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I've never loved anyone in the world but you
Because I was watching Stop Making Sense (1984) with my cousins on Saturday and talking about Jonathan Demme with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel last night, I was hoping to be able to link to his excellent television version of Kurt Vonnegut's Who Am I This Time? (1982) on either Netflix or YouTube, because it doesn't get enough love. No go. It's not streaming anywhere I can find. Have instead the notes I meant to post about it in May 2011, after which I shall go and pack up my DVDs. I don't own this one; I wish I did. It's the rare case of an adaptation that improves on the original.
Demme's Who Am I This Time? isn't a feature film; it aired in February 1982 as an episode of PBS' American Playhouse, which I suppose means there's a chance I saw it in the same way as the RSC's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, i.e., my mother watched a lot of PBS while she was nursing. I didn't know it existed until four or five years ago and then it took me another several years to track it down on Netflix. Clocking in at a little less than a hour, it's a very faithful transfer of the original short story, which is no more than a handful of pages itself and has always reminded me of Bradbury, probably for the faintly magic-realist sense of small-town America. Christopher Walken plays the paralytically shy Harry Nash, who gives a barnstorming performance every summer with the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club and then melts off again into introversion and absence as soon as the curtain falls. Onstage, he's the reason this town does community theater at all. No one knows what he's like offstage; he might as well not be anyone. "Harry, body and soul, was exactly what the script and the director told him to be . . . The minute he didn't have a part to play, he'd disappear into some hiding place where he could hear people call him, but where he couldn't be seen." This does not compute for newcomer Helene Shaw (Susan Sarandon), who's known him only since being cast as Stella to his Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire—what she sees is a man as smoldering and swaggering as his character, intent, intense, and overwhelmingly sexual, and she's as enthralled by him as if she really were "a sweet, pregnant girl married to a sexy gorilla." Their chemistry onstage is practically illegal. Offstage, he can barely acknowledge a hello. Hurt and bewildered by the difference, she realizes on the last night that the way to reach Harry is to ask him to read one last scene with her—the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet—after which, to take Vonnegut's version first, "[t]hey never did show up at the cast party. One week later they were married." It's a sweet ending, but there's a troubling, existential undercurrent: "They seem very happy, although they're kind of strange from time to time, depending on which play they're reading to each other at the time." The narrator doesn't question it, but the reader might wonder: is Helene really in love with Harry, or with all the different people he can be? Is he in love with her, or is it a function of the different lovers they play? And maybe there's no difference, but . . .
The film does two things to clarify its position, one of which is its handling of the Shakespeare reading on the last night of Streetcar. Vonnegut starts with "How cam'st thou hither" and has the lovers out the door by "I would not for the world they saw thee here." The play takes hold of Harry and he's gone. Demme backs the scene up to the question of names—Juliet's insistence that the person under them is what matters and Romeo's self-renunciation, which as spoken by Walken's Harry is not flirtatious. There's a helpless laugh of irony in his "Call me but love and I'll be new-baptized—henceforth"—and then we hear how low and painfully he tells her, "I never will be Romeo." It sounds like a confession, and it sounds like a warning, because he's no more Romeo than he was Stanley Kowalski, he's Harry Nash, the tongue-tied, fumble-fingered hardware clerk who freezes so badly at the slightest social interaction, he ran away from her twice already; he's not indifferent to her, we understand now, but she has to know he's not any of the men he reads. She answers back a challenge: "What man art thou?" And every line now has a double meaning, as they negotiate their way through Shakespeare to each other: "By a name, I know not how to tell thee who I am . . ."
The other is the late addition of a scene in which Harry proposes to Helene with The Importance of Being Earnest, mostly Act II where Jack is nervously feeling out whether Gwendolen would love him under his own name or whether an Ernest is required. (She responds, of course, in kind: "I think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully determined to accept you.") Again the question of identities and personae, but what the scene really makes clear is that Sarandon's Helene hasn't somehow hacked Harry into falling in love with her, she's found him a way to communicate. She didn't initiate the proposal, or the choice of play. He came up to her on the street and started cold, trusting her to follow along: "Charming day, Miss Fairfax—" He's not obedient to the scripts anymore; he's speaking through them, taking their words for his own. He'd never known before that he could choose. Theater is no longer this potluck exception, eight weeks a year as Antony or Cyrano or Abraham Lincoln and the rest knocking over mops and unable to look anyone in the eye; he may go around talking in quotation for the rest of his life, but it's talking all the same, and he knows now that he wants to.
And really it's three things, because it is not so plain in the story that the same applies to Helene, whereas the film is certain. She's not so far from Harry on the social anxiety scale—after her initial, disastrously flat audition for the part of Stella, she describes herself tearfully as "a walking icebox," feeling all her life as though she's trapped inside a bottle she can't break, can't get out and touch anyone, do anything, be real. Her attempts to approach Harry by conventional social means fail because they scare him off, but she's equally nervous and uncomfortable trying to behave the way she thinks a romancing couple is supposed to. (The picnic lunch is agony for everyone.) What happens with her and Streetcar isn't just a confusion of role with actor, mistaking the false front of Harry-as-sexy-gorilla for the real life of Harry-as-nonentity. She sees correctly that theater is Harry's way of being himself—all his different selves, not just the awkward blank behind the counter of Miller's Hardware—and it opens up something in her, too. By the end of the movie, there's no more bottle glassing her off from the life she's always wanted. Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde have become the way she, too, can touch the world.
(So, yes: let's hear it for theater. Jonathan Demme films things on stage really well.)
I don't think I own any Tennessee Williams, but my Oscar Wilde is definitely in a box right now. At least after tonight he'll be in a box atderspatchel's. The books are the worst part of any move for me—I genuinely don't own that much other stuff. Someday I'll have normal furniture and it will be very confusing. I'll probably like it.
derspatchel last night, I was hoping to be able to link to his excellent television version of Kurt Vonnegut's Who Am I This Time? (1982) on either Netflix or YouTube, because it doesn't get enough love. No go. It's not streaming anywhere I can find. Have instead the notes I meant to post about it in May 2011, after which I shall go and pack up my DVDs. I don't own this one; I wish I did. It's the rare case of an adaptation that improves on the original.Demme's Who Am I This Time? isn't a feature film; it aired in February 1982 as an episode of PBS' American Playhouse, which I suppose means there's a chance I saw it in the same way as the RSC's Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, i.e., my mother watched a lot of PBS while she was nursing. I didn't know it existed until four or five years ago and then it took me another several years to track it down on Netflix. Clocking in at a little less than a hour, it's a very faithful transfer of the original short story, which is no more than a handful of pages itself and has always reminded me of Bradbury, probably for the faintly magic-realist sense of small-town America. Christopher Walken plays the paralytically shy Harry Nash, who gives a barnstorming performance every summer with the North Crawford Mask and Wig Club and then melts off again into introversion and absence as soon as the curtain falls. Onstage, he's the reason this town does community theater at all. No one knows what he's like offstage; he might as well not be anyone. "Harry, body and soul, was exactly what the script and the director told him to be . . . The minute he didn't have a part to play, he'd disappear into some hiding place where he could hear people call him, but where he couldn't be seen." This does not compute for newcomer Helene Shaw (Susan Sarandon), who's known him only since being cast as Stella to his Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire—what she sees is a man as smoldering and swaggering as his character, intent, intense, and overwhelmingly sexual, and she's as enthralled by him as if she really were "a sweet, pregnant girl married to a sexy gorilla." Their chemistry onstage is practically illegal. Offstage, he can barely acknowledge a hello. Hurt and bewildered by the difference, she realizes on the last night that the way to reach Harry is to ask him to read one last scene with her—the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet—after which, to take Vonnegut's version first, "[t]hey never did show up at the cast party. One week later they were married." It's a sweet ending, but there's a troubling, existential undercurrent: "They seem very happy, although they're kind of strange from time to time, depending on which play they're reading to each other at the time." The narrator doesn't question it, but the reader might wonder: is Helene really in love with Harry, or with all the different people he can be? Is he in love with her, or is it a function of the different lovers they play? And maybe there's no difference, but . . .
The film does two things to clarify its position, one of which is its handling of the Shakespeare reading on the last night of Streetcar. Vonnegut starts with "How cam'st thou hither" and has the lovers out the door by "I would not for the world they saw thee here." The play takes hold of Harry and he's gone. Demme backs the scene up to the question of names—Juliet's insistence that the person under them is what matters and Romeo's self-renunciation, which as spoken by Walken's Harry is not flirtatious. There's a helpless laugh of irony in his "Call me but love and I'll be new-baptized—henceforth"—and then we hear how low and painfully he tells her, "I never will be Romeo." It sounds like a confession, and it sounds like a warning, because he's no more Romeo than he was Stanley Kowalski, he's Harry Nash, the tongue-tied, fumble-fingered hardware clerk who freezes so badly at the slightest social interaction, he ran away from her twice already; he's not indifferent to her, we understand now, but she has to know he's not any of the men he reads. She answers back a challenge: "What man art thou?" And every line now has a double meaning, as they negotiate their way through Shakespeare to each other: "By a name, I know not how to tell thee who I am . . ."
The other is the late addition of a scene in which Harry proposes to Helene with The Importance of Being Earnest, mostly Act II where Jack is nervously feeling out whether Gwendolen would love him under his own name or whether an Ernest is required. (She responds, of course, in kind: "I think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully determined to accept you.") Again the question of identities and personae, but what the scene really makes clear is that Sarandon's Helene hasn't somehow hacked Harry into falling in love with her, she's found him a way to communicate. She didn't initiate the proposal, or the choice of play. He came up to her on the street and started cold, trusting her to follow along: "Charming day, Miss Fairfax—" He's not obedient to the scripts anymore; he's speaking through them, taking their words for his own. He'd never known before that he could choose. Theater is no longer this potluck exception, eight weeks a year as Antony or Cyrano or Abraham Lincoln and the rest knocking over mops and unable to look anyone in the eye; he may go around talking in quotation for the rest of his life, but it's talking all the same, and he knows now that he wants to.
And really it's three things, because it is not so plain in the story that the same applies to Helene, whereas the film is certain. She's not so far from Harry on the social anxiety scale—after her initial, disastrously flat audition for the part of Stella, she describes herself tearfully as "a walking icebox," feeling all her life as though she's trapped inside a bottle she can't break, can't get out and touch anyone, do anything, be real. Her attempts to approach Harry by conventional social means fail because they scare him off, but she's equally nervous and uncomfortable trying to behave the way she thinks a romancing couple is supposed to. (The picnic lunch is agony for everyone.) What happens with her and Streetcar isn't just a confusion of role with actor, mistaking the false front of Harry-as-sexy-gorilla for the real life of Harry-as-nonentity. She sees correctly that theater is Harry's way of being himself—all his different selves, not just the awkward blank behind the counter of Miller's Hardware—and it opens up something in her, too. By the end of the movie, there's no more bottle glassing her off from the life she's always wanted. Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde have become the way she, too, can touch the world.
(So, yes: let's hear it for theater. Jonathan Demme films things on stage really well.)
I don't think I own any Tennessee Williams, but my Oscar Wilde is definitely in a box right now. At least after tonight he'll be in a box at
derspatchel's. The books are the worst part of any move for me—I genuinely don't own that much other stuff. Someday I'll have normal furniture and it will be very confusing. I'll probably like it.
no subject
I wish you luck with packing. (I do wonder how many books you have.)
no subject
You're welcome. Welcome to the Monkey House (1968) was the first Vonnegut I ever read.
I wish you luck with packing. (I do wonder how many books you have.)
I don't know. Several thousand. At least forty-seven white cardboard Staples boxes' worth, but I didn't keep precise count as we moved them and I forgot to ask anyone else to. But they are all out of my house now and at Rob's!