Saturday, August 18, 2012
Fifty Years of Randle McMurphy
The publicity gurus at Massey have this thing where they try and get us to take over a high school for the day, with appropriate members of staff teaching all of the normal classes in some kind of special souped-up "university" way. As you'll gather from my tone, I have certain reservations about this idea. Are we really that much cooler and more interesting than their usual teachers? It seems unlikely.
Anyway, the latest target is Mahurangi College. We're going to occupy it next Monday, 27th August, and I (for my sins) have to teach one of the year 13 English classes - what I'm afraid I still think of as "seventh form." I'm quite terrified. I had to go to a High School to present prizes a few years ago, and the moment I arrived the fear came back - I felt at any moment I was going to be hauled off for disciplining by one of those eagle-eyed Heads and Deputy Heads keeping an alert eye out for trouble ...
The thing that does interest me about this event, though, is the subject of the lesson: Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I first read the book myself when I was in the sixth form at Rangitoto College, in - it must have been - 1978 (I remember one of the older, staider teachers fulminating on about all the hippie nonsense they were getting kids to read these days - instead of sticking to good ol' Dickens and Thomas Hardy). That was more than thirty years ago.
But there it still is, in the curriculum, Chief Broom, Randle McMurphy, the Combine and all ... When you think that the book was already a bit of a period piece then, at the end of the seventies, what does it sound like now, to these teenagers they're getting to read it? I was born in 1962, the year of the book's publication. Not only were these kids not born or thought of then, but their parents probably weren't either - it actually comes from their grandparents' generation.
Anyway, it didn't seem safe to rely on those thirty-year-old memories - nor my recollections of the (then current) Jack Nicholson film, which was screened for us in the school video room, and which I suppose I must have watched on video at least once since. So I have been rereading the book. Not only that, I've also been rereading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), an account of Kesey's subsequent adventures with LSD, the magic bus, and his group of Merry Pranksters.
What strikes me most about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is just how good it is. Kesey definitely had a lot of talent, and his narrative barrels on like an express train. Nor do the themes of the book (presumably set in 1960, as reference is made to "voting for Eisenhower" as an especially loony thing to do, in the early pages of the book - crazy because it was his vice-president, Richard Nixon, who was actually running for president that year?) seem particularly dated. The idea of the "Combine", the machine that runs the whole country, keeping everyone in line, is still right on the button.
There's a certain inescapable romanticism about the whole thing, of course: the Chief's escape at the end, bearing McMurphy's soul with him, is a bit too good to be true. But then, it was never supposed to be a realist text, an expose of the mental health system (though there are elements of that within it). It's more of a blueprint for the real-life adventures and escapades that Kesey would himself enact a few years later.
And, as such, it's quite prophetic. Just like McMurphy, Kesey was eventually busted and flung into jail, and after his release, things were never quite the same. Where he and his pranksters had pioneered the Hessean Journey to the East, and were, at the time of their dissolution, trying to find a way to go "beyond acid," it was the bland suits of the music industry who reaped the cash rewards. Where he and his pals dreamed of a great spiritual awakening, the reality came down mostly to a string of squalid communes springing up on waste ground all over the world.
It might have been better, in some ways, if Kesey had achieved the martyrdom of his fictional hero instead of turning into a reclusive old has-been on a farm in the back of beyond. He did go on to publish a couple more books, but none of them had the power and influence of his first two - Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) still resolutely refuses to go away or go out of print, just like its predecessor.
Jack Kerouac grew old and sad, too - drinking himself to death in a scungy old cellar. But there the analogy ends. Kesey was always more focussed and productive than Kerouac: his pranks worked, his prose made better sense. He died in 2001, but it's hard to see his story as over yet. His books keep on selling, keep on being read, because he genuinely had something to say: the fact that he lapsed into being a mere man of letters gives you some clue of just how high the expectations for him had become.
If he was a John the Baptist rather than a Messiah, preaching the coming of something bigger than himself, then that can hardly be seen as a reproach. He may have got some of the details spectacularly wrong (in particular the timetable), but it's unfair to type him as a lost leader, a failed hope. Nobody since has succeeded in picking up that baton, but I guess we're all still waiting for someone to try.
Monday, July 30, 2012
NZ's Best: Matt Harris & Miriam Smith
I'm afraid I've only made it to two film festival films so far this year. They've both been extremely interesting, though: last Saturday (21/7) I went to the world premiere of Chris Pryor and Miriam Smith's documentary How Far is Heaven, and this Saturday (28/7) I went to the New Zealand's Best programme of six local short films, selected by veteran Kiwi film-maker Roger Donaldson.
There were, admittedly, some ulterior motives in these two choices. I've known Miriam Smith for a number of years, and have watched with admiration the sheer enthusiasm and determination she's brought to her quest to break into the film industry. It's wonderful to see her name on a feature film at last, and especially one as innovative and thought-provoking as this documentary about the small Māori / Pākehā community at Jerusalem / Hiruharama on the Whanganui River.
Matt Harris, who wrote the screenplay for the short film 43,000 feet is also an old friend and colleague. We work together, teaching creative writing at Massey's Albany campus, and I was in fact the co-supervisor of his recently completed Doctoral thesis on New Zealand metafiction. Getting the opportunity, at last, to see the short film we've heard so much about, was therefore quite a thrill.
What shall I say about the films? The idea for the NZ's Best short films screening was to get the audience to rank in order the ones they preferred, with a substantial cash prize awaiting the victor. I may be prejudiced, but I do feel that Matt's film, expertly filmed and interpreted by director Campbell Hooper, cinematographer Andrew Stroud, and producers Heather Lee and Amber Easby - not to mention actor Dylan Pharazyn - was by far the best. Or the most to my taste, at any rate.
That's not to say that there was anything wrong with the other films: I was particularly struck by Michelle Saville's Wellington hipster comedy Ellen is Leaving, but Sam Kelly's Lambs was also extremely powerful and well-made.
What all the other films had in common, though, was a strong local flavour: almost an insistence on the value of portrayals of the Kiwi quotidian. Matt's stood out simply because of its "rootless cosmopolitanism" - as with the metafictions he's been studying so assiduously over the past few years, Matt's film seemed the only one that was interested in laying out new directions for our storytelling.
One might argue - Matt, in fact, has - that this tendency has already been successfully established in New Zealand fiction (with Janet Frame the first great breaker of the mold), but our film-making still seems dominated by the great New Zealand realist tradition.
It was not the ideology of the thing that made Matt and Campbell's film so entertaining to watch, though: it was the Taika Waititi-ish playfulness of the story, combined with the magical intensity of the imagery.
Was it necessary to give the lead character an American accent, and imply a North American setting for the story? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm sure a lot of thought went into the choice. The fact that the film has already screened at so many international film festivals (including the Tribeca Festival in New York) would seem to vindicate their decision, though.
You could hardly imagine a greater contrast with Chris and Miriam's film about the interactions between the nuns of Mother Mary Aubert's order of the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion, and the children of the local community.
This was fly-on-the-wall film-making with a vengeance. Interview after interview had been carefully spliced together into a somewhat meandering chronicle of life in this small outpost on the Whanganui River. At times one felt the lack of a larger context to the story that was gradually unfolding - some account of James K. Baxter's involvement with the place, for instance; not to mention Mother Mary Aubert's own experiences there.
By the end of the film, I felt more as if I had myself spent a year living in Jerusalem than that I'd seen an analysis of the complex interactions going on there now, more than 120 years since Mary Aubert first established her mission so far up the river.
Thinking it over since, though, I've come to realise how necessary this approach was to such sensitive material: so many off-the-cuff comments and revelations offered to Chris and Miriam in trust. Of course, though, their film has turned out to be an account of the sheer difficulty of helping people, however good your intentions. With so few locals attending their services or requesting their aid, the nuns have been forced to reconsider their role in the town. As one of the sisters puts it herself: "“At a major level they do not need us.”
Should they stay or should they go? No heavy-handed solutions are suggested by the film, but the sheer scope of the problem is outlined with subtlety and tact. The more I thought about it, the more I understood why the sole reference to James K. Baxter, whose grave still looks down on the little town from a bluff above the river, was a side-view of a picture of him inside the church. There's an absorbing, fascinating history to Māori-Pākehā relations at Jerusalem, but the subject of this film is how it feels to live there right now.
It may be less immediately beguiling than Matt and Campbell's film, but Chris and Miriam's definitely stays with you, grows in the mind. It's a film to ponder, to watch more than once. These film-makers may have fallen in love with their subjects, but the way they've cut their eventual documentary offers a wry commentary on a lot of aspects of life in this country that it seems very timely to hear about right now.
As the young girl Chevy explains, talking about the taniwha that lives under the concrete bridge leading into the town: "Rivers are important to Māori. It's because we don't have anything else."
Friday, July 13, 2012
Korero
Korero is a "collaborative exhibition illustrating a fusion between visual art and poetry. 20 artists from various disciplines select from 20 carefully chosen poems on the theme of conversation, to use as inspiration for their artwork. The artists include Ingrid Anderson, Lisa Benson, Kirsty Black, Chris Dennis, Sue Dick, Matt Moriarty, Dom Morrison, Emily Pauling, Clinton Philips, Kirsten Pleitner, Ramon Robertson, Mark Russell, Kate Sellar, Brendon Sellar, Shona Tawhiao, Emma Topping, Wayne Trow, Jana Wood and Nicola Wright."
One of the poems chosen for the exhibition by Siobhan Harvey and Melissa Elliot, the curators, was my piece "Except Once":
– Aren’t I always nice to you?
– Except once.
[Overheard in the Massey @ Albany Refectory]
tap’s still dripping, diesel generators roar
in shop doors, no money rolls
in, lumps of old essay sag
in plastic bags – I type out texts
from Penguin Books of European Verse.
The water’s too cold
for swimming.
Focus on externals: tick of death
in Irene’s stomach, Miriel’s scorched flesh,
brain-clots and blood-diseases, Julian’s sister
killed on Saturday night – I like to see
the islands in the gulf, driving
down the long hill, ships floating
down the sky.
(17/3/98)
So, as a result, Bronwyn and I drove over to the Uxbridge Creative Arts Centre in Howick last night for the opening of the show. And I'm very glad we did. We got to catch up with a number of friends we hadn't seen for a while: Sarah Broom, Riemke Ensing and Sonja Yelich among them. And we also got to meet the artist who'd created a work based on my poem, Kirsty Black.
Here we are in front of her painting, also entitled "Except Once":
And here's a more detailed view of the painting itself:
<[Kirsty Black: Except Once]
[Except Once (detail)]
I guess I should explain that the poem was written during the great Auckland blackout of 1998, when "diesel generators" were indeed roaring "in shop doors" up and down Queen Street, and the only lights one could see in the darkened city were traffic red, orange, greens. It was a strange and uncanny time, and an appalling number of people I knew seemed to be in pain and turmoil just then. There's a bit of a lift at the end, though, which I feel that Kirsty has picked up on in her transition from the dark blue at the bottom of her painting to the lighter, more life-affirming colours at the top of the frame.
It was very interesting to discuss her intentions with the piece with her. All in all, though her painting didn't win the $1,000 prize, I think it was a thoroughly worthwhile experience. I guess that's why I'm looking so smug in the picture below:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)