"I've spent years inflating the balloon that is Welles. Please do not puncture it."
- Orson Welles (to Mary Livingston on The Jack Benny Show)
Orson Welles has his hair and beard like a rolling Van Gogh storm cloud for MR ARKADIN (1955), recently screened on TCM and at least trippy enough with its mismatched sound rhythms that you can feel Orson Welles playing around all through post-production, having a high old time. It's too bad it's couched in a luxuriant 3-DVD + novel set on Criterion and not floating in on the late late night UHF movie after PLAN NINE or THE CREEPING TERROR, because its Brecht/Godardian deconstruction is all in your face from the get go, it begs to be reconsidered as a Monogram horror film that's gone off the rails and run off to Europe, rather than 'Art.'
The cheap budget means most of the action is just discussed rather than seen, in rooms where people lurch about as if in the stateroom of a heaving yacht, or drink champagne or method act in waves and the plot also circles around like a bizarre combination of two old radio shows playing at once in perfect synchronicity and the connections with narcotics, Nazi money laundering, captain of industry psychedelia, and the feeling that maybe poor Orson's just been masking his lonesome all along, as the past comes catching up with him; you can smell the wine and cigar smoke, Ibiza perfume and suntan lotion and ghost laughter of passing mistresses; whiskey spills along the strips of celluloid; snatches of great dialogue that seems to be a kind of journal of witty things Welles has said and heard in his European exile.
Pretty Woman:
Do you remember me?
Mischa Auer:
No. I can never remember a pretty woman, it's so expensive!
Like internet dating, this film is the story of trying to unmask someone while keeping your own mask on, trying to open up a dangerous candy egg as it in turn is trying opening you, for you are also a candy egg. Inside the normal, competent, witty candy shell could be anything, from a saintly cream to the bitter pills of maniac psycho yawning void with sharp can opener fingers or more of the same candy shell, waiting to leak out into your mouth, venomously or no. The girl who came off so polished and nice becomes bossy and mirthless as the night moves on and you struggle to make sobriety appear effortless while a churlish demon sulks within your egg, scratching at your insides like they were his dream journal until your tongue slips and reveals a screaming multitude of convicted hellions writhing (and writing) below your smooth surface.
It takes a great director to tap into that hellish core energy but an even greater to tap in a whole layer further to find the black comic heart of that inner core, for evil too has an inner yolk, a deep, well-earned sense of wit and good humor. Such a yolk is Welles, who rules in the Hell of his B-movie sphere rather than serve in Hollywood's regimented heaven.
To get back to the internet date analogy, consider the date is a success and they are married and even then, for a few months, the candy shells are undamaged by the demon yolks within. But now the stress of daily grind, of each others' messes have made hairline fractures and the yolk demons have figured out how to short wave radio to each other with special code words that crack shells like high pitched arias. This fighting is the great expression of love between demons. It is something foreign, alas, to someone like Welles, a towering genius who preferred women at a distance, to be loomed over as they cringe with their jigsaw puzzles or to be seen only in passing, in the shadows of sharks ala LADY FROM SHANGHAI. But this evasion tactic will not stall them forever. Rather than show his true core demon to his daughter (played by his much younger fiancee at the time) Arkadin would prefer to just disappear into the ether.
So a 'towering' genius like Welles must inevitable embrace loneliness like he embraces alcohol, tobacco, and hashish, and all other eggshell removers, until the last vestige of phony candy shell is gone, and the whole social sphere-- wherein friends bring friends over who bring people who amused them on the boat now--seem dull and inane. He'd rather be alone in his editing suite than at a party or in bed with a gorgeous blonde. In proto-nouvelle vague fashion there's the sense that while you're watching an ARKADIN scene, Welles is giving you his notes on it, fusing his commentary track half a century early into the essence of the dialogue, overdubbed by himself for nearly every male character. You get the sense meanwhile that the female actresses could be dubbed by whomever wakes up first in Welles' chateau, before whiskey and sycophants render her incoherent.
Note that Welles has never made a movie about an actor or artist struggling with their art, tending rather towards murderers, rogues, and captains of industry (Arkadin is all three). Not for him the sanctimonious glum piety of something like QUILLS, which mistakes the addiction of writing flagellant smut for a holy purpose; or the classical polish of actors like Laurence Olivier and Patrick Stewart, who sometimes mistake Shakespeare for bourgeois highbrow Art as opposed to merely the pinnacle of charlatanism. Welles made a career laughing at the titanic absurdity of his own persona, especially as a guest on radio shows like Jack Benny and Fred Allen. He always preferred to play the devil rather than the angel, and the one time he wasn't the heavy--in LADY FROM SHANGHAI--he showed why he wasn't much good at it. He couldn't even make eye contact with his own ex-wife, turning away to pontificate in his high whispered Irish brogue instead while Mr. Bernstein ran away with the loathsome ogre lawyer showman, the plumb part designed clearly for the balloon that is Welles.
To Welles, and to Don Birnim, and to Ben in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, and to myself of course, whiskey is a far more noble addiction than writing. We'd rather be remembered as being able to hold our liquor rather than holding a Pulitzer. Drinking leaves only empty bottles, and maybe broken glass, while writing leaves ugly thoughts that can gestate for centuries until your original meaning has been torn out and the zombie husk of your words used to champion any old egg-crushing cause.
Or worse, they can be forgotten altogether.
I know from my own work that how seductive it is when you're the star and love to edit and look at yourself on screen. There's something quite magical about it, the chance to study how you look to other people, frame by frame. Welles never lived long enough to see the age of affordable digital video, and I wish he'd made a dozen ARKADIN sequels instead of making just one three times. Such is the life of a vagabond obsessive. Indecision reigns but at least glum sanctimony has been kicked out the window. Welles makes any other egotistical tyrant genius look shabby by comparison, and he makes himself perhaps shabbiest of all.That is why we love him: he's cinema's one true prodigal, and his own best company.
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