Pat and Billy on The Agitation of the Mind

March is ‘Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid’ month on The Agitation of the Mind. I’ll be reviewing Paul Seydor’s finely researched and monumentally detailed new book ‘The Authentic Death & Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film’ and curating a Q&A with the author.

I’ll also be reappraising the film itself, both the 1988 Turner Preview cut and the 2005 Special Edition. These reviews will be written in context of Seydor’s book; I’ll be making no reference to the material I produced for my Sam Peckinpah retrospective on this blog in 2009.

Seydor traces, in the early chapters, the various accounts of Billy the Kid, from Garrett’s own (albeit heavily ghostwritten) memoir to Charles Neider’s novel ‘The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones’, by way of Marlon Brando’s ‘One Eyed Jacks’, a production initially slated to be written by Peckinpah and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Accordingly, I’ll be looking at this curate’s egg of a western, not to mention a few other films that treat, or are influenced by, the mythology surrounding Billy the Kid.

PERSONAL FAVES: A Clockwork Orange

Posted to coincide with Malcolm McDowell’s 69th birthday. Party well, little brother, party well.

 

“We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d’esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die.” Thus spake Anthony Burgess, author of the slim novella on which Stanley Kubrick’s symphony of visual mind-fuckery and ultra-violence is based. It’s a hell of a thing of a writer to repudiate one of their own works, let alone admit that said work has no value beyond the money it earned.

This contentious point, however, is accurate. In 1958, having published his ‘Malayan Trilogy’ but still essentially treating writing as something of a hobby, Burgess collapsed while lecturing to a class and was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. This misdiagnosis was compounded by the clinician in question giving Burgess a year to live. Keen to provide for his wife, Burgess banged out four books in quick succession, one of which was ‘A Clockwork Orange’. It’s an amazing piece of work, not just for its immediacy, raw power and its prescient approach to youth-speak (narrator Alex uses “like” almost as punctual), but for its linguistic experimentalism.

The inspiration for the novella, if such a lofty word is appropriate to such a grim starting point, was the attack on the author’s wife by a gang of American GIs during the war. They were deserters; Burgess, serving in Gibraltar at the time, wasn’t allowed leave to visit her in hospital. She was pregnant at the time and subsequently miscarried. In approaching such violent material, and using a first person narrator, Burgess used the language of the book as a distancing technique. Using a mélange of corrupted Russian, cockney rhyming slang and Romany colloquialisms, he effectively created a language that any reader of the novella has to pick up as best they can during the first few pages. He called it Nadsat.

Stanley Kubrick – never one to let an author’s intentions get in the way of an adaptation (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, Google “Stephen King Stanley Kubrick The Shining” and settle back for an evening of reading) – happily jettisoned the concept of Nadsat as a distancing technique from the violence, turning it instead into a verbal barrage of swaggering machismo that plunged the viewer further and further into the world of Alex and his droogs – a world basically defined by ultra-violence, the old in-out-in-out, and some lovely lovely Ludwig Van (the 9th Symphony a particular favourite). Put simply, Burgess’s novella is a dystopian investigation into societal dysfunction, governmental conditioning, wayward youth and eventual maturity; while Kubrick’s film is an unapologetically amoral romp that celebrates the darker impulses of the human psyche and sounds a triumphant Ode to Joy to free will, never mind that said freedom of choice is often knowingly deployed by bad people who luxuriate in their recidivism.

 

Or, put even more simply, the film is totally not what Burgess intended the book to be. This has much to do with Kubrick omitting the last chapter, in which Alex reflects on his misbegotten life and begins to entertain thoughts beyond the fighting, fucking and fuck-authority-ing that have defined his personal aesthetic thus far. 

And this is where I quit sitting on the fence, launch myself out of the middle ground and come down firmly in Camp Kubrick. As much as I love ‘A Clockwork Orange’ à la Burgess, I’ve always found that last chapter forced and just a smidge unconvincing. The note Kubrick ends the film version on, I completely buy into it even as it chills the hell out of me.

‘A Clockwork Orange’ probably isn’t Kubrick’s best film, and I will admit to some ambivalence regarding the director. I often find myself admiring his work rather than liking it. The lack of any real humanity to a good half of his (admittedly unprolific) output results in some jaw-droppingly amazing technical exercises rather than engaging and emotionally fulfilling works of art. ‘A Clockwork Orange’ remains my favourite, ironically, purely because it’s honest about its lack of humanity. The film introduces us – literally: in his first scene, he raises a glass to the audience – to a complete bastard, albeit an awesome cool one, in the form of Alex the droog, played, in what must rank as one of the greatest performances in the history of cinema, by Malcolm McDowell. Kubrick picked McDowell on the basis of his performance in the equally incendiary Lindsay Anderson film ‘If…’, and it’s easy to see Alex as Mick Travis with a few years on him and a decent classical music collection.

For two and quarter hours, we follow Alex’s rise, fall and restoration to his vicious ways. The first hour is an adrenalin rush of the reprehensible: Alex and his droogs kick the shit out of a drunken old homeless guy, run motorists off the road as they go joyriding, get stuck into a fight with a rival gang using fists, boots, knives, bicycle chains and broken bottles, and pull a “surprise visit” on an unsuspecting couple which concludes with very unsavoury business which plays out to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’. And our man Stan films it all with exuberant abandon.

 

After another B&E that similarly concludes in a welter of sexual violence (a porcelain phallus the size of a chair is used to deliver the coup de grace), Alex is abandoned by his droogs – it should be mentioned that he’s not twatting them for getting out of line – and arrested. By the kind of coppers who probably watch ‘The Sweeney’ as a refresher course. He’s booted and spat on and next thing he’s in the nick, hypocritically cosying up to the chaplain to get out of the more onerous work rota and fantasizing all the while about being one of the Roman soldiers whipping Christ on His way to Golgotha. (Think ‘Life of Brian’ without the laughs and you’ll pretty much have imagined this scene.)

When the prison’s pompous Elgar-loving governor mentions a revolutionary new “cure” for criminality – Ludovico’s Technique – Alex immediately volunteers, convinced it’ll win him a quick parole. Ludovico’s Technique involves Alex being strapped to a chair, his eyes forced open, while images of violence, destruction, degradation, Naziism and just about any other bad shit you can think of play out in front of him. He is being programmed to reject all such stuff. To respond with physical revulsion at the very thought of it. There’s an unforeseen side-effect, though. Throughout the treatment, the accompanying music is Alex’s personal favourite, Symphony N° 9 in D minor, Opus 125.

Released, unable to even consider lifting a hand in anger, Alex’s mind is also programmed to reject Beethoven. It’s an almost unpalatably horrible implication: deny free will and you’re taking great art out of the equation as well as the capacity for evil. Your choice folks: a world with all the horrors that Alex epitomises but which also has Beethoven’s 9th, or a world without any of it, the good or the bad. Think you’ve made your choice? Slip a microtape on and think again.

 

Deep, dark, troubling stuff … and you know what the worst (or perhaps the best) thing is? Kubrick plays it as comedy. Right down to the final sequence where Alex, suddenly a cause célèbre as the media rounds on the government in condemnation of Ludovico’s Technique, has the process reversed and gleefully takes up the mantle of his erstwhile persona, imagining himself feted and in flagrante as the ‘Ode to Joy’ reaches its crescendo. “I was cured all right,” Alex purrs as the music dies away and Burgess’s last chapter gets its head kicked in as thoroughly as any of Alex’s victims.

Two more things to mention: like Alex, my favourite piece of music is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony; unlike Alex, I regard it as the mankind’s highest artistic achievement in any medium. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve heard it, and the amount of different recordings I’ve listened to (though the Karajan 1963 version with the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon takes some beating – this review was written while listening to it at high volume), and there are still times, almost without realising it, that I find myself murmuring “I was cured all right” at the climax.

Second thing: the most recent Warner Brothers ‘Director’s Edition’ box set of Kubrick’s work features a documentary called ‘Great Bolshy Yarblockos’ as one of the special features. I’m one of the talking heads in the documentary. I get about thirty seconds’ screen time all told, but it was my bit they picked to explain the origins of Nadsat. I’m a bit proud of that.

The Shining

As a corrective to the rather heavy-handed statement in my last post that I prefer Stephen King as a writer of short fiction, that’s not to say that he hasn’t written some bloody brilliant novels. And there’s a strong case to be made for ‘The Shining’ as the best of them. Dark, unflinching, compelling, it boasts one of the best opening sentences in the English language and moves inexorably towards an explosive climax.

In his introduction to the latest edition, King describes it as “a ‘crossroads novel’, where the writer is presented with a choice: either doing what you have done before, or try to reach a little higher”. His choice with ‘The Shining’ was whether to carry on writing what is essentially a haunted house story, or delve a little deeper into Jack Torrance’s psychology, particularly in terms of his relationship with his abusive father and his problems with alcohol. As King put it, “instead of changing from a relatively nice guy to a two-dimensional villain … Jack Torrance became a more realistic (and therefore more frightening) figure … a killer [motivated] because of childhood abuse as well as those ghostly forces …”

Stanley Kubrick, adapting the novel with Diane Johnson, omits Torrance’s thorny relationship with his father and gives the alcoholism issue only the most fleeting mention. The narrative arc of Torrance’s descent into madness is more carefully in the novel (the film casts Torrance in a fairly sinister light early on and loses no time in having him behave irrationally as soon as he and his family are installed in The Overlook). The character of Wendy, a sympathetic and quite resilient character in the novel, is remodelled as simpering, irritating and finally hysterical. The topiary animals are jettisoned in favour of a maze, the facts pertaining to Halloran’s return to The Overlook differ significantly and the denouement is a complete divergence.

On the whole, it’s easy to appreciate King’s dislike of the film and his famous remark “that Kubrick set out to make a horror film with no apparent understanding of the genre” is cruelly accurate. Kubrick and Johnson throw everything but the kitchen sink into the mix – Indian burial ground, ghosts in the bath, ghosts in the ballroom, ghosts getting up to weird kinky stuff in animal costumes, creepy ghost kids in the corridors, elevators vomiting blood, history repeating itself, Freudian imagery, Laingian behaviourism, a WTF final shot that’s probably still fuelling discussion forums – but never really settle on what tips Torrance over the edge, beyond a severe case of writer’s block. Which isn’t to say writer’s block can’t be frustrating, but it doesn’t make you take an axe to your family.

All told, ‘The Shining’ ought to be an abject failure as an adaptation and, as a film, little more than a feature length advert for Garrett Brown’s Steadicam (Brown not only invented Steadicam, but shot all the sequences in ‘The Shining’ that utilise it, including Danny Torrance pedalling around The Overlook on a tricycle and the climactic scene in the maze). And yet, after a lukewarm critical reception on its original release, it’s now revered as a modern classic and, at time of writing, ranks at 53 on IMDb’s Top 250 list. So what went right?

Well, almost everything bar direction and performances, and even the over-the-top performances aren’t necessarily the fault of the actors. John Baxter’s biography of Kubrick quotes editor Gordon Stainforth: “That long tracking shot where Jack Nicholson pursues Shelley Duvall up the staircase … was taken fifty or sixty times. Typically, Nicholson’s first take would be absolutely brilliant. Then the thing would start to get stale after ten takes. Then you can see he’s almost marking time … Then he’s going right over the top. The impression I got was that Stanley tended to go for the most eccentric and rather over-the-top ones.”

What ‘The Shining’ does right is establish an atmosphere of unease straightaway. The girls in the corridor (“we want you to play with us, Danny, for ever and ever and ever”) and the blood spewing out of the elevator are iconic images and are still being homaged, thirty years down the line, by the likes of ‘Family Guy’. The music, a very minimal original score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind supplemented with eerie soundscapes by György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki, would give you the creeps if it was laid over a Rice Krispies ad, let alone married to Kubrick’s ominous visuals.

The Overlook is a splendid creation, a disquieting and disorientating place that’s virtually the main character in its own right. While some exteriors were shot at the Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood, Oregon, a full scale exterior was built at EMI’s Elstree studios, along with sets for the interiors. The awesome helicopter shots of Torrance’s VW negotiating winding mountain roads that open the film were second unit footage. Kubrick, as was his wont, never left England for the shooting of the project. Interiors for The Overlook were chiefly inspired by Yosemite National Park’s Ahwahnee Hotel, while the white-and-red headache of a restroom where, in the film’s most chilling scene, Torrance’s mind is poisoned against his family by the ghost of his predecessor Delbert Grady (a quietly terrifying Philip Stone), was based, according to Vincent LoBrutto in his exhaustive biography, “on a men’s room in an Arizona hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.”

I’ve come across the phrase “architecture porn” on various blogs, mainly in connection with ‘North by Northwest’ and its almost erotic fixation on the Lloyd Wright-esque stylisations of Vandamm’s hillside lair. A great phrase, and entirely apposite for Hitchcock’s classic. Kubrick’s film, however, is less a porno than an architectural snuff movie. The cumulative effect is visually overpowering: death by set design. Seriously, just the fucking carpets are enough to drive you to madness.

2001: A Space Odyssey

In 1948, Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story called 'The Sentinel' for a BBC competition. It didn't win. Wasn't even placed. Two decades later, Stanley Kubrick used it as the basis for '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Which pretty much makes the BBC competition adjudicator the literary equivalent of the man who turned down the Beatles.

Kubrick was introduced to Clarke's work by Roger Caras, the publicist on 'Dr Strangelove'. Kubrick was impressed by his novel 'Childhood's End', but director Abraham Polonsky had optioned it and was trying to secure backing for a script he'd written. Instead, Kubrick bought the rights to half a dozen short stories, whittling down their themes and ideas until he was left with 'The Sentinel' as the starting point for his quasi-mystical sci-fi epic.

John Baxter's book 'Stanley Kubrick: A Biography', while evincing a disdainful attitude towards SF and placing Clarke at "the front rank of second rate science fiction writers" (case for the defence: Clarke's nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature), offers some intriguing insights into the gestation of Kubrick and Clarke's screenplay: Kubrick initially envisaged the film as a "mythological documentary" including interviews with scientists about the theory of interstellar travel and the possibility of extra-terrestrial life. Early drafts had the monolith projecting images and the Star Child detonating "a ring of atomic satellites orbiting the globe ... One representative of mankind ... would get the point and become the avatar of the new consciousness" ('Stanley Kubrick: A Biography', p. 209).

With a summary of the film running to more than 100 pages, and concerned that Clarke hadn't written for the screen before, Kubrick suggested Clarke tackle '2001' as a novel, from which their joint screenplay would then derive. That was in late 1964. Book and film didn't see light of day until mid-1968, with Clarke making endless revisions to his manuscript at Kubrick's behest, the director not approving the novel for publication until the film was virtually in cinemas and Clarke was heavily in debt.

Stanley Kubrick: not the easiest guy to work with.

Still, Clarke's fiction gained a new lease of life of courtesy of the film and he went on to write three more 'Odyssey' novels, with the second, '2010', also getting the big screen treatment (Peter Hyams' adaptation suffers from comparisons to its predecessor, but is considerably better than the general critical concensus would have it).

I watch '2001: A Space Odyssey' every couple of years or so; immerse myself in its soporific running time, soak up the leisurely sequences of space flight, beautifully played out to Herbert von Karajan's recording of Johann Strauss II's 'Blue Danube' waltz. Kubrick's talent for interweaving music and image is as effective here as it is in 'A Clockwork Orange': Richard Strauss's monumental 'Also Sprach Zarathustra', used three times, captures the film's aesthetic the way 'Ride of the Valkyries' does in 'Apocalypse Now'; Khachaturian's 'Gayane' suite emphasises the loneliness, the remoteness of deep space; and the mysterious aural conjurings of Gyorgy Ligeti hint at worlds beyond our own.

When he's not using music to take the film to whole new levels, Kubrick lets dialogue - what little of it there is - take a back seat to soundscapes either harsh (the screeching of the monkeys during the opening sequence) or repetitively pervasive (Dave Bowman [Keir Dullea]'s breathing hideously amplified in his space suit). Just as dialogue is dispensed with for the most part, Kubrick doesn't bother much with his cast. Dullea and Gary Lockwood are figuratively and thematically adrift as the film's real protagonist, the HAL 9000 computer (voiced by Douglas Rain), gets his fifteen minutes of fame ... or rather, his hour of infamy.

The 'Daisy Daisy' scene, as HAL gets the manual over-ride treatment, is one of the great moments in film history ("I'm afraid, Dave ... my mind is going"); the journey through the stargate revolutionised visual effects; the final twenty minutes are elegaic, poetic, baffling and pretentious in roughly equal measures.

I watch '2001: A Space Odyssey' every couple of years or so and I'm still no closer to deciding whether it's a profound, cerebral, philosophical work of art, or a self-indulgent, egotistical, intellectually hollow con job.

Either way, it's bloody good movie.


(in memoriam Sir Arthur C Clarke CBE, 16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008)