At the Mountains of Madness

Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.

                                                                                                            Professor William Dyer

It spoils almost nothing to mention that this classic tale of horror has been declaimed by some abler-minded cineastes as the glorious forerunner to this recent film. I have not seen Prometheus, nor do I anticipate doing so; but if its online summaries are remotely accurate, the comparison may not be specious. There would appear to be, however, at least one very important difference: regardless of the science fiction component of both works, for which I care little, the motif of At the Mountains of Madness does not involve knowledge or the discovery of the origins of mankind. Its anthem is a sheer, relentless dread at the demonic roots of our realm, at hundreds of millions of years of ignorance that dwarf those worthless atheist claims of two thousand years of deception. No, only those who admit that the ineluctable modality of the visible cannot be our only reality are not deceived by it. Which brings us to the baleful travelogue of Professor William Dyer.

Dyer introduces himself as a survivor and geologist, "forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow [his] advice." His advice, as we soon shall see, will consist of henceforth avoiding anything to do with the ice continent of Antarctica. His reason? Something which will be fleshed out in agonizing slowness over the course of our narrative, and which can only be suggested here:

The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth – a truth which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

This passage leaps forward a few steps, but it typifies Dyer's attempts to caption the unearthliness he has witnessed (one quickly loses count of how often "nameless," "decadent," "horrible," "terrible," and "monstrous" recur throughout the whole story). Given that our journey is an antarctic expedition, the "recent unexplained horror at the camp" can only mean a blizzard, cannibalism, or an inhuman phenomenon. What does occur there is never really described perhaps because it is never really understood by Dyer and his much younger colleague Danforth. When, very late in our tale, two missing members of the party turn up unexpectedly, we gain more information as to the details of the rest of the party's demise, at which point, of course, it is far too late for salvation.

Why have I omitted such a wealth of detail? What city could be millions of years old if we homines sapientes were merely "primitive archaic mammals" at the time? Danforth and Dyer do "a good deal of indecisive whispering" as they wander about the South Pole in search of – and here is where our doubts accumulate.  That a group of scholars and crewmen intended on "securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent" might seem plausible if oddly ambitious; that such an expedition was sponsored by Miskatonic University, the hub of abnormal behavior in the world of this author, will explain what actually transpires, especially the enthusiasm on the part of a biology professor by the name of Lake. Lake's curiosity ("the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect") is transmitted over radio, in what we know will be a doomed broadcast, to many of his colleagues as his party stumbles upon what can only be termed the greatest scientific discovery in the history of mankind. Lake vanishes from the airwaves soon thereafter and, just as predictably, it is his camp and allies who fall victim to the "recent unexplained horror." Dyer and Danforth seek out their fellow explorers with solemn hope; this is, after all, the deadest patch of the globe, and Lake was indeed elbow-deep in – well, we don't really know, but "existing biology would have to be wholly revised." The creature or creatures in question possess attributes that promote a human fear that should not, and thankfully is not, ever fully verbalized, and about biology and its revisions we should now be silent.

Lovecraft has engendered a mass following owing to the slime-and-scare aspects of his fictional creations, but his foremost contribution remains his inimitable and gorgeous style. For perhaps precisely these reasons, At the Mountains of Madness, while clearly a work of genius, is ultimately less satisfying than his pieces on individual characters and their dark pacts. Too many turns of phrase echo prior sentiments; too many of those sentiments entail pseudoscientific reports on subjects well beyond science's scope; and too many times are we told that our author doesn't want to tell us anything at all, but is simply compelled to do so to avert further adventure in the region ("It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them"). Yet our tale has been consistently included among his masterpieces adapted into various media including a much-ballyhooed screen version that, allegedly because of the release of Prometheus, has been scrapped indefinitely. The text is itself an overlapping labyrinth of ineffable shocks and wonders that results in one rather repulsive conclusion regarding those very mountains in the title. The same mountains, mind you, whose height we have been chary of discussing because much like the "specimens" that Lake uncovers, the mountains and their configurations make no sense at all. At least not to homines sapientes.

Verlaine, "Dernier espoir"

A work ("Last hope") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

Amidst the cemetery grows a tree, 
Abask in freedom's fullest sun: 
Not placed as mourning letters run,
Along a humble stone for all to see.

Be it by summer or by winter sky, 
To sit here comes a clear-voiced bird; 
So sad its song of faithful word,
For lo! This tree and bird are you and I. 

Bright memory are you, I absent fog, 
Which passing time recounts so as to log ... 
Ah, at your knees if but to live again!

Ah, life again!  But what, my beauty, then?  
Cold conquest by oblivion's my part ... 
At least tell: do I live on in your heart? 

Dark City

I am necessarily skeptical of lavish praise for films that do not maintain a strict artistic agenda, and I am even more dubious about those praised almost exclusively for their visual effect. Most of these effects, you will understand, are just that – effects. Nothing real was filmed; nothing was experienced between actor and director; nothing was improvised, natural, or granted an opportunity to fail. That is the inherent shortcoming of all films which lean heavily on computer-generated imagery, as well as the one very good reason why video games in any way, shape, or form have never appealed to me. Their graphics are extraordinary, although we may admire such advances for but a few awestruck moments until we realize that what we are watching is even less real than a dream. Dreams are so real that we may remember something in our waking hours, something impossible, such as the return of childhood or a lost love, and understand that this is the memory of last night's pandemonium. An excellent way to bring us to this iconic film.

The setup is boilerplate noir: a young man (Rufus Sewell) awakes in a bathtub not knowing his name or his past. Above him a swinging light bulb suggests he may just have missed someone who could have helped to unlock those mysteries. As he rises and instinctively clothes himself (we are all quite bourgeois upon waking), he finds beside him the body of a young woman slain in what can be loosely termed a ritual manner, or at least by someone who was trying to do more than just kill her. Our protagonist lurches on tangled in webs of memories – a woman, affection, bloodletting, some other women, and innumerable flashes of scenes of chiaroscuro. He finds in short order that he cannot explain any of this, but perhaps this task will ultimately devolve to us. And after dressing in the clothes available and leaving the apartment (with doubts about his ownership of both), he then proceeds down that well-worn path of discovering himself even if this involves accepting his murderous psychosis. As he puzzles out meanings in his new realm he is immediately taken by a postcard for a place called Shell Beach. This is one of the many generic toponyms that do not reduce the significance of what is occurring into allegory so much as suggest that the namers do not quite know what is a cliché and what isn't. How could anyone who speaks English as a native language, as all the characters in Dark City seem to do, not comprehend the banality of such nomenclature? Two reasons surface to explain this dissonance: those who named these places are alien to the world that contains them, and this world is a trap.     

In time we and our protagonist become fairly sure that his name is John Murdoch. He traces his life to his wife Emma (a chubby-cheeked Jennifer Connelly), a torch singer whose recent extramarital activity may have incited him to start murdering those for whom promiscuity pays the bills. Murdoch also locates a limping doctor by the name of Daniel Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) – a namesake of one of the most notorious of all clinical patients – and a tall, handsome, and rather befuddled detective called Bumstead (William Hurt), a name which will remind some of us of an old comic strip. These four characters, representing in no coincidence the heroism, passion, science, and intuition of a tragedy, will interact and intertwine in the usual series of half-misunderstood episodes, and each encounter will add a line to our own transcript of what precisely makes the City tick. We suspect we know the tickers already. They are very probably that menacing, roving trenchcoated band known as the Strangers since they seem to be the only ones with any degree of autonomy, and exhibit a morbid interest in the fate of John Murdoch. Who or what they are does not need to be explained here; suffice it to say that in appearance they resemble an eerie hybrid of this film's species (if that is really the right word) with the wardrobe of this film's murderer. When midnight strikes – as if one could really measure a middle to this perpetual darkness – the Strangers gather in a subterranean vault that will also remind the thoughtful viewer of M.'s cavern of confrontation and set in motion a giant machine that resembles a human face. The result is an altered surface world, in which all the beings that dwell therein are lulled into deepest slumber, at which point the Strangers decide, almost haphazardly by all indications, that the surface-dwellers' existence should change. To this end they enlist the good Dr. Schreber, who happens to be very handy with a vast arsenal of needles and potions.

Most reviews would now proceed to comment on the why and how of the city's machinations, but that would be giving too much away. Are there profound philosophical questions to be pondered? There are indeed; and yet the aim of the plot's structure, which is plain if ingenious in its plainness, allows us to consider only four. What is the nature of memory, that is to say, why do we remember? Are our personalities constructed upon what we remember or what we believe? How can we be sure that what we remembered actually happened to us, or at least whether it happened to us in exactly the way we think we remember (a corollary would be why do we sometimes recall the same event from two or more different points of view)? And finally, what does our interaction in the slowly dissipating "present reality" do to our memories, does it enhance or detract from them? These are certainly fascinating queries that will, in all likelihood, remain for all of history unanswerable. Dark City does not want to answer them; indeed, its reluctance to do so is one of its most redemptive characteristics. Yet it provides us with a scenario in which each is in fact answered intelligently and coherently, without aggregate simplification, a scenario that accounts for the Strangers, for Emma, for Schreber and Bumstead, and even for most of John Murdoch.

Why is Dark City better than similarly styled works about reality and unreality? Because unlike some much-ballyhooed vehicles which are really just pulp with choreographed fighting (one of cinema's most hideous additaments) and desperate lunges at philosophy about as profound as a contact lens, Dark City faithfully orchestrates a nightmare based on a few old German movies from the 1920s and then maybe this perplexing classic. The texture, and here I echo literally dozens of critics, is so palpable and seamless as to seem realer than reality, which is exactly the sensation of our worst nightmares when we are still in their thrall. There are so many wonderful moments – a scene in which water seems to spill into outer space and yet still accumulate, the look that Murdoch gives one particularly devastating lady of the night before making a crucial decision, the first glimpse at Shell Beach as it resonates in Murdoch's memory, one couple's gentrification literally overnight – that we fairly swoon at the craftsmanship. At length one unbelievable shot towards the end of our tale will eclipse all other shots and all other ideas, and when it first appears, it quickly becomes one of the most breathtaking in the history of cinema. You will know what I mean, and you will gasp in aesthetic awe if you haven't already guessed the secret of the eternal night and how it may be conquered.  Quod nulla nux interpolet, fideque jugi luceat.

Port Mungo

Many years ago in a graduate school far, far away, a visiting professor with decidedly limited English inflicted upon his first class's sensibilities a simple dichotomy: all novels are either historical or psychological. The manner in which he gurgled these words (I shall not reveal his provenance for any sum) as well as the hesitance he displayed in convincing us of this brilliant theory remain with me as an example of many things, one of which is that simple thoughts bereft of any subtlety or qualification often smack the nail into the board with astounding accuracy. In other words, a work of art may draw its power from within or without. You know all too well about the latter: the torrid wartime romance, with fates cloven as the battlefield expands and misunderstandings multiplied in the face of increasing danger, as all the while death and history conspire to keep two sweet lovers apart. With very, very few exceptions, most works tailored on this pattern are of a very thin and flimsy fabric. The protagonists love like any other couple loves, but we are supposed to find them infinitely more tragic because they may be killed at any moment and because history, that sentinel of sorrow, will hurt them as it has hurt billions of others. Yet the saddest events in one's life are always personal, always unshared, always unimportant to anyone except the sufferer. And private tragedies inform and steer every line of this novel.

Our narrator will be revealed slowly; that is to say, we know her as Gin Rathbone, a solitary Englishwoman and long-time New Yorker now in her seventies, but her motives for composition remain obscure. We also know before we are even informed that Gin is the type of person born to refract, not to shine. At first she may be seeking to vindicate her beloved brother Jack ("the most remarkable event of my life has been Jack himself"), now dead and forgotten by the artistic world whose adulation he once sought. A later reason develops somewhere towards the middle of the story, and we sense it is a mere contrivance for the sake of padded plot, a peccadillo but not a rarity in serious literature. Still, without this odd shunting the engine of our narrative remains decidedly cold. Cold until we find a young and unsung Jack Rathbone enamored with a mildly older woman by the name of Vera Savage. 

Vera, like Jack, belongs to that generation of souls that does not evince any tenderness towards its predecessors yet is consumed by an urge to ponder its own profundity. In short, the embodiment of the smug, ignorant modern artist. And while her portrait will be edited throughout the novel, stopping like some anti-Vera Expo at every stall of her defamation, her initial appearance is damning enough:

Jack liked the look of her at once, this was clear, and for this reason: she dressed like a prostitute. She stood there at the podium, a loud, bosomy woman in a tight dress and pancake make-up, one hand cocked akimbo on her hip and the other flapping the air as she spoke to us with a kind of hoarse nervous bravado, and I remember thinking her opinionated and not very clean, nor entirely sober. Her hair was the color of coal, her lips were scarlet and she had lost a tooth, whose absence lent her a distinctly menacing aspect when she grinned. What was it she talked about? Much of it I have forgotten; but I know she told us how pointless it was to attend art school, which raised a cheer, and then she spoke about inspiration, and how travel, drink, the colour black, bodies of water − passion − these were the sorts of things that inspired her. 

It is of no small coincidence that I too have been inspired by precisely these "sorts of things," as they remain key components of any Romantic's toolkit − but I digress. The description goes on to quote Vera, who seems so opposite to the plain, emotionless Gin as can only happen in fiction, that "a real artist would sooner let her children starve than work at anything but her art." As Port Mungo arrives at an explanation of its title, a dingy Central American backwater that inspires Jack to form the single-student school of "tropicalism" or "malarial," we begin to understand the basic dichotomy: we all have creative desires, but for the vast majority of us these will be quenched in the production of smaller beings who will become the vessels of our hopes. For someone who thinks himself able to add to the pantheon of great art, however, children seem too common, too unruly, and too unpredictable to appeal to his one-tracked mind.   

Yet this is precisely what a "real artist" would never do. A "real artist" may and should shirk a mindless job, the material pleasures of expensive food and clothing and luxury items, and the conformist ideas that proclaim that life is to be lived for the sake of instant gratification. Why? Because real art predicates only two things: beauty and pity. And to us there is nothing more beautiful and vulnerable than a child, any child, but especially one that owes its existence to our own seed. A child is the greatest work of art we can produce, because man is superior to his doodles, his tracts, and his tunes, and herein lies the tragedy of all artists. They cannot better nature in its mountains and canyons, even if perhaps that was never quite their ambition; yet a true artist gains his foothold when he realizes that a child's hair is more valuable than any book ever written, and the ripping squeal of a newborn baby more marvelous than any aria or sonnet. Such is, in essence, the main theme of Port Mungo, which has many dirty ideas and many dirty ways to imply those ideas without making them explicit. We get Vera's negligence of the couple's two daughters, Peg and Anna, both of whom will be separated from their parents, one for good and one across an ocean; Gerald, the eldest, most successful, and most genteel of the three Rathbone siblings, who steps in and makes a very important decision; Antonella, an Italian model for some of Jack's finer work; Johnny Hague, another white resident of the Mungo, Vera's sporadic lover, and, in a strange way, Jack's alter ego; and Eduardo, a sexually ambiguous and manipulative sculptor whose stealth somehow reminds us of our narrator. The action moves from England to New York and the Port with the retrospective sweep of a long-stifled confession. The only question will be the crime, and about that we are obliged to keep comfortably mum.    

McGrath's style is spiteful, gloomy, and fantastically crisp; it also harbors an insatiable curiosity for the reasons of the human soul, which are infinite. He lingers on the dark psychology that is never insinuated, however hard he may try, in Banville's mannerist fables, and such attention to our ticking impulses makes some of the revolting subject matter that inhabits his dark halls all the more amazing to visualize. I shall never forgive McGrath for a short story (also featuring the name Mungo) he once wrote about a priest in a style so magnificent that the abomination of its contents would convince even the staunchest non-believer of its infernal origins. But we can overlook the monotony of Port Mungo's alleged plot − rarely has such a beautiful shawl been wound about such bony shoulders − and revel in the polish and texture of this wretched little realm. I suppose it is amusing that the names Gin and Jack echo the alcoholism rampant throughout the novel, and that Vera is supposed to furnish the savage truth, the comeuppance. In this last respect, as opposed to many other facets of her chosen exile, she does not fail. In vino veritas, indeed.   

Avenue Montaigne

Halfway through this film our ingenuous protagonist tells a man she hopes to impress that there are two types of people: those who hear the phone ring and think "who the hell is that," and those who pick up and simply say "hey." Yet she is wrong, there is a third category: those who never approach the switch hook at all. That the man happens to be impressed with her has little to do, of course, with the correctness of this statement and more with the fact that he has already made up his mind about her. As it turns out in this tale, being incorrect about one's immediate surroundings and cohabitants will not be so much of an occasional mistake as a pathological disorder.

I did mention a protagonist, which I suppose is what we will have to dub the twentysomething tomboy Jessica (Cécile de France). Jessica embodies how we are supposed to enjoy being young and how we are supposed to treat the old, and we begin the film by hearing her grandmother prattle on about her fetish for luxury. Some reviewers have become vigorously opposed to other details from the film simply because they detect, behind the humoring of a nice elderly lady, an admiration for celebrity and wealth. Readers of these pages are, however, well aware of my antipathy to such nonsense, so perhaps it might be more analytically productive to digest Avenue Montaigne as both a homage to failure and a mockery of success. If our left-wing sensibilities are still offended we can take solace in the presence of a great artist. This is Jean-François Lefort (Albert Dupontel), who must certainly be the buffest concert pianist you will ever encounter. Lefort (literally, "the strong") possesses effusive talent and regales us with a variety of pieces that would make any connoisseur appreciate the plot that interferes with his listening pleasure. Lefort has a beautiful wife (the ageless Laura Morante) who is also his manager, ubiquitous fame, and enough compensation to fund his rigorous workout and dietary regimen – all of which means he will soon yearn anew for the humdrum errands of average life. His epiphany comes quickly and is captioned by yet another mistaken impression, said to Jessica in her newly appointed position as waitress at a celebrity bistro: "You are a waitress; you can quit at any time and people will understand. I can never quit because no one would understand." The facetiousness of this statement cannot be verified by detail from the film (his attitudes are apparently styled after this French pianist). After all, we don't know whether his wife first became his manager or his manager first became his wife. We also know that talent such as his normally emerges from unbridled ambition, even if only for personal satisfaction. Lefort may be miserable but he has himself to blame, although Jessica smartly does not for one moment hold that against him.

In fact, with the exception of one late and wholly justified outburst, Jessica doesn't hold much against anyone. She meets a widowed art collector, Jacques Grumberg (Claude Brasseur), still insecure about his blue-collar and perhaps his Jewish roots (a comment made in another context emphasizes this likelihood), his dishy girlfriend Valérie (Annelise Hesme), and his very intellectual son Frédéric (Christopher Thompson). Frédéric has a brooding, attractive air complete with permanently furrowed brow not unlike the demeanor of this Danish actor and, when not teaching at the Sorbonne, can offer his father more sarcasm than sympathy (it should be said that there is a plain back story to their relationship that is neither worth spoiling, nor particularly original). Three more figures waft in and out, adding more to our annoyance than anything else:  the kitschy celebrity fan Claudie (Dani), the neurotic actress Catherine Versen (Valérie Lemercier, who inexplicably won a César for this role), and the American director Brian Sobinski (the late Sydney Pollack). No great loss would be endured if we never saw any one of these characters again. Claudie provides the provincial Jessica with a roof over her head and some comfort to both her and Catherine, but we greatly anticipate her retirement on March 17. That same night, as it were, three main events within a block of one another are taking place: Catherine is starring in a demimonde comedy that eerily reflects her own vapid, slutty struggles; Lefort is playing with the local philharmonic; and Jacques is "parting with his art" (yes, that last phrase is especially jarring). The auction will rake in millions, and since Jacques cannot be said to be in fantastic health it is assumed that Frédéric and his siblings will be the beneficiaries – if Valérie does not marry the blighter on his deathbed.    

The countdown to the big night does not sway us, nor should it do so. There are few things more loathsome than an ensemble cast (I shudder at the ten separate portraits on some of the advertisement posters) and even fewer than a hyperlink film, yet Avenue Montaigne fits into neither pigeonhole. The characters meet in a very easy way since they all work right next to one another, invariably congregating in Jessica's celebrity bistro described as a "microcosm" that exploits the lack of supermarkets or drugstores in its vicinity. Soon we recognize our plot as mere observation of an assortment of unhappy people who alternatively exhibit sloth, selfish ambition, resentment, greed, anxiety, and frustration. All of these are normal human feelings experienced by all normal humans; the only question is in what proportion to the good things in life they occur. At the center of this tumult we find two souls: the young woman who is completely unattached and, in a harmless way, completely talentless, and the middle-aged man of genius shackled for all of eternity to the fruits of his prodigious abilities. Lefort plays for a hospital of sick and elderly people and finds greater exaltation than in any paid concert; when his wife says of Jacques that "he is not an artist, but an investor in art," Lefort cruelly subjects her to the same judgment. Only a true pococurante could not be moved by Lefort's skill, and only a lover of Paris will appreciate the landscape. And, as one character comments, "a man who is a pain to his mistress must be a pain to his wife." I suppose some people can afford never to return a phone call.