Debunking a movie myth: the straight, ahem, poop on 'L'Age d'Or'

"What is that Roger Kimball going on about now???": Lya Lys in Bunuel and Dali's L'Age d'Or, 1930

I'm sure many of you are wondering what I myself make of this whole thing with the Yale art student who was claiming to have impregnated herself multiple times and then induced multiple abortions/miscarriages and documented them for her senior project. Actually, I'm sure none of you are wondering that, but bear with me. What I think is, of course, pretty much what most non-insane people think, which is "Yeeuch." (Strangely, whenever the topic comes up, two songs go through my head—"Artists Only" by Talking Heads [particularly the part when David Byrne shrieks "I don't have to PROVE—that I am creative!"] and, of course, "Who Are Parents?" by the Shaggs.) In any case, in the course of following varied commentaries about the whole mishegas, I came across a peculiar slander against a great film. And now I'm blogging to set the record straight, because that's just what I do...

Roger Kimball, the co-editor of The New Criterion, chimed in on the scandal with a post on his blog titled "Yale, abortion, and the limits of art." If you read the whole thing it turns out he's not really as appalled about the Yale business so much as he's still ticked off about poor old dead Robert Mapplethorpe. But. Anyway. Kimball builds up a good head of steam as he draws to his inevitable conclusion that the whole damn civilization is already gone to you-know-where-in-a-you-know-what; this particular passage is best read in an approximation of one of the teachers' voices in an old "Peanuts" animated special:

Indeed, as a society, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesia: an anesthesia based on the delusion that by calling something “art” we thereby purchase for it a blanket exemption from moral criticism—as if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations beside the point.

But wait, he's just getting started! "George Orwell gave classic expression to this point back in 1944 in 'Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí,' a review of Dalí’s autobiography. 'The artist,' Orwell wrote,"

is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things graphic shots of a woman defecating] is O.K.

Reading that, I thought, hey, wait a minute. There aren't no graphic shots of a woman defecating in L'Age d'Or. I know this because, well, if there were graphic shots of a woman defacating in L'Age d'Or, I wouldn't have sat through the film like maybe twenty or so times in my life. (I can't ever watch Pink Flamingoes, for instance, because I want to be able to listen to "Surfing Bird" for the rest of my days without certain pictures coming into my head.) The 1930 surrealist film, shot by the great Luis Bunuel from a scenario by Bunuel and Dali, contains a fair amount of still-shocking, or at least bracing, imagery, but not that.

Where the hell had Kimball, or Orwell, gotten that notion? It was hard to say from looking at the quote in Kimball's post just whose notion it was; the use of brackets usually suggests an interpolation from the person doing the quoting. Consultation with The Complete Works of George Orwell online and with Volume 3 of the Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters in print, show that Kimball took a liberty with a footnote in Orwell's original essay, escalating what's essentially a second-hand account into an objective truth. The footnote in Orwell's essay reads: "Dali mentions L'Age d'Or and adds that its first public showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defecating." Oh my.

Still, that's more than a little different from just plain "which shows among other things graphic shots of a woman defecating." Some further investigation into Kimball revealed that this isn't the first time he's so distorted Orwell; apparently he trots out this hobbyhorse every time an artist does something he doesn't like. But that's his problem. What I'm left with is this patent falsehood about the film, and wondering how it came to be. So I dug into Henry Miller. There's an essay called "The Golden Age" in his book The Cosmological Eye, in which he praises the picture rather, I have to say, fulsomely. And therein we find this passage:

Is it necessary to add that there are scenes in this film which have never been dreamed of before? The scene in the water-closet, for example. I quote from the program notes:

"Il est inutile d'ajouter qu'un des points culminants de la purete de ce film nous semble cristallise dans la vision de l'heroine dans les cabinets, ou la puissance de lesprit arrive a sublimer une situation generalement baroque en un element poetique de la plus pure noblesse et solitude."

A situation usually baroque! Perhaps it is the baroque element in human life, or rather in the life of the civilized man, which gives to Bunuel's works the aspect of cruelty and sadism.

A friend has kindly provided a much better idiomatic translation of the French bit than I could ever manage:

"It goes without saying that the purity at the heart of this film is crystalized in the image of its heroine on the toilet; what would normally be a shocking display is transformed by the film's essential spirit into a moment of great nobility and loneliness."

And with that, let's go to the DVD. That is, the BFI version of the film, which I find somewhat more satisfactory than the domestic-issue Kino. Don't worry. What you're about to see is not even vaguely as disgusting as what Orwell (some might say reasonably) extrapolated from Miller and the film's program notes. It's about fifteen minutes into the film, and its leads, Gaston Modot and Lya Lys, have just been introduced, making love in the mud mere yards away from where a very solemn ceremony is taking place. Officials separate the two and lead Lys away; Modot, still in the mud, seems to beg for her return...

A reverie is inspired...we seem to be going for a fadeout, but the shot instead dissolves...

And there indeed is our heroine, and indeed, she is in a "water closet." Is she standing or sitting? Hard to tell for sure from the way the shot is constructed, and that's quite deliberate, don't you think? She looks straight into the camera, furrows her brow, and exhales deeply a couple of times. Are her facial expressions meant to suggest orgasm, or elimination? I'd say the question is precisely the point. Dissolve to...

...the empty bathroom. An almost lyrical image, with something fluttering in backwards motion on the wall to the left. On the soundtrack: the sound of a toilet flushing. Dissolve to...

...a couple of shots of a mud slide, and a bubbling pit of...ugh. Tar? Lava? Well, whatever it is, we know what it's meant to evoke...and we cut back to—

Modot, who's now even more agitated.

So, to conclude: Miller was unknowingly misleading, Orwell was wrong (not just about the film's content, but in his assumption that said aspect of the film's content was what motivated the riot that shut down the movie), and Kimball is wronger. You think that this post will compel him to knock it off?

Nah, me neither.

Oh, and another thing: do you think had Lya Lys permitted herself to be shown evacuating on film in 1930, Hollywood would have come calling after her? Again, nah, me neither. Here she is in 1939 in the Warner Brothers film The Return of Dr. X (which starred Humphrey Bogart):

Comments

[bill]

So he (or Orwell) is wrong about "L'Age D'or". Why be so dismissive of the rest of what Kimball has to say? Your own reaction to the Yale student's project would seem to indicate that you don't even really disagree with him.

[bill]

Oh, and PS - Kimball doesn't even mention Mapplethorpe until the second-to-last paragraph, and then only to pull that quote which illustrates his point.

[Dan]

A few points:

1) How, exactly, does one develop a working knowledge of film without seeing a Luis Bunuel movie? If Kimball had any familiarity with the man's work he'd know just how inaccurate that is. Bunuel always liked to push the limits but he always did so with elegance. Showing actual human defecation just wouldn't be up his alley, even when he was a young firebrand.

2) I don't think creating art or being an artist excuses immoral behavior but on the other hand, both words are awfully tricky to define and before you condemn you'd better be DAMN sure it's not just your personal outrage talking, and that your personal outrage at the work isn't part of the point. One of the most hilarious moments I ever had was watching a teacher rail against what a bastard Alexander Payne was for "Citizen Ruth" and how dare he make a pro-life film.

3) Roger Kimball could use a dose of common sense; I immediately pegged this as a publicity stunt and utterly fake. A) How could she get pregnant that many times in the first place, for a freakin' senior thesis? It's not like you can go to the store and buy a "Knock Me Up" kit. And B) How did she not manage to do incredible personal harm to herself throughout all these self-induced abortions?

[Glenn Kenny]

Bill: Well, first off, I object pretty strongly to Kimball continually perpetuating a falsehood in order to put across a point...which he's perfectly capable of putting across without. And while I may agree or disagree with Kimball on a case-by-case basis (the Yale art student, yes; Mapplethorpe, no), I have to say I find the larger outlines of his project kind of frightening. For all that Orwell objected to about Dali, he finally allowed "Not, of course, that Dali's autobiography, or his pictures, ought to be suppressed." I don't think Kimball believes that; in fact, I think Kimball very much wants to turn back the clock by whatever means necessary. Why not, some might ask, given such excesses as Kimball rails against. But my sense is that a world that's run by "Roger's rules" wouldn't just mean a world without crazy Yale art students or Mapplethorpe; I believe it would mean a world without quite a lot that you and I hold dear.

[bill]

I read nothing to support your fears in his article. Unless I'm forgetting something, I didn't even see anything in there about suppressing anything (are you basing your fears on other writings by Kimball?). All I saw was a disgust at the idea that if something is called "art", not matter how disgusting or morally repellent, it's not to be questioned, because to question it is to be labelled a suppressor. That's quite different from actually being a suppressor.

[bill]

Goddamnit, there I go again: "disgust" and "disgusting" in the same sentence. Something about posting comments on this site freezes my brain a little bit.

[Glenn Kenny]

Bill, you are a highly valued reader and commenter, so I don't want you to have brain freeze in these parts. We disagree on a lot, yes, but I never even want to give an impression of trying to lord it over you.

My impressions of Kimball are based on longer readings of him, yes; and yes, I think he would like to obliterate art from the point where Duchamp painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa, if not before.
That does scare me.

Okay, a more cogent response will come when I'm in front of an actual computer rather than a Blackberry...

[bill]

Oh, I didn't get the impression you were lording anything over me. I was just mad at myself for my sloppy writing.

Being new to Kimball (as far as I can remember, anyway), I can't say whether your impression of him is based on your interpretation, or on things he's actually written (care to direct me to any particular article? I'd even read it and everything). All I can say for sure is that I didn't even get a whiff of what you describe from this current article.

[Glenn Kenny]

Fairly put, Bill. As "Bounty Bear" says in Wenders's 1991 "Until The End Of The World," "give me a minute." Or more. I will give you argumentative satisfaction. I've just got to attend to the other portions of my life first.

[Aaron Aradillas]

For me, "Surfin' Bird" will always be linked to that great transition in Full Metal Jacket. You know, the one where the guys sound off for a film crew about making Vietnam: The Movie. ("We'll let the gooks be the Indians!") The scene climaxes with a helicopter taking off.

(I've always had this image in my head of a giddy Stankey K. demanding that the helicopter come back and do it again becasue "...something wasn't quite right" with the previous 17 takes.)

The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird" is such a perfect one-hit garage-rock, Nuggets-style song that even the Ramones couldn't bring anything new it. Like the Beatles covering "Please Mr. Postman," some songs should be left alone.

[addison dewitt]

One pretty simple distinction between Orwell and Kimball on this count is that Orwell was writing at a time when it would have been all but impossible for him to see L'AGE D'OR himself. Not only did DVD, video, Netflix, etc., not exist, but my recollection is that the movie -- which after all was never a commercial release -- stayed suppressed and unavailable for decades in any form. So Orwell had no choice but to rely on other people's descriptions of it, in this case to his misfortune.

Kimball, on the other hand, could've checked out whether Orwell was right or wrong within hours -- and if he has indeed cited L'AGE D'OR before in this context, he both could and should have done so years ago. That's the difference been bad information and mendacity.