketch. The narrative goes off the deep end with projectile vomiting, a scene in which the heroine wrestles with a live rattler, and a final horror sequence that is supposed to show the L.A. underbelly but really is just cheap Grand Guignol. Perhaps no film can succeed at the box-office today unless it exploits bourgeois taboos. Babylon may not have gone far enough: it has reportedly bombed. It would be easy to dismiss Chazelle’s work as expensively loathsome. But, no, it can now stand forever as an example of the product of American moviemakers with no sense of period attempting to show an art’s past only to expose their own incompetence. The director’s 2016 La La Land had similar problems dealing with the world of jazzmen. You remember that it almost won an Academy Award as best film. Chazelle was named best director, a consolation prize.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish -- a sequel to the 2011 Puss in Boots -- turns out to be the best holiday movie of the year. This animated film is more realistic than any of the works described above. Its only obvious flaw: a powerful Goyaesque Death figure appears in the form of a giant Wolf, and the children in the audience may be terrorized. This is possibly a cartoon for adults only. Its satire of Puss’s raging ego is multiform. The movie’s mayhem is comic and consistently beautiful to watch.
What better purveyor of revenge than royalty – as the British Royal Family is currently discovering? In Corsage, the Austro-Hungarian Empress Elisabeth (Sissi for short) takes out retribution against her constricting life-style as Presentation Consort. All those official duties! Oh, how galling to be a Public Image rather than Yourself! This cliché is wrung for all it is worth by the director, Marie Kreutzer. Actress Vicky Krieps limns the panic of turning forty and trying to look fit, young, and beautiful for her public. For the obligatory horror element, we get disturbing official visits to insane asylums and casualty wards. Since this is a “fictional biography” the heroine achieves a spectacular suicide rather than the historical assassination that reality imposed. The film is studiously anachronistic in its details, including the joys of heroin consumption to combat galloping depression. And there is something a little too pathetic about an empress attempting to seduce her British riding instructor -- and failing! (This sequence verges on camp.) Dedicated to reductionism, the arc of the film is reverse-Cinderella: the heroine starts out at the palace and ends seeking oblivion. I found the color photography of the autumnal forests of Bavaria to be highly distracting in the very best sense. Kreutzer includes some witty contemporary musical choices rather than period allusions. Period filmmaking requires knowledge and focus. and such qualities are in limited supply in contemporary movies.
As a complement to Kreutzer’s movie I’ve been reading Spare, a memoir of Prince Harry (Random House, 2023), the new volume passed on to me by our bookworm Louise. There is something peculiarly reassuring about finding the same familial details between hard covers that we’ve previously encountered in tabloids over the years. The cumulative version replays journalistic scandals with little additional resonance amid all the acrimony against the British press. Youthful Harry is happy on safaris, battlefields and drugs. Otherwise, he claims life among the Windsors is a matter of backbiting and short-term reconciliations. As Louise says, “It’s family.” Harry is both the powerless “spare” to William’s “heir” and the presumptive righter of monarchial wrongs. He and his wife achieve happiness in the end by building their own panic room: residency in the U.S. If only Sissi had had the advantages that Harry describes from among his many ghostwriter-curated memories.
Over at today’s New York City Ballet, anachronism has taken yet another form in the announcement that choreographer Alexi Ratmansky will become the company’s “artist-in-residence”. (An equivalent temporal confusion can be found in those anti-dance videos that currently advertise the company with “experimental” visuals from around 1966.) As my friend Florian puts it, NYCB‘s management and board have developed a cultivated taste for balletic schmarm: that thin, gelid coating of academicism which Ratmansky spreads across his stage with no sense of an underlying dance impulse to be found anywhere. His predominate style of movement derives from the Soviet dramballet, in contradiction to the Petipa-Balanchine classical dance aesthetic at NYCB. There is little in Ratmansky’s original creations which suggests a connection to that antique-modern tradition or any fresh ideas about balletic form or style. Here is a version of the art form utterly dependent on its performers to hold our interest.
Ratmansky has revealed himself to be the Damien Chazelle of period evocation in his many ersatz stagings of old ballets. His insensitivity to the original nature or spirit of those works is underlined by the failure of his attempts to return to an “original” dance text via archival notations and lithographs. Such studious reconstruction has led unfortunately to the palest pastiche. This diminishment of classical dance values extends to characterization and theatrical pacing, especially noticeable in Ratmansky’s Sleeping Beauty at ABT. His sense of choreographic fantasy is constricted. There is a reductive “Little Me” aspect to the ballerina roles: his heroines are smaller-than-life. After several decades, where is the female dancer anywhere who could be called a “Ratmansky ballerina”? The absence of any real grip on an art’s past may explain the thin texture of the choreographer’s original works.
New York City Ballet’s leadership now appears to rely on the all-American boardroom belief that artistic talent can be bought and paid for, imported rather than identified and nurtured from within. American Ballet Theatre and Broadway productions have followed just such a plutocratic line for decades. Peter Martins started this particular financial ball rolling at NYCB. Why such dogged loyalty in 2023 to the tastes and policies of a departed Artistic Director? Time to move on.
In the all-too-ecumenical Peter Martins tradition, NYCB continues to provide temporary shelter for choreographic strays. After decades of non-stop traffic in visiting and tyro dance-makers, new candidates today have to be deluded to see the company as a Forever Home. Choreographic pets are passed around, briefly indulged, then put up for adoption elsewhere. Management and Le Board thereby claim a continuing search for talent while providing copy for local flacks hawking the latest journalistic shill. The day will come when such Artists and Choreographers will be gone, but for NYCB’s leadership the public record of fatuity will remain. And the level of dance artistry on stage will suffer. Management has turned raw panic into its safety mode.
Perhaps Ratmansky can do something with the best-selling Spare for a new choreodrama. Imagine his version of that bird-bagging scene where Harry asks his sure-shot Granny for royal permission to marry! Kenneth MacMillan proved with his torrid Mayerling that princely kitsch can sell. A film like Corsage paves the way for an updated Windsor exposé: a princeling finds his fated consort not among scullery maids but in an actress from a pop video drama. Period detail will not be necessary. Dance can be the weak element amid mimed scandals torn from today’s headlines. No memorable choreography or explicit program notes required.
We’ve seen the movie. We’ve read the book.
M.R.
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