LAST DAYS (Gus Van Sant, 2005)

The sell-out of Portland, Oregon’s Gus Van Sant to Hollywood (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester) seemed to slap a tombstone on the career of a genuine artist (Mala Noche, Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho). But his conscience and his soul must have shown Van Sant the light and helped him to find such stunning artistic rebirth that this event will stand forever as an inspiration to artists who have lost their way and wandered into the dank swamp of commercialism. (Some, alas, have toiled all their days there.) Courage! his example proclaims; There is yet hope. Now Van Sant has completed the trilogy that marks this rebirth. Last Days, Van Sant has said, is “a meditation on isolation, death and loss.” The same could be said about the first two installments of the trilogy, Gerry (2001) and Elephant (2003). In Gerry, death comes from Nature—from natural causes—as two young men, alone, lose their way in the desert. In Elephant, death comes from mass murder in a high school, in which other students no less than the killers are each isolated in a difficult adolescent life. In Last Days, in a remote natural setting, a beleaguered man tries desperately to find space all his own before drifting and stumbling into suicide. (An incredibly moving shot afterwards, as the camera ascends a ladder, suggests that this man’s spirit has found this space at last.) Last Days, like the incomparably beautiful and haunting Elephant, confirms Van Sant’s place in the pantheon of great American film artists, along with Chaplin, Keaton, Ford, Lynch, Flaherty, Jost and Welles.

Much, including his appearance, tells us that the film’s main character, Blake, is based on Kurt Cobain, guitarist, lead singer, composer and lyricist for the grunge band Nirvana in the 1990s. Cobain became addicted to heroin, which helped him cope with pain from stomach ulcers. He committed suicide—it may have been his second attempt—when he was 27 years old. Haunting life’s dead-ends, Cobain’s songs include “Lithium,” which many take to be about a man on the verge of taking his life. Last Days depicts in a fashion both highly particular and nearly abstract the last two days or so of the protagonist’s life.

Cobain was born in 1967 in a small town near Seattle; he died in Seattle in 1994. His young parents divorced when he was eight, and he was passed from one relative to another, ending up, at times, homeless. He withdrew into himself. Like the killers in Elephant, he was targeted for abuse, in Aberdeen, by high school “jocks” and called “queer.” (He would later say defiantly, “I’m not gay, but I wish I was just to piss off the homophobes.”) Nirvana was born in Olympia in 1986 and became, a few years later, one of the world’s most popular bands, highlighted by the intensity of Cobain’s onstage performances and the brilliance of his guitar-playing. (In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine adjudged Cobain to be the twelfth greatest guitarist of all time.) In 1992, Cobain married Courtney Love, who was pregnant with their daughter, and who had her own band, Hole, was a few years older and more than two inches taller than he. Many Cobain fans have painted her as the bane of his existence, and there have been tabloid rumors of the most dispiriting kind. (Grasping at squaws?)

Certainly Blake in Last Days draws heavily upon Cobain. However, Van Sant’s film is yet more personal. For Blake also suggests another Pacific Northwesterner (from Madras, Oregon) and a contemporary of Cobain’s, whom Van Sant befriended when he directed him in a legendary performance in My Own Private Idaho (1991): River Phoenix, whose inadvertent drug overdose triggered a fatal heart attack, at 24, less than six months prior to Cobain’s death. River’s death left Van Sant grief-stricken, and his 1997 novel, Pink, was written so that he might work his way through the grief. Van Sant remains, of course, haunted by the loss of this friend.

While the film is largely composed of Blake’s seemingly random, haphazard actions and activities during his last days, including eating a bowl of cereal and making macaroni and cheese, it is bookended by music: the King Sisters’ gorgeous rendition of “La Guerre,” a choral piece apparently from the early sixteenth century, by French composer Clément Jannequin, or Janequin, or Jancquin. The sound of this recording, in effect, contains the film, imparting an otherworldly feel to it in contradistinction to the film’s cut-and-dried realistic matter and minutia. One may say, therefore, the film comprises opposite motives: the earthly and mundane, and the spiritual; the seemingly random and scattered, and the formally rich, rounded and complete. The co-existence of these opposites is correlative to the film’s attention to Blake’s last days and the eternity to follow.

There is a wonderful shot in which Blake walks past a tree and the camera remains fixed on the tree once Blake has walked out of the frame. It is a technique that Robert Bresson often employs with rooms and doors and other objects. In Last Days, the juxtaposition is between Blake’s transience, his restless, anxious spirit, and the tree’s sturdiness and permanence (its treeness)—like the stars in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Self-Dependence” that chide the anxious poet with their composure and effortless radiance (their starriness). Blake, in flux, will shortly pass from earth, but the tree will remain. This contrast is sufficient to claim a kind of brilliance for the shot. However, there is even more to it; for by holding the shot of the tree at such protracted length, Van Sant is able to extract from its materiality the opposite: the spiritual life that the tree’s integrity implies. In this shot, materiality yields to spirituality, thingness to mystery, before our eyes, telescoping Blake’s odyssey through three days the third day of which is the moment of resurrection and eternity.

Like Elephant, this is a film of long takes; shots, like the one of the tree, are held a long time as a matter of course. There is much in the film to suggest Van Sant’s familiarity with the minimalist work of Belgium’s Chantal Äkerman; long takes of mundane kitchen activity, especially, recall passages in Je, tu, il, elle (1974) and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brüxelles (1975), in the latter of which the accumulation of such moments prefaces the implosion of the main character. Something like that also happens in Last Days.

Van Sant employs another technique, borrowed from the cinema of another contemporary of his, Hungary’s Béla Tarr, that he also used to mind-bending advantage in Elephant: a looped-around action giving us a different perspective on the action as it is replayed—picked up—from a new perspective. This, like the shot of the tree, likewise contributes to the film’s thematic development. It implies an elasticity of time that again, in turn, implies the soul’s journey from one dimension to another, from the mundane that fills, possibly anchors, life to something more complete beyond.

Roger Ebert has correctly noted Van Sant’s refusal to manufacture drama in order to explain, or explain away, Blake’s behavior and actions. (This, too, is Bressonian.) This makes Last Days very pure, nondramatic, unaffected. To view it is to feel one’s soul refreshed.

In line with this, Last Days eschews the sensationalism in which media coverage of Kurt Cobain’s death indulged. For instance, Cobain’s suicide takes place off-screen. Van Sant’s approach to his material allows the viewer throughout to roam the film with his or her anonymity, humanity and imagination intact. Moreover, the camera’s ascension of the ladder as Blake’s spirit approaches nirvana is given a heartfelt lift by our not having seen Blake’s last mortal act. Van Sant has created a work of great dignity.

How, then, has Van Sant achieved his own artistic resurrection? He has taken to heart and mind films by filmmakers he greatly admires, and he has meditated on their aims and accomplishments in order to search out what in himself spiritually identifies with these. He has applied to his art Arnold’s lesson in “Self-Dependence,” which I revise for contextual relevance here: Resolve to be thyself; and know that he/ Who finds himself loses Hollywood.

And for the third film in a row, Gus Van Sant has made Portlanders, including me, grateful and proud.

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SHADOW OF A DOUBT (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)

To the end Shadow of a Doubt remained Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite among his sixty-odd films. His fifth American film but only the second whose action unfolds in the States (whereas Saboteur, 1942, the first, begins in California and ends in New York, Shadow begins in New York City and ends in California), it already reveals his grasp of his newly adopted country’s social and moral landscape; a BankAmerica tower looms over the heart of the small town where most of the film is set. Armed with the antiestablishmentarianism he had brought over from England, which would assist in his becoming a soft-spoken prophet against American materialism and mammonism, Hitchcock observed also a terrible loneliness in the States—a theme that would eventually lead to his masterpiece, Psycho (1960). Relatively rare in a ‘rootless’ society predicated on individualism, family life—so much more central in Britain—might at best help defend one against this loneliness, when indeed family itself didn’t instigate or exacerbate the loneliness instead. The ‘average American family’ in Shadow of a Doubt, the Newtons of Santa Rosa, California, are but a façade of emotional strength and mental health, built by affectionate love and nostalgia, behind which we find two delightful children and their undelighted elders: a sister self-described as being “in a rut,” aimless and discontent; a father who is unable to assert himself in the household’s mini-matriarchy; a mother and wife who sees herself only as an appendage to others; and Uncle Charlie, her younger brother visiting from New York, who “has secrets” and hides from the police, for unbeknownst to the others he is a serial killer, the ‘Merry Widow Murderer.’

One of Hitchcock’s two finest films of the ’40s (the other is Notorious, 1946) suggests novels by Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters—authors who grappled with American loneliness and aberrant behavior. But to arrive at their bracing notion that in the United States the ‘mainstream’ itself is composed of aberrations, Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson and the Hitchcocks (the filmmaker and his indispensable partner, wife Alma Reville) created their extraordinary screenplay from a story idea by Gordon McDonnell. Charlie Oakley is a driven and exhausted man. Despising human greed, he seduces and strangles “fat, useless women” who, loving their jewelry only, have acquired their wealth and liberty by outliving the husbands they harried to death. Hitchcock’s heroine—this angel of vengeance’s niece, his namesake—and even Hitchcock share in Uncle Charlie’s protest: Young Charlie refers to “souls” as being more important than money; and Hitchcock shows us one ostentatious widow as Charlie too must see her. But whereas the girl finds her uncle’s sick distortion of a sound moral attitude a wall to shatter her innocence upon, Hitchcock takes a more comprehensive tack, viewing Oakley’s sociopathic antimaterialism as the extreme reactive consequence of the social and corporate preoccupation with wealth and profit—money—that grips the land. The fact that the father of the girl is a bank clerk tightens the motif; for even the Newtons’ modest income comes from money. Moreover, this self-begetting inwardness crosses another motif: that of a complicated inwardness of family life, for which Emma Newton’s heartbreaking adoration of her brother—a bicycling accident that nearly cost the boy his life has extended her childhood sense of closeness with him—provides a powerful instance.

This ‘inwardness’ is more complicated yet; for Emma, by naming her first-born, although a girl, after her brother has helped make her daughter the embodiment of this sibling attachment of hers, pressuring Young Charlie into a similar attachment to—and more: an identification with—this esteemed uncle and, at the same time, somewhat shutting out from his own marriage and family life her husband, Joe, whose spousal and fatherly replacement the largely absent Charlie has become. Marriage sometimes poorly competes with nostalgia; Emma’s infatuation with her past her brother’s sudden visit has woken from dormancy into obsessiveness, and, discounting the mock-couplings of his widow-murders, Charlie himself has remained a bachelor. Hitchcock in no way suggests that Emma and Joe are a marital mismatch or mishap; but Emma’s attachment to her brother has unmistakably imposed on her relationship with Joe a limit to which they have both had to adjust. After all, our capacity to respond to all the claims made on our emotional attention is finite, and the surfeit of attention that Charlie still receives—Emma jokes about how ‘the youngest’ is always spoiled—siphons attention from elsewhere, even as Emma remains devoted to Joe and her children—and all the more so, before Charlie’s visit, ironically, to compensate for his absence. Emma’s fixation on her brother, at its outer reach, is a defense against death—a defense against her mortal awareness; for if her daughter, for her, embodies her brother, it is equally the case that, by his boyhood brush with death, her brother has enforced her knowingness about the frailty of human life. More than anything else this distances Emma from Joe, who, God love the American lug, is in no way a worrier like her but someone instead who explains worry away and tries to take things easily as they come. Indeed, Joe is even immune to the mortal implications of his favorite pastime, wherein he and his best friend, Herb, share imaginary plans on how best to kill one another and get away with it. For Joe, this is a way of relaxing after a hard (and demeaning) day of unimaginative work at the bank; but the playful exercise makes of human death an objectifiable “thing”—a plaything. To Emma, on the other hand, death is a force constantly threatening to deprive her of those she loves.

Her family provides Emma with a means for coping with her fears; but, like most parents, she worries, too, about the safety of her children—and all the more when, unbeknownst to her engineered by her own brother, “accidents” start befalling Young Charlie. Having learned the truth about her murderous uncle, Charlie receives Uncle Charlie as the embodiment of her own mortal fear, which, for her, his presence now triggers. This new view of him in fact completes Young Charlie’s first view of him as he exited the train at its Santa Rosa stop, for he appeared then, to her, “sick”—the prelude to her gradual discovery of how mentally sick he really is.

Charlie Oakley is, in a way, the celebrated American loner and rugged individualist pushed to the extreme of dementia. He suggests to us, as well as his niece, the mortal fear that American myth, cultural and political, works mightily to suppress—a fear that also accounts for American eleutheromania and money-mania. Through Uncle Charlie, moreover, we are pointedly reminded of the ruthlessness that lurks behind much great American benefaction; for, from the wealth he amassed by converting into cash the jewels of his victims, he establishes in Santa Rosa a philanthropic fund that survives both his stay and his life. (His niece kills him when he tries to kill her on a quickening train; Hitchcock shoots the event, among the most memorable of his passages, as though Young Charlie were warding off her uncle’s attempt to rape her.) Young Charlie is the only one of the townsfolk who knows about Uncle Charlie’s secret criminal life; with the detective who exposed to her this life (a man she may marry) she stands outside the church while her uncle is being memorialized within—Hitchcock’s ironic musing at the civic good with which bloody evil is inextricably intertwined, certainly in America and perhaps elsewhere. In response to a scurrilous book, Patricia Hitchcock, the director’s daughter (and the model for the precocious younger daughter in this film), has remarked that her father didn’t really have a “dark side.” Probably true; but he saw the dark side of American life.

And he directed Shadow of a Doubt with great patience, eschewing titillation for the sake of a rich American canvas. Also, his is a film of great technical facility. I especially like, in a scene in the library, an upswooping crane shot that seems to take out from under her Young Charlie’s legs once a newspaper story confirms her worst suspicions about Uncle Charlie and about the jewel he has given her as a gift. Entrancing also is the low-hung, upwardly tilted camera that captures that rooftop spectacle of lights ‘BankAmerica’—the film’s symbolical vortex, a tower seemingly ripping the heavens in sacramental mischief: human greed opposing the Holy Ghost. In truth, though, every shot in the film is fine and fresh, and, with the help of Joseph Valentine’s superlative black-and-white cinematography, the motif of smoke as a moral clouding and peril is developed with especial brilliance. Only one element grates: Dimitri Tiomkin’s pushy music—although the ominous use of the “Merry Widow” waltz is another matter entirely. This tune haunts while underscoring one of the film’s great themes: the seductive though dangerous nature of nostalgia that casts an unblemished glow on the past at the expense of a more complex present that requires our most committed attention if we are morally and emotionally to navigate it. (The repeated dissolves showing graceful couples engaged in ballroom dancing underscore Oakley’s sentimental nostalgia, his longing for an idealized past.)The genius of Hitchcock divests this theme of misleading political attack, for it helps us to see (I am writing in the year 2000) the reactionary kinship between Ronald Reagan’s conservatism and Steven Spielberg’s sentimental liberalism, where the latter replaces the historical past with childhood as the object of adoration, converting it, too, into a pathological fetish.

The acting is splendid—a given in most of Hitchcock. Even if Charlie is conceived a tad naively (we now know so much more about serial killers than Wilder and Hitchcock could possibly have known), Joseph Cotten gives a striking performance. Even better is Teresa Wright, whose Young Charlie the National Board of Review honored at year’s end. Hers is a fetching portrait of innocence as it stumbles lethally into experience. Henry Travers and Hume Cronyn delight as Joe and Herb, serial killers only in their imaginations. Janet Shaw is marvelous as Louise, Young Charlie’s classmate who, working as a waitress in order to survive, finds her youth not the slightest protection against emotional and spiritual exhaustion—an indelible insert of a character glimpsing the lower rung of America’s socioeconomic class structure. But it is Patricia Collinge, Lillian Hellman’s racist Birdie in The Little Foxes both on stage and on film (William Wyler, 1941), whose inspired acting as Emma Newton deepens Shadow of a Doubt’s undertow of melancholy, helping Hitchcock most of all to balance the beauty of kindness and affection against the tragic frailty of human existence.

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MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.

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