Tetro

How many poets never become poets? It is the question that every writer asks himself, especially if fame has until now eluded him. Failure has many hues and brushes, but we accept that failure at certain trials means success in others because we have a limited amount of energy and attention. Most great artists of legitimate talent have become great because that was the only thing they ever wanted to achieve, and no other event – be it a marriage, the birth of a child, a death, a betrayal – could ever clutter the straight path of destiny. Art, while man's greatest intellectual accomplishment, is an all-consuming fire that some allow to engulf all the meadows of their everyday contentment. A brief preface to this fine film.

Like other movie monsters, Tetro (Vincent Gallo) does not take long to rear his scruffy head. An American resident of Buenos Aires, our Tetro was born Angelo Tetrocini, son of the famed conductor and generally pompous buffoon Carlo Tetrocini (a cetacean Klaus Maria Brandauer). This fact is the most important of Tetro's life, and the one from which all other facts may, seriatim, be revealed. The second fact, almost as important, is that he is a failed writer, and spends every second of every day under this invisible burden. They are merged in a flashback on a cruel beach when Carlo, informed of his son's literary ambitions, claps him patronizingly on the shoulder and whispers: "If you want to live from your writings, you have to be a genius. And there's only room for one genius in this family." Argentina, on the other hand, has been kind to Tetro, albeit not initially. We see him in a mental asylum called La Colifata (which the intergalactic weapon known as Google tells me is lunfardo for "crazy") with enough Spanish to participate in the usual group therapy sessions that always seem far too civilized and logical for a madhouse. He is a broken, humble man who "holds everything he ever wrote in a file pinned to his chest," and has a tendency to prevaricate about a past he has been unable to forget. Which, we are told, is exactly what makes him so attractive to Miranda (Maribel Verdú).

Unpretty but pleasant-looking with distantly placed eyes and a quiet mission, Miranda is that fictional necessity, the unbelievably good woman. More importantly, her foil, the unbelievably bad man, is not Tetro. Tetro is scarred, bitter, and somewhat enraged at the hand life has dealt him (in Italian, tetro means "gloomy" or "bleak"), but he is not evil. He copes with his perceived inequities by channeling his energy into being a different person, the author of a play that he "will never publish," a stagehand at a shoddy little theater plagued by vulgarian whims, and the husband of Miranda. They have no children because children would mean that Tetro would have to love and Miranda would have to love something other than Tetro. Into this uneasy truce with life comes Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich). Bennie is Tetro's brother from a different mother – and we learn that Tetro's mother didn't have much of a chance of having too many other children. Bennie is seventeen but lied his way onto a cruise ship where he works as a waiter. Of course, the cruise ship breaks down in Buenos Aires (precisely where I would scuttle my vessel if I were a captain), and Bennie is left with the option of spending a week in dry-dock or visiting that long-lost brother of his who once wrote him a terribly clichéd letter in which he promised his return. 

No one is fooled by this coincidence – not Miranda, not the viewer, and least of all, not Tetro. When Bennie first sees Tetro, the latter sports a cast and crutches from having challenged a bus; later in the film, another character will endure a similar injury and we correctly understand the appurtenances in both cases as excuses. Bennie asks the usual questions, often to Miranda since Tetro selectively ignores most queries from Bennie and everyone else. Miranda does not really apologize for her husband's behavior as much as contextualize it ("family dispute," "mother's death," etc.), and punctuates it with a magnificent adage: Tetro is "a genius without enough accomplishments," exactly how all young and unsung artists feel when they see others gushing over well-known mediocrities. Bennie recognizes his brother's talents and does not let him feel sorry for himself ("How do you walk away from your work? Doesn't it follow you?"), but the film's basic conflict persists: younger sibling wishes to know everything from the beginning; older sibling wants the past sunk irretrievably in some remote swamp. Given this disparity in outlooks, that the brothers communicate at all, and often through exchanges pregnant with meaning, is remarkable. I give nothing away by including the interference of a woman introduced as "Alone," in apposition, "the most powerful writer and critic in Latin America." Once upon a time, she was Tetro's mentor "until she turned against him" ("no one knows quite why" is the equally mysterious echo). People like Alone never have any talent and yet possess the despotic desire to determine who does – a trap which would repulse any first-rate writer. But Bennie sees the woman, an inexorable fraud who only cares about her reputation and control, as an opportunity. All of which leads to a festival so named, one supposes, in order for its founder never to be subject to its dreadful implications. 

While Ehrenreich, Brandauer, and Verdú are all excellent, this is Gallo's vehicle and he makes it hum. At times his Tetro reminds us of Willem Dafoe playing the lead role in a Michael Douglas biopic. The plot of Tetro is straightforward in that only one person is concealing information. Once that information is revealed, everything makes more sense, but somehow our impressions of the characters do not radically shift. The announcement is not inevitable, but it is plausible and, in a way, the best possible explanation for what came before it. And what of the family drama that came before it? Oddly, that natural self-awareness or stage presence that imbues interesting people with a sense of the dramatic is intentionally lacking in many parts of Tetro, lending it much of the amateurish feel of the horrible little play it encapsulates – which cannot really be coincidence. For the film's duration only the flashbacks and imaginary scenes are in color because they are exciting and actual life is uneventful and drab, and because for Tetro they are much more real than anything he could ever do in Buenos Aires (the dream sequences that borrow liberally from this work are especially wonderful). We may expect violence, nudity, or profanity, but thankfully our expectations remain unrewarded. For even though all these things occur in Tetro's life, he knows they are the easy resorts of the talentless hack. This is his film, and he does not care – as he tells one character after another, although each time with a slightly different insinuation – what others may think. So forgive him, if only this once, the axe he brings to dinner.   

The Judge's House

Happy people will agree that life above all other things is sacrosanct; unhappy people will care about little details or none at all. The qualms of conscience from which the vast majority of us suffer should therefore reflect our concerns, and the unhappy cannot be expected to worry themselves about the big picture. That is to say, if what plagues you is your coworker's hairstyle, salary, or ability, we cannot hope that you will have empathy for those who cannot afford meat much less envy. Some particularly woeful shades will even look down upon those who have nothing and claim that they are lazy and complacent (and I think I need not share my opinions on that approach to humanity). Yet it is true that we all quietly mete out imaginary sentences to those who have offended or betrayed our ideals or pride – which brings us to this terrible tale.

The premise is plausible enough: Malcom Malcomson, an advanced student of that coldest of sciences, mathematics, frets over his upcoming exams for which he needs absolute serenity. As such, the young man betakes himself by train to "the first name on the local time-table which he did not know." I say plausible enough because an utterly unfamiliar location would be as time-costly as one's own neighborhood, if in a very different way. In any case, Malcomson is convinced, perhaps foolishly, that all English villages have enough in common to allow for easy adaptation. When he arrives in Benchurch, he puts up at the town's only inn all the while looking for "quarters more isolated than even so quiet an inn as 'The Good Traveller' afforded." As it were, there was "only one place which took his fancy," a house that has been empty for so long that it has made itself a victim of "absurd prejudice." What type of "absurd prejudice," you may ask? One can well imagine what the villagers have in mind; but the only details provided to Malcomson relate to a nameless Judge who was particularly cruel and bloodthirsty to anyone unfortunate enough to cross his docket. He is warned that staying in such a residence might be detrimental to his spiritual well-being, an admonition he summarily dismisses. A man reading for his mathematics exams "has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious 'somethings.'" A bold statement made, of course, well before he has encountered any of the somethings in question.

I am naturally loath to reveal too much of a bad thing, but I will add a few more pieces to our puzzle. The general temperament of the house is transformed by a loving charwoman whom Malcomson hires, and he falls into the very student routine of work, dinner, more work, and tea (some prefer coffee, but that would be a tad continental). Slowly Malcomson realizes that he is not alone. His company is a pack of hateful plague-carrying rodents who at first do not scare as much as annoy him. Yet a strange occurrence attends his unwillingness to rid himself of these beasts and instead examine his shadowy surroundings:

The carving of the oak on the panels of the wainscot was fine, and on and round the doors and windows it was beautiful and of rare merit. There were some old pictures on the walls, but they were coated so thick with dust and dirt that he could not distinguish any detail of them, though he held his lamp as high as he could over his head. Here and there as he went round he saw some crack or hole blocked for a moment by the face of a rat with its bright eyes glittering in the light, but in an instant it was gone, and a squeak and a scamper followed. The thing that most struck him, however, was the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hung down in a corner of the room on the right-hand side of the fireplace. He pulled up close to the hearth a great high-backed carved oak chair, and sat down to his last cup of tea. When this was done he made up the fire, and went back to his work, sitting at the corner of the table, having the fire to his left. For a little while the rats disturbed him somewhat with their perpetual scampering, but he got accustomed to the noise as one does to the ticking of the clock or to the roar of moving water, and he became so immersed in his work that everything in the world, except the problem which he was trying to solve, passed away from him.

He suddenly looked up, his problem was still unsolved, and there was in the air that sense of the hour before the dawn, which is so dread to doubtful life. The noise of the rats had ceased. Indeed it seemed to him that it must have ceased but lately and that it was the sudden cessation which had disturbed him. The fire had fallen low, but still it threw out a deep red glow. As he looked he started in spite of his sang-froid. There, on the great high-backed carved oak chair by the right side of the fire-place sat an enormous rat, steadily glaring at him with baleful eyes. He made a motion to it as though to hunt it away, but it did not stir. Then he made the motion of throwing something. Still it did not stir, but showed its great white teeth angrily, and its cruel eyes shone in the lamplight with an added vindictiveness.

Those familiar with how such narratives function will come to conclusions which they will wonder why Malcomson himself did not entertain. And yet he goes on in his studies, flinging books at the rats that seem to come from the very darkness that wreathes the top of his study like, well, a giant noose.

Our tale is collected in this slender tome, long since relegated to the dusty shelves of more eccentric booksellers because its first story is improved upon in the opening chapter in this most famous of horror novels. Stoker's style is better when he observes from a neutral perspective, as his first-person narratives tend to be overwrought with the emotion a conventional Victorian mind would never openly admit it enjoyed (although it would have likely comprised a secret pleasure). When separated by third-person distance, he paints in much more terrifying colors because so much of horror stems from not knowing your adversary. And even that ignorance doesn't stop some very bright people.

El fin

A short story ("The End") by this Argentine writer. You can read the original here.

Still lying down, Recabarren half-opened his eyes and saw the clear, oblique sky of rushes. From the other room came the strumming of a guitar, the sort of impoverished labyrinth that became entangled then undone in infinite alternation ... Little by little he recovered reality, the daily things that he could never exchange for others. He gazed unmercifully at his large, useless body and the plain wool poncho wrapped around his legs; outside, beyond the cross-pieces of the window, the evening and prairie were dissolving into one another. He had slept but the sky was still stained in light. He groped around with his left arm until it came across a bronze cowbell at the foot of the bed. He rang it once or twice; the humble chords echoed back from the other side of the door. The perpetrator was a black man who had shown up one night with the pretension of being a singer and challenged another foreigner to a long musical duel. Bested, he continued to frequent the local store as if waiting for someone. He whiled away the hours on his guitar but had never sung again – perhaps his failure had left him embittered; in any case, people had already gotten quite accustomed to this inoffensive fellow. As owner of the local store Recabarren would never forget this duel in vocal counterpoint, and the next day while putting away a few bottles of the local beer his right side had died on him and he had lost the faculty of speech. Since we always pity the misfortune of the heroes of novels, we end up pitying our own misfortunes excessively. Yet such was not the long-suffering Recabarren, who accepted paralysis the way he had accepted the rigor and solitude of America. He had grown used to living in the present, like animals do, and now gazed upon the heavens and thought that the red circle of the moon presaged rain.   

A boy of Indian-looking features (his son, perhaps) pushed the door ajar. Recabarren's eyes asked him whether there were any customers. Taciturn, the boy gestured that there weren't; the black man did not count. He remained in his bed prostrate and alone, his left hand playing a bit with the cowbell as if he were exercising some kind of power.

Beneath the sun's last flashes the prairie was almost an abstraction seen in a dream. One point danced upon the horizon and grew into a horseman who was coming, or appeared to be coming, to the house. He saw the broad-brimmed hat, the long, dark poncho, the Moorish steed, but not the face of the man who, at last, held his gallop and approached in a trot. About two hundred paces away, he turned around. Recabarren did not see any more of him, but did hear him chatting, alighting, tethering his horse to the post and entering the store with a firm step.

Without taking his eyes off his instrument, where he seemed to be looking for something, the black man said gently:

"I knew I could count on you, my dear sir."

The other replied in a gravelly voice:

"As I knew I could count on you, my dark friend. For some days I made you wait, but now I have come."

Silence ensued. After a time, the black man said:

"I am used to waiting. I have waited seven years."

The other explained without a trace of urgency:

"I spent more than seven years without seeing my children. The day I found them I did not want to show myself to be a man inured to knife fights."

"I took care of that," said the black man. "I hope that you left them in good health."

Having sat down at the counter, the foreigner had a hearty laugh. He ordered a beer and savored it without drinking it all. 

"I gave them some good advice," he stated, "advice that was neither platitudinous nor at any cost to them. Among other things, I told them that one man should not shed another's blood."

A slow chord preceded the black man's response:

"You did well. In that way they won't be like we are."

"At least not like I am," said the foreigner and added as if he were thinking aloud: "My destiny has obliged me to kill and now, once again, has placed a knife in my hand."

As if he hadn't heard him the black man quipped:

"Once autumn comes, the days will be shorter."

"The light that remains is good enough for me," said the other, getting to his feet. He stood at attention before the black man, then said to him almost fatigued:

"Leave that guitar alone, because today another type of counterpoint awaits you."

The two men walked over to the door. As he was leaving, the black man muttered:

"Maybe in this contest I will do just as badly as I did in the first one."

The other answered with all seriousness:

"You didn't do so badly the first time. What happened was that you went about the first contest desirous of the next contest."

Walking in unison they distanced themselves from the houses. One spot on the prairie was the same as any other and the moon stretched out in resplendence. Suddenly they exchanged glances and stopped, then the foreigner removed his spurs. They were standing there, ponchos in hand, when the black man said:

"Before we get to work I want to ask you for one thing. I ask that you invest all your courage and skill in this endeavor; just as you did seven years ago when you murdered my brother."

For perhaps the first time in their dialogue, Martin Fierro detected hate; his blood goaded him on. They mixed it up and his sharp steel blade struck the black man's face.

There is an hour in the evening when the prairie seems ready to speak, to reveal something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely and we do not hear it, or perhaps we hear it yet it remains untranslatable like music ... From his bed Recabarren saw the end. A lunge and the black man recoiled, lost his footing, feigned a chop to the face, then fell far upon the blade that penetrated his stomach. Then came another lunge which the storekeeper could not make out and Fierro did not get up; still and unmoving, the black man appeared to be watching his laborious agony. With some grass he wiped off his big knife soaked in blood and, without looking back, slowly returned to the houses. Having fulfilled his task of vengeance, he was no longer anyone; rather, he was the other: he had no destiny on this earth and had killed a man.         

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

In the morning I read mass and then we descended through the clouds.

                                                                                                                        Gaspar de Carvajal

The folly of many colonial expeditions was exposed well before the last century, where anti-colonial sentiment rightly replaced the silly arrogance of Westerners who believed it their holy duty to reform the ruffians who stalked jungles darker than they could have ever imagined. Throughout history critics, oftentimes silent or silenced, were aware of what was transpiring, an evil so far from God's will that one almost shudders. Now I for one am all for the spread of Good News, provided it is offered and not spoon-fed. Yet more important than any creed or system of belief is the notion that we are all brothers, regardless of what we worship as long as our divinity believes in good, in redemption, and in tolerance. The ignominy of what the Spaniards and Portuguese did in the New World in the sixteenth century needs no summarizing or rhetoric. So we would do better to focus on one of their most preposterous searches, that of the Gilded Man, and the brutal mockery of that search in this film.

Our initial screen shot informs us that what the Spaniards are pursuing, El Dorado, is a myth devised well after their landfall; whether this was clear at the time to the emissaries and assassins of Spain is not ours to worry. We venture into the Peruvian highlands on a jungle march of master and slave, the masters easily being distinguishable by their weapons and skin color. One native carries a wheel; another a crate of chickens; a third leads wild boars on a leash; a fourth is burdened only with the icon of the Virgin. We look upon the animals in consort and know they are no less doomed to die and be consumed than any other member of the party. And when an Inca lies collapsed on the ground out of exhaustion or disease, we know not a single Spanish step will lose its pace. After the march has depleted the expedition's reserves, Gonzalo Pizarro – the conqueror's brother and trusted aide – appoints a new party to head out on rafts, ostensibly as scouts against possible enemy attacks, although everyone seems to understand the assignment as a death sentence. Everyone, that is, except one man. That man is Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), a feral blond skeleton of a Spanish mercenary who has little respect for his superiors or the Crown he allegedly serves. When his eyes are not gazing upon his beloved teenage daughter Flores, their glint bespeaks nothing less than mutiny. A complex but typical series of power transfers takes place, with Pizarro's choice for the secondary expedition being a man of some dignity by the name of Ursúa (Ruy Guerra), who also happens to have brought along his radiant mistress, Doña Inez de Atienza (Helena Rojo). Ursúa will endure, even after being shot and reduced to a mute captive, as Aguirre's bloody conscience for most of the film. That Aguirre's conscience and guilt are drowned out by the indigenous sounds of the tightening cage makes Ursúa's participation all the less likely.

For better or for worse, we know precisely what will happen to most if not all of these miserable men. What is odd is that they know it as well. The first raft comes back littered with corpses and arrows, all in close conjunction; a day later the tides wash away rafts and other useful items, so more must be built. Aguirre predictably infects his comrades with ideas of the glory that Cortés attained in Mexico, then anoints a fat and pasty nobleman, Don Fernándo de Guzmán, Emperor of El Dorado – at which point Guzmán's days officially become a matter of whispered wagers. The narrator throughout most of the journey is a Franciscan monk, Gaspar de Carvajal, who flashes piety and goodness but evinces his true colors in a wicked last-act confrontation with an Amerindian couple. And as the only European women for miles around, Doña Inez and Flores tend to each other's grooming and occasionally make the priest think he's in the wrong line of work. As the river flows and the difficulties mount, we regularly stumble across a Spanish corpse. It is one of the nameless minions of the bloated Emperor, and death has invariably arrived in the form of a poisoned arrow – although the bow and archer are never revealed. The arrows fly in from the most unexpected angles, or at least that's what a brief examination of the cadavers would lead us to believe, as if the perpetrators were invisible or suspended behind a cloud. All the while we see and hear the whip of Aguirre's tongue as he urges his troops on, slaps a horse into the water, and generally acts as if the only thing that mattered were the discovery of something in which no one believes.   

A cynic would be almost right in concluding that, in format, there is little to distinguish a film like Aguirre, the Wrath of God (as it were, a self-proclaimed epithet) from any slasher vehicle in which a batch of stupid, pretty people are numbered and destroyed in sequence. Yet that similarity speaks more deeply about the patterns of our nightmares than its engagement in true philosophical conjecture. When you hear Herzog's film labeled as a forerunner to this later work, you may think the comparison valid until you compare Aguirre's quest for eternal life and wealth to Willard's contract killing. And anyway, Aguirre and his thugs may be soldiers, but we are not dealing with war, devastation, or ruin. What informs the entire picture is greed, greed for something that cannot possibly exist, greed for taking advantage of nature in every way imaginable to obtain a treasure that, once found, would probably be impossible to defend. None of this occurs to Aguirre; nothing in his beady eyes suggests any awareness of the fact that he alone cannot keep all this money and all this land. Even when he gets to share his thoughts with the monkeys that assault his craft towards the end, no one pays him too much attention. Not even the people behind the clouds.

Blok, "Две любви"

A work ("Two loves") by this Russian poet.  You can the read the original here.

To bright and murky love's sweet pain,
Are equal the experienced roads. 
Selfsame desires invade the soul, 
So how, how then shall meet the twain? 
 
Unjoined and unagreed they float,
With good and evil's equal weight. 
The first lives yet in clearest day,  
The second in dark woe remote.

Pronounce on high this equal fame, 
And equal secrets thus condone.
And baleful, wilful slave, atone  
Both loves with victims and with shame!

So fear the finger's threat'ning thrust;
From future punishment now shake; 
Your blessings and your fires' lake 
Are dust and ashes, ash and dust!