Review: A Little Chaos

The movie A Little Chaos initially sets out to do the impossible: sex up a story about André Le Nôtre, the seventeenth-century garden designer responsible for the meticulously curated landscape of the Palace of Versailles.  It does this by imagining a scenario in which it was not Le Nôtre who designed a small, cleverly cascading Salle de bal at Versailles in the early 1680s, but a female landscape architect named Sabine de Barra, played intelligently by Kate Winslet.  The movie itself embraces the visual precision of the best British period dramas, with each detail of manner, setting, and costume carefully calibrated on a level to match the expansive historical setting.  The tone, however, is peculiar—it’s much more fanciful (the lush emotional whimsy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream kept coming to mind) than its designation as a period drama would suggest.

The plot of A Little Chaos attempts the kind of historical fiction that I find most intriguing—it inserts a plausible fictional character into a universe of famous historical figures whose philosophies and behaviors may be illuminated by presence of this new actor.  The creation of Sabine de Barra further serves another master by seeming to expose previously hidden narratives that embrace modern sensibilities.  A woman of middling social class, who, when pressed, answers honestly that she has “no blood” to speak of, skillfully executing projects in a male profession during an era where only the wealthiest women truly possessed a measure of freedom in their social dealings—what could go wrong?  How could she not attract the appreciation and, eventually, romantic love of the stoic master Le Nôtre?  The one true factual accuracy in the movie is that romance was in the air when Louis XIV held court at Versailles.

A confrontation between Sabine de Barra and Le Nôtre early in the film both exposes the trends in design philosophy that governed the creation of the gardens and presents a subtle realization of gender politics that I wish it didn’t.  When Le Nôtre inspects the plans that Sabine de Barra submitted as a job application, he asks her, “Are you a believer in order?”  She evades the question by answering, “Well, I admire it.”  Pressed further, she continues: “Order seems to demand we look back to Rome or to the Renaissance.  What I’m saying… surely there is something uniquely French as yet not celebrated by us which needs the rules of order to attain it.”  Le Nôtre interprets her statements as an insult to his life’s work and gruffly dismisses her from their meeting.  On the face of it, she does challenge Le Nôtre’s claim to fame, his celebrated ability to impose rigorous order on living landscapes prone to disorder.  Mme de Barra’s designs, in contrast, consistently incorporate a modicum of chaos—one planter out of place in a complex concentric layout, creative structures that allow living plants room to alter the landscape as they grow.  As Le Nôtre and Mme de Barra grow closer together, he ably tames her emotional troubles, which I shall not spoil here, in the same way he tames the wild foliage in his gardens.  She serves his slightly wild inspiration, and he is her stabilizing benefactor. 

The kernel of truth in the plot developments outlined above is that order was, indeed, Le Nôtre’s guiding principle.  I cannot speak for the history of gardening, except to note that English gardens, even those designed by men, prized the disorder preferred by Mme de Barra.  However, in the long history of landscape painting, assigning gender roles followed crisper lines.  The landscape painter—characterized as virile, focused, inherently male—tames the landscape—unruly, unprincipled, feminine—through fixing its image on canvas.  Doctrines suggesting that landscape painters adhere to celibacy and travel alone in the name of expanding their abilities to exert power over the wilderness held sway until far into the nineteenth century.   Le Nôtre lets the “little chaos” that Mme de Barra represents into his life as a man would agree to marriage—a philosophical union that will forward his greater goals.  Recognizing these fault lines of masculine/feminine and order/chaos in their discussions of gardens probably remains reserved for art historians familiar with landscape theory, but the film exposes these divisions further when Mme de Barra arrives at court in Fontainebleau and is spirited away by the wives and mistresses to a room where the women sit alone and talk.  As the other women question Mme de Barra about her past, they begin to commiserate about the losses they’ve experienced—and which the king forbids them from discussing at court.  Grief and sadness are clearly viewed as unruly emotions that should be confined to women’s spaces, while order reigns in court.  It’s more upsetting that A Little Chaos cloaks this dichotomous position in a narrative that seems, on the surface, to celebrate a woman’s skill and intelligence.

It’s not like A Little Chaos is a movie that revels in facts.  For example, re-envisioning Le Nôtre as a strapping, long-haired, dreamy-eyed man in his prime ignores the fact that he would have been sixty-nine years old in the year the narrative begins.  Though it’s not entirely impossible that enough stars could have aligned for a woman, through unorthodox means, to attain a position in Le Nôtre’s orbit, this movie seems to deliberately evade suggestions of prejudice regarding gender or social class that someone like Mme de Barra probably would have faced.  The courtiers treat her as a curiosity they can collect for her merits, and even that potential condescension is soft-edged here.  The only malicious intent comes in the form of Le Nôtre’s wife, who functions as almost a cartoon villain—confronting and sabotaging, but never surpassing the level of “women’s” squabbles.  The fact remains that, though Mme de Barra is pure fiction, there are movies like Martin Scorsese’s Hugo that operate similarly between fact and fiction and maintain the historical truths of the setting in furthering the story through newly created characters.  A Little Chaos needed to choose between adhering to facts or proposing a truly fantastical history anchored in a familiar universe, instead of presenting a harmfully gendered, yet ultimately toothless drama that disappoints in its lost potential.

Traveling: Jewels of Marseille

I mentioned in the previous post that I had entered a travel writing competition about a month ago.  Part of the application asked for a short piece that highlighted a "travel discovery," a unique site or experience that to recommend to other travelers with enthusiasm.  What's copied below is my entry, which was not selected to move on in the competition.  I don't know if my attempts to emulate the tone they sought were any good, but the sentiments are sincere.  The photograph at the bottom is the specific moment I was thinking about when I wrote it.

I wasn’t sure I was going to Marseille until I walked into the train station and bought a ticket in my halting French.

Even my most ardently Francophilic friends had advised against going there—its gritty urban modernity seemed antithetical to all the storied charms of French life. I didn’t want to believe them, but I wasn't sure if I could prove them wrong.

The train took me to the center of town, where I descended the steep, dirty steps of the train station into the pockets of cramped neighborhoods that lay wrapped together between the sea and the surrounding mountains. As I followed the wide central boulevards that led to the harbor, the people around me chattered vibrantly, moving between markets and cafes, settling into their morning routines as I began to smell the sweetly fishy greeting of the Mediterranean waters.

I trembled as I stepped onto the ferry that would take me to the Château d’If, a legendary prison fortress on an island just offshore, and tried to conquer my nervous fear of boats by securing my hat and sunglasses. I closed my eyes as the boat moved into open waters, delivering us to the island with a welcome briskness that sent a salty breeze rifling through my hair.

It only struck me as I stepped off the ferry how strange it was that the woman in the tourism office had viewed a visit to an isolated prison as representative of the city. I moved quickly and uncomfortably through the Château d’If’s interior thinking how confinement in one of its abyss-like stone cells would affect a person’s mind and body. Hurrying toward the exit, I became eager to see the sun even if it meant the ferry ride had been a waste.

I stepped outside and stopped short, breathless.

From my viewpoint outside the fortress walls, I saw the bustling lows of the harbors swoop up toward the tips of the city’s mountains, where churches rest to maintain watch over the comings and goings of valuable cargo ships and beloved sailors. Even this expanse seemed minute as I noticed the additional shadowy mountains that peeped up beyond the urban panorama, foggy masses framing the city in blue and grey.

Eager to see more, I stepped closer to the island’s edge, where water playfully sloshed against the rocky shores. And then I knew my friends had been mistaken—myriad teals, turquoises, and blues stretched out before me into the expanse between the island and the city. The luminescent clarity of these jewel-toned waters proved that Marseille does, indeed, guard treasures.

Traveling: The Eiffel Tower

During this time of year, school ends, and those who benefit from long summer breaks flee to all corners of the world for research, leisure travel, and other edifying experiences.  For each of the past four summers, I numbered among these travelers, and now as I sit at home contemplating the future, I see my friends leaving for their new experiences, instagramming the oddities of living abroad, expressing their excitement at seeing a new painting or trying a new food.  It’s not precisely that I am jealous, though I would certainly love to know that I could jet off to somewhere intriguing.  Last week, I entered a travel writing competition because it seemed like all the travel memories I hold in my brain could be mobilized for something more fulfilling.

The first time I went to France, I was seventeen and had just graduated from high school.  As an inexperienced traveler on a ten-day educational trip, it served primarily as an introduction to life abroad and to big name, legendary sites that had seemed like fantasies before I saw them with my own eyes.  When I first went to France to start dissertation research in 2011, I knew the experience had to be something different and more productive—that I had to dig more deeply and broadly to understand the culture I meant to study.  That said, my favorite place in the city turned out to be a place that had been a central feature of that first trip: the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower. 

The Eiffel Tower has such a terrible reputation among many people I know who travel regularly.  In some ways, it’s a clear demonstration of everything that’s wrong with tourism as an industry.  During portions of the year, people swarm to the tower in droves, looking up instead of being aware of their surroundings, snapping picture after picture before paying an exorbitant fee to wait in line to take more pictures of the view.  No wonder, then, that pickpockets threaten these distracted tourists, and people who prize authenticity in their travel experiences disdain going anywhere near the Eiffel Tower with a disproportionately ferocious “been there, done that” attitude.

I understand the negative views of the area surrounding the Eiffel Tower and also that they can’t solely be combatted by the fact that, if you stand in just the right place, the view looks exactly like the above—like Paris in all its genius planning, activity, and glory.  It has always seemed to me that the Tower itself represents a useful historical intersection of the strife-filled years of the nineteenth-century that preceded its construction in 1889 and the coming uninhibited technological modernity whose beginnings remain apparent in its lacy ironwork and, for Paris, its exceptional stature.  To object to the tourist fashioning of its superficial symbolism is one complaint, but it’s worth considering how Paris itself has used this structure to characterize the city in popular media.  Any quick survey of Eiffel Tower history will tell you about its origins in the Exposition Universelle (the same one that inspired Gauguin to head to the South Pacific), its continued prominence in the advent of film and avant-garde theater in the early twentieth century, and then describe how it still serves as central to aspects of French cultural life—including the Bastille Day fireworks that crown the Tower in fire and colored lights every July 14th.

From that history, I believe it is possible to find peace in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.  The lawn at the Trocadéro is one of the few non-museum places in Paris that I have returned to again and again, bringing a book to read for awhile and absorb the bustling city.  I like watching the Tower change, knowing that the hours are passing when the cannons at the Trocadéro majestically fire and splash water all over the lawn or the Tower sparkles and everyone “oohs” and “ahhs” together.  Even as I dodge the men selling tacky metal keychains and grasp harder at my purse, the Eiffel Tower grounds my professional expertise in the fascination I feel for France and its art and culture.

Humor and Public Intellectualism

The Atlantic recently published an article entitled “How Comedians Became Public Intellectuals,” which suggests that, as people like Amy Schumer, John Oliver, and others have become more political, they have ascended beyond just making jokes to creating salient cultural commentary.  The article, on the whole, probably seems like common knowledge to anyone who has been regularly watching The Daily Show for years, but it hangs the proposed shift of comedians into public intellectuals on the power of the internet.  As more people share Amy Schumer’s sketches or John Oliver’s rants on facebook and they go viral, they become part of mainstream conversation, and as the author Megan Garber declares, comedians have become the “intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.”

I am a person who follows comedy pretty closely—I watch The Daily Show and The Nightly Show, gut out every episode of Saturday Night Live, try to keep up with stand-up specials, listen to Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast, and so on.  Comedy appeals to me as a sort of alchemical science, and I enjoy hearing its respected technicians explain their philosophies on constructing their acts or writing their shows.  Many of the funniest people I respect most view themselves as writers more than anything else and express a level of professionalism that belies the spontaneity of their stage personas.  I’ve listened to Tina Fey’s audio book six or seven times.  I like comedians who make political points and skillfully negotiate thorny social issues in ways that social commentators cannot.  See, for example, Chris Rock’s recent profile in Rolling Stone.

The last few times that I taught college courses I joked to my friends that the bulk of my class prep came in the form of listening to George Carlin’s stand-up albums.  Or rather, I think they thought that I was joking, and I was not.  What I actually did was listen to his stand-up while going over my notes before class, rehearsing the things I intended to say directly to my students, marking places for improvisation and noting potential objections that I’d need to anticipate.   I’ve always loved George Carlin above all because his best work functions like a good writer must.  Smart and incisive, he seems to scan the available ideas on the subjects that interest him or confuse him, and he locates his humor in the places where the available information fails to align.  Demonstrating logic serves as the core of his humor; he made his listeners laugh at themselves because any other option would be silly.

With all of that in mind, I’m interested in this article because it has appeared during a time when the definition of “public intellectual” is up for debate.  Academics active in social media or blogging have recently suffered the pitfalls of the lack of clarity in this definition, with their qualifications and even their jobs called into question over ideas they posted, with varying levels of care, on Twitter or other platforms.  Comics have long been subject to a similar level of scrutiny, with many seeking to draw controversy that will, perhaps, draw many more followers to their material.  However, the difference between comics and scholars remains that many do still brush off sketches and bits as “just jokes” when the content pushes limits or turns racy—where scholars supposedly engage in “serious” work, comics have room to play. 

So it’s important to note this fusion of comedy to intellectualism, and praise the fact that these new, more diverse, more astute faces have replaced the yokel-ish humor of a Larry the Cable Guy or a Jeff Foxworthy that dominated mainstream perceptions of comedy not too long ago.  Allying humor with politics allows social movements (ahem, feminism) frequently decried as humorless to more readily dispel the negative stereotypes that hold them back.  However, I’m concerned that no such positive protection extends to academic commentators presenting truth-based arguments in the name of being public intellectuals. 

If, as The Atlantic’s article posits, the shift toward viewing comedians as public intellectuals means that jokes are no longer only dismissed as such, intellectuals—specifically university professors—have no equivalent leeway.  This paradigm is fine while people like Amy Schumer and John Oliver use their powers for good instead of evil, but I wonder what could happen if scholars learned more from comedians.  Earlier today I saw an article that described how Aziz Ansari, best known for Parks and Recreation, is collaborating with a sociologist, Eric Klinenberg, on a book about how technology affects contemporary romance.  I’m not sure how about this as a potential trend, but it’s worth asking what it says about how we view comics and scholars alike when their collaboration alters the results of research. 

Documenting Kurt Cobain, Part 4: Genius

(This is the final part of a series of four posts presented in relation to the premiere of Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck on HBO on May 4.  This post seeks a post-review wrap-up of some issues in writing biography that I have pursued in earlier posts.)

Under the bridge where Kurt Cobain hung out in Aberdeen, Washington.

Van Gogh's grave in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

Part of the disturbing narrative that surrounds Kurt Cobain, and which Montage of Heck seeks to suppress, turns on romanticized notions of dying young.  People make note of the 27 Club, for example, which numbers Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, and Cobain among its “members” who all died at the age of twenty-seven.  There was controversy last year when the singer Lana Del Ray stated that early death seemed glamorous to her, and Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt’s daughter, scolded her on Twitter, writing that “the death of young musicians isn't something to romanticize.”  The language used to talk about these people who died young celebrates the quality of their artistic output, but it also inextricably allies that output with intense aspects of their personalities.  Art Historians, too, often confront the “genius myth”—that is, the idea that the most celebrated of artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and so on, exhibit almost supernatural qualities that place their abilities above those of their contemporaries and render them unassailable in evaluating aspects of their work or biographies that might undermine the overall product of their genius.

This genius myth is not unlike the challenges faced by Brett Morgen, the director of Montage of Heck, in trying to humanize Kurt Cobain, but the rhetoric is still problematic.  Continuously throughout the film, both Morgen and the interview subjects describe Cobain in words that call to mind these other artistic geniuses, especially Vincent Van Gogh, whose legacy has been similarly altered by the role of the artist’s writings in interpreting his art.  In Montage of Heck, this tone is established early—an interview with Cobain’s sister includes her saying, in awe, how “that genius brain” of his never stopped churning.  From her manner, it’s clear this is not simply a figure of speech, but a meaningful categorization—an elevation—of her brother’s intellect.  In turning to Van Gogh, his letters immediately indicate an interest in defining genius.  He viewed genius in contrast to mere talent, but, perhaps as a result of his penchant for hard work, insisted that “theory and training” were not “always useless by the nature of the thing.”

My comparison of these two men on these grounds may seems arbitrary, but Montage of Heck furthers a genius narrative by building symbolism through the extremity of Cobain’s feelings.  I view this as a means of cultivating an idea that the one who experiences the most extreme feelings is the most perceptive observer.  At one point, Morgen prompts Courtney Love with a question asking if Cobain just “felt things a little more intensely,” again setting him apart from an average person.  Love responds with a fabulist story about how she had considered cheating and her husband somehow just knew, and this betrayal, she says, precipitated his suicide attempt in Rome about two months before he died.  He felt things too deeply and reacted disproportionately.  This strain of feeling “too much” and “too strongly” resonates through pop culture perceptions of Van Gogh; his personal forays into color theory, the harsh greens and yellows that supposedly embodied his feelings, encapsulate the heightened nature of his sensations.   He describes his own feelings as a “vague background sadness” and a melancholy that prevents him from reading or working.

The choice of these words is certainly not exclusive to figures like Cobain and Van Gogh, and the language participates in familiar tropes about artistic figures who suffer from depression (see also: Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace).  However, it’s worrisome that they persist so poetically in a documentary that purports to bring its subject back down to earth—Montage of Heck doesn’t quite dispel the idea that such extreme suffering gave Cobain access to the unique emotional tools that allowed him to produce memorable music.  Another common feature of these tragic artist narratives is the determinedness of their stories, the idea that they were on a collision course for disaster.  Montage of Heck highlights this, too, by featuring a writing animation that focuses on the Cobain’s declaration that “Nothing’s gonna save me” and then “(Goes without saying).”  Van Gogh similarly alludes to his increasingly foundering practice when, in his last unsent letter to his brother, Theo, he writes, “Ah well, I risk my life for my own work and my reason has half foundered in it.”

I readily admit two flaws in what I have written above: 1) at times I compare other peoples’ words about Cobain to Van Gogh’s own words, and 2) because I am speaking here of how genius and tragedy become conflated, some of these recurring elements also appear frequently in narratives that consider struggles with mental illnesses.  Depression, especially, figures into considerations of both these men, and it must do so, but excavating undiagnosed mental illnesses is a dangerous game.  In contrast, placing Kurt Cobain in the continuum of artistic melancholy that stretches throughout art history, including Van Gogh, is not remotely difficult.  However, it remains interesting to me that, despite the general unwillingness of scholars to take psychological elements of biography seriously, the genius myth persists.  It’s worth breaking down the components of this myth to ask what these (mostly) male artists can continue to boast without its cover.  With Montage of Heck, we cannot say it truly humanizes its subject if retains his exceptionalism in emphasizing his suffering.