Everyman Cinema
"At any rate, I must keep away from spiritualists", wrote C.S Lewis after his wife died. "I promised Joy as much. She knew something of those circles."
Someone called Stan (Bradley Cooper) washes up at a carnival, suffering from flashbacks about burning down a house. Like Bob Dylan, he hands in his tickets and goes and watches the geek. The geek is at this point in history a semi-human creature, half-man half -monster, as opposed to someone who fixes your computer. The audience pay to see his feeding-time, when it eats live chickens. The guy who runs the carnival (Norman Osborn) admits that the geek is simply a homeless guy who they persuade to humiliate himself with drugs and alcohol.
The usher at the Everyman remarked afterwards that we should have spotted this is Heavy Foreshadowing because geekery isn’t otherwise relevant to the main plot-line. One of the nice things about the Everyman, apart from its sofas and its hotdogs is that the stuff positively like movies and positively want to talk to the audience about them. The usher for Belfast had a broad Northern Irish accent.
We spend quite a lot of time at the Carnival: the movie is set in or around 1942 (some bad news from Hawaii drifts through towards the end) a point when radio was replacing the side show as source of entertainment, sensation, and dubious education. I tend to think of them as early theme parks, with roundabouts and ferris wheels and thrill rides, but as depicted here, the primary point is the side-show: dubious fortune telling acts; freak-shows and strong men. Stan befriends Molly (Roony Mara) whose act involves apparently passing electricity through her body. (There seems to be no trick: she’s just got used to the pain.) He greatly improves the act by presenting it as a mock-execution.
We spend quite a lot of time at the Carnival: the movie is set in or around 1942 (some bad news from Hawaii drifts through towards the end) a point when radio was replacing the side show as source of entertainment, sensation, and dubious education. I tend to think of them as early theme parks, with roundabouts and ferris wheels and thrill rides, but as depicted here, the primary point is the side-show: dubious fortune telling acts; freak-shows and strong men. Stan befriends Molly (Roony Mara) whose act involves apparently passing electricity through her body. (There seems to be no trick: she’s just got used to the pain.) He greatly improves the act by presenting it as a mock-execution.
I have to say that I thought that director Guillermo de Toro made the carnie show seem an awful lot of fun: I would certainly have gone. Our hero inveigles himself with the mentalist act and learns the tricks of the trade: the blindfolded mind-reader communicates with the “assistant” through a series of hand signals and verbal codes. But it turns out that a lot of the act is about guess-work and cold reading. It isn’t enough to just know that the mark has given the assistant an engraved gold watch to identify; the game is in pretending that the spirits have told you that the watch is a gift from your dead father. Stan turns out to be very good at the “cold reading” side of the act, and starts to work fake mediumship into his routine, but his mentor warns him to avoid what he calls "spook shows" and not to start to believe “his own shit”.
People like Darren Brown can certainly do, or affect to do, cold-reading of a kind, although I suspect that, like Sherlock Holmes' inductive reasoning, it works much better in a novel than it ever could in real life. Debunkers have tended to find that mediums and mind-readers rely on clients mis-remembering what really happened; so you say “That watch is of some special significance to you” and I say “How could he possibly have known that it was a gift from my dead father.” We see Stan brilliantly diverting a police raid on the Carnival by spotting that the sheriff has damaged left leg; guessing that he had polio, and building up an accurate picture of his unhappy childhood.
Cut a few years forward, and Stan and Molly have quit the circus and are doing a full-on spirit medium act in posh clubs and for private clients in New York. I was aware that there was a previous film of Nightmare Alley (starring heart-throb Tyrone Power) which is regarded as rather a classic of the film noir genre. The core of the del Toro version plays up to this heavily: in places almost tending to pastiche or parody. Cate Blantchet as the sinister Freudian analyst (called Lilith, for goodness sake) pretty much embodies the femme fatale archetype. She initially tries to debunk Stan’s act; but then agrees to provide him with information about wealthy victims in return for being allowed to psychoanlyse him. I don’t know if the film or the original book was trying to make the point that Freud, like the carnival humbug artist, relied as much on inspired guess-works as inside knowledge to reveal clients secrets. The psychological drama -- who is playing who, exactly -- is pretty compelling and quite dark; although I enjoyed this section a lot less than the atmospheric carnival material. Stan’s lies get more and more complex; and by the end of the movie it has all blown up in his face in a very bloodthirsty way. He ends up running from the scene of a murder in the box car of a train; returns to the carnival; and finds out that there is only one job he can still do. Can you guess which one?
Incidentally, the old movie ends with Molly also returning to the carnival and rescuing him, but this one follows the book by leaving Stan a broken man in the final scene. We never quite find out what the flashbacks are about, but it appears that he was responsible for the death of his own father.
In 1956, as everyone knows, an American poet name Joy Davidman came to England, partly to get away from her unfaithful and sometimes violent husband. She sought out and formed a relationship with her literary hero, the British moralist C.S Lewis who she eventually marries. Davidman’s first husband, Willian Gresham, had been at one time a moderately successful writer whose only successful novel, Nightmare Alley, had been adapted into a moderately successful movie. I don’t know whether, during her relationship with Bill, Joy had attended spiritualist meetings; or whether Bill having, researched his book about Carnies, had warned her that most spiritualists were frauds and con-men. (He collaborated briefly with James Randi.) He died, after Joy but before C.S Lewis, apparently taking his own life after being diagnosed with cancer. Towards the end of his life he had dabbled with Scientology. Perhaps he too found it difficult not to sometimes believe in his own shit.
People like Darren Brown can certainly do, or affect to do, cold-reading of a kind, although I suspect that, like Sherlock Holmes' inductive reasoning, it works much better in a novel than it ever could in real life. Debunkers have tended to find that mediums and mind-readers rely on clients mis-remembering what really happened; so you say “That watch is of some special significance to you” and I say “How could he possibly have known that it was a gift from my dead father.” We see Stan brilliantly diverting a police raid on the Carnival by spotting that the sheriff has damaged left leg; guessing that he had polio, and building up an accurate picture of his unhappy childhood.
Cut a few years forward, and Stan and Molly have quit the circus and are doing a full-on spirit medium act in posh clubs and for private clients in New York. I was aware that there was a previous film of Nightmare Alley (starring heart-throb Tyrone Power) which is regarded as rather a classic of the film noir genre. The core of the del Toro version plays up to this heavily: in places almost tending to pastiche or parody. Cate Blantchet as the sinister Freudian analyst (called Lilith, for goodness sake) pretty much embodies the femme fatale archetype. She initially tries to debunk Stan’s act; but then agrees to provide him with information about wealthy victims in return for being allowed to psychoanlyse him. I don’t know if the film or the original book was trying to make the point that Freud, like the carnival humbug artist, relied as much on inspired guess-works as inside knowledge to reveal clients secrets. The psychological drama -- who is playing who, exactly -- is pretty compelling and quite dark; although I enjoyed this section a lot less than the atmospheric carnival material. Stan’s lies get more and more complex; and by the end of the movie it has all blown up in his face in a very bloodthirsty way. He ends up running from the scene of a murder in the box car of a train; returns to the carnival; and finds out that there is only one job he can still do. Can you guess which one?
Incidentally, the old movie ends with Molly also returning to the carnival and rescuing him, but this one follows the book by leaving Stan a broken man in the final scene. We never quite find out what the flashbacks are about, but it appears that he was responsible for the death of his own father.
In 1956, as everyone knows, an American poet name Joy Davidman came to England, partly to get away from her unfaithful and sometimes violent husband. She sought out and formed a relationship with her literary hero, the British moralist C.S Lewis who she eventually marries. Davidman’s first husband, Willian Gresham, had been at one time a moderately successful writer whose only successful novel, Nightmare Alley, had been adapted into a moderately successful movie. I don’t know whether, during her relationship with Bill, Joy had attended spiritualist meetings; or whether Bill having, researched his book about Carnies, had warned her that most spiritualists were frauds and con-men. (He collaborated briefly with James Randi.) He died, after Joy but before C.S Lewis, apparently taking his own life after being diagnosed with cancer. Towards the end of his life he had dabbled with Scientology. Perhaps he too found it difficult not to sometimes believe in his own shit.
No comments:
Post a Comment