There’s a kind of literary digression in Greek and Latin poetry that I’ve always loved but never completely understood: an object is described in such detail that for a while—sometimes for the entire rest of the poem—the narrative focus shifts to another story entirely. The object is generally a gift from one to another of the gods or demigods, or else it has been crafted by a god, or both. (The description of Achilles’ shield in The Iliad is probably the most famous example of ekphrasis, as the device is called.) The gift is always decorated with exquisite pictures, and the scenes depicted on the object form the substance of the digression.
What’s wonderful and mysterious about the device is that the scenes the poet describes are sometimes things that pictorial art could never, ever represent. They’re action sequences or feats of rhetoric or acts of sustained psychological meditation, or else they’re simply complex beyond the ability of visual art to convey. On a purely narrative plain, one assumes that the wondrousness of the object, the utter impossibility of its wealth of detail, is meant to be an index of its preciousness. On another level, the device may be a celebration of narrative itself.
Not long ago, I caught a glimpse of something I thought might be another possible function of the ekphrasis. It was toward the end of Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock, in which Bill Murray plays an aging vaudevillian with anticommunist leanings. He’s a ventriloquist who doesn’t know that vaudeville has had its day. Late in the movie, before a bored audience in a half-empty theater, he gives an impromptu farewell performance in which he purports to have a political falling out his dummy.
The puppet admits to having progressive sympathies. (“Ladies and gentlemen, this man exploits my labor for his own profits.”) Murray professes surprise (“In my own hand a revolutionary!”) and tries to reason with him, but the puppet gets the upper hand, launching into the first verse of “The Internationale,” and Murray ends up walking offstage without him.
It’s a an extraordinary scene. You can’t get a purchase on Murray’s character’s real viewpoint, or even attempt to describe what Murray the actor is himself doing. (Seeming to be not seeming to be doing something? Appearing to be not appearing to espouse something?) “Who’s the dummy now?” runs a line in the ventriloquist’s regular routine. The answer is “Everybody.” Everybody’s a puppet. All the voices are real. Both things are true.
The scene made me wonder if it might not be one of the purposes of the ekphrasis—that unrealistically realistic image—to remind us of the existence of truths too complex to be captured head-on, truths which can only be expressed in terms of some figure that presents a convergence of seemingly contradictory experiences.
Murray’s ventriloquist seemed to me to embody an ineffable truth about the intellectual paralysis of partisan politics in this country. Something of that paralysis was evident in the critical response to Cradle Will Rock itself. When it was released, Robbins’ film about the much-chronicled censoring of Marc Blitzstein’s labor opera The Cradle Will Rock, on its opening night in 1937, was largely dismissed or ignored—except where it was excoriated by professional intellectuals. These (a little like Murray’s ventriloquist in that scene, making a fool of himself, breaking his heart over things his audience couldn’t have cared less about) seemed chiefly interested in using the film as an opportunity to revisit old questions of who had or had not been a fellow traveler or a friendly witness. Which was too bad. There was a fair amount that was silly in the movie—good actors doing bad foreign accents or cast as real-life personages they had no business playing—but it had an unlooked-for integrity. Most accounts of the events surrounding the opening of The Cradle Will Rock either glorify the people involved in the incident—particularly the central figures, Orson Welles and John Houseman—or else they exaggerate its importance. Robbins did neither. He just seemed to want to capture the spirit of a time.
The story of how the very young Houseman and Welles, working together as producing-directing team, managed to turn what may or may not have been an act of government censorship into a history-making piece of pro-art and pro-union propaganda is something an actor could really only see in one way. It’s the only way one would wish to see that particular story enacted. (One might want to read a debunking of the legend, but what would be the point of seeing it dramatized?).
Whether the incident actually had any political content is very much open to question. It’s difficult not to come away from the gleeful account Houseman offers in his autobiography with the sense that he and Welles knew perfectly well that The Cradle Will Rock, which they were producing under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project, was not a victim of government censorship, and knew that the controversial WPA directive—which delayed “any new gallery exhibit or theatrical production” for a fortnight—was exactly what it purported to be, a routine response to congressional budget cuts. Houseman seems to suggest that he and Welles were a pair of brilliant publicity mongers who knew a terrific agitprop-op when they saw one.
The trouble with the American Left has always been its inability to hold on to more than one idea at a time. In this it resembles nothing so much as the American Right. Robbins’ film follows most of Welles’s biographers in suggesting that Government was knuckling under to the interests of Big Steel, whose factories and automobile plants were besieged that year by violence and labor agitation. The truth may be more complicated. Certainly the arts projects were a hotbed of radicalism. Very probably Congress was responding to right-wing pressure. That said, it’s also true that by 1937 the WPA had lost a lot of its former popularity—the arts projects especially—and that Congress was getting ready to plow the whole thing under. What’s more, everybody knew that. There’s no question that Houseman and Welles were a couple of canny opportunists. There’s also no question that strikers were getting shot in the back. There’s also no question that The Cradle Will Rock is a perfectly awful show. All of those things are true.
Another thing that reminded me of the ekphrasis recently was a snippet of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance that I saw late one night. I’d been mulling over the phenomenon of the movie-epic, in the context of the release of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. When I saw that TCM would be showing Intolerance, I realized I’d forgotten all about Griffith and his biblical and historical extravaganzas, so I decided to stay up and see at least the beginning.
What struck me during a particular scene in the Babylonian section—an aerial shot of bodies wriggling frantically before a colossal gate—was its utter pointlessness from any but a purely technical standpoint. Its beauty lay in the mere fact of motion and the idea that no one had ever been able to film a shot like it before. It was the ekphrasis realized, the static picture brought to life. I had a sudden glimpse of how exciting that must have been.
Since Gladiator opened, the retrospective cable stations have been showing older examples of the genre. Last week AMC broadcast The Fall of the Roman Empire, and a few weeks before that TCM showed Spartacus a couple of times. That movie was supposed to be the last great expression of the plight of the American Left. The two gladiators unwillingly matched in a battle to the death was Howard Fast’s metaphor for the predicament that McCarthyism had placed us all in: kill or be killed, destroy or be destroyed. Fast himself had actually been an unfriendly witness in the late 40s and gone to jail in 1950 for refusing to hand over the names of associates who, years before, had worked with him aiding refugees from Franco’s Spain.
After seeing Gladiator, I went so far as to read Fast’s novel. Like everyone else, I was curious as to why the summer’s first action picture seemed so curiously unembarrassing—almost hip, for a gladiator movie. Also, I’d noticed that the paired-combatants image got comparatively little play in the new movie. I found myself wondering about the provenance of the film’s most famous scene: where Laurence Olivier promises to spare the rebels from crucifixion provided that they identify their leader, and all, one by one, step forward and claim to be Spartacus. It was, of course, an inversion of “naming names,” but it appears nowhere in the novel. (Perhaps Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted writer who adapted the book for producer Kirk Douglas, got the idea for the sequence from Billy Wilder, whose 1953 prison camp drama, Stalag 17, had featured a similar scene.)
Vincent LoBrutto, a biographer of Stanley Kubrick, the film’s unwilling director, reports that Fast himself had wanted to adapt his own novel for the screen but had turned in a script that Douglas and Kubrick found unworkable (“lacking in the dramatic power that Douglas saw in the book”). Maybe it was unworkable. Maybe Fast was a perfectly terrible screenwriter. But maybe he wasn’t.
Maybe Fast’s script only seemed undramatic because it preserved his original conception, which was to tell the story of the slave rebellion without ever having Spartacus appear as a character. Fast’s novel begins where the movie ends (the rebellion has already been put down), and it mostly follows a group of wealthy travelers on a journey between Rome and Capua. Fast cheats a bit toward the end, but the first three quarters or so of the book consist entirely of conversations about Spartacus among people who never saw him, prompted by the sight of the crucifixes that line the Appian Way.
Not every image is well served by being embodied. Spartacus isn’t great writing by any means; it’s genre fiction—agitprop and proud of it—but it’s a hell of a lot more sophisticated than the movie Kirk Douglas insisted on making. Fast wasn’t trying to dramatize an historical incident, he was trying to suggest something about the revolutionary spirit. (Can’t we please talk about something other than Spartacus, people in the book keep asking, and the answer turns out to be, No.) Fast seems to have realized that to represent a mythic figure in any more concrete way would have been to open the door to vulgarity. Douglas, who wanted an heroic role to play, preferably one with social importance, missed this.
What a dilemma the film must have posed to the intellectual Left: that great rhetoric on the one hand, and on the other the mortifying spectacle of all those guys rushing around in loincloths and rubber pants. If Ridley Scott’s movie seems less tasteless, more knowing, that’s only partly the lack of shiny torsos and overdetermined music. More likely, it’s because it isn’t really a gladiator movie at all, but a backstage musical, a genre that—as people keep pointing out—disappeared around the same time as hem-of-the-garment pictures and sword-and-sandal epics. Essentially, Gladiator echoes the plot of all those Depression-era movies (like 42nd Street and the Golddigger series) that were about getting off the breadline by becoming a star. Their subtext, the American ideal that Hollywood wanted to express at the time, was that if you were truly special and talented (and willing to work hard) you would prevail.
A Chorus Line changed all that. Where the goal of heroines in the 1930s musicals had been to get out of the chorus, Michael Bennett’s concept musical was about a star who wanted to get back into the chorus. Her style was too distinctive and she couldn’t get work anymore. She just wanted a job. If A Chorus Line virtually killed off the backstage musical by turning the genre’s ethos on its head, it’s interesting that Gladiator seems to take such an interest in relegitimizing the show-business work ethic. Win the crowd, people keep telling each other. Rome is the mob. “The beating heart of Rome is the sand of the Colosseum.” The picture only really comes to life in that scene in which the late Oliver Reed begins waxing eloquent about performing at the Colosseum. The thrill of it all! You’re starting to get misty-eyed along with him until you realize he’s talking about the Roman equivalent of snuff movies.
Except that he isn’t: he’s talking about acting. What’s interesting about Gladiator is that it’s the first Hollywood epic to confront the basic hypocrisy inherent in the intellectual extravaganza. Naively, the genre always strove to marry spectacle with high moral purpose. But that can’t be done. You can’t wow people with your extravagance and glorify American imperialism or Christianity at the same time. You can’t glorify anything at the same that you’re trying to wow people with your extravagance. You can only glorify yourself.
At least Gladiator knows this. At least it’s honest about who and what it’s glorifying. It is, after all, a post-Chorus Line backstage musical. The figure that Russell Crowe most closely resembles isn’t Ruby Keeler, the hoofer-turned-star, but Warner Baxter, the director/producer. From the beginning Crowe is presented as a director: he choreographs war (“At my signal, unleash hell!”); the very battles he fights are half about spectacle, and in the Colosseum he turns his men into a team of synchronized dancers. It’s Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg that this movie glorifies. All that rhetoric about winning the crowd and making the mob love you: they’re talking about us.
So how come it doesn’t seem smug? Why isn’t it obscene? It may actually be the much-despised computer-imaging sequences that save the picture: all those beautiful shots of a blue-black pseudo-Rome. For one thing, they are beautiful. They’re also stylized: they never for a moment seem intended to be realistic. The mob scenes in the Colosseum were evidently created by using the same image of a few people moving their arms repeated over and over, which explains the balletic quality of those shots. (They’re also art-directed so as to resemble all those paintings by Poussin—something about a particular orangey shade of red.) It’s as though the self-conscious echo of reality in the constructed images adds an echo to what the movie is really saying, that the only real power worth having is the power to entertain—but, after all, this is only a movie.