Because You’re Mine

Alan and I went to see Walk the Line Saturday night. Joaquin Phoenix did a good, brooding acting job as Cash, and Reese Witherspoon was extraordinary as June Carter: strong, perky, principled, and loving, and a damned fine performer. I wouldn’t be surprised (or affronted) if she won the Oscar for Best Actress. I haven’t seen all the nominated films, but I can say with assurance with David Strathairn’s subtle brilliance as Ed Murrow in “Good Night, and Good Luck” deserves an Academy Award.

The symbolism (falling down, slamming doors) was a thought heavy-handed, but the film was well-made and authentic in feeling if not always in look. With some movies that cover my early days, I feel the almost physical shock of recognition of the world I knew then. I never felt that in this film, but I may be getting jaded.

WARNING: spoilers ahead for Ray and Walk the Line Altogether, it was a good film, emotionally moving and powerful, even if it did in some ways resemble a paler version (in several senses) of Ray.

The resemblances were extraordinary—the sharecropper background and blood guilt for a brother’s sudden death, as well as the usual rock-star trilogy of groupies, drug abuse, and redemption—but the differences are also telling. Ray had to deal with race issues and going blind at the age of seven, but he had the very great advantage of a strong and loving mother who taught her son pride and independence. Johnny Cash was not so lucky.

Although Johnny Cash’s mother was a hardworking woman with a sweet singing voice, she does not come across as a strong character. Her drunken, judgmental husband never forgave Johnny for surviving when his older, smarter brother died. Later on, she sat silent while her husband gibed at his successful son. Despite the horrors of racism, Ray Charles was at least loved. Johnny Cash had to put up with a lifetime of rejection and verbal abuse from his father and passivity from his mother.

Johnny Cash comes across as a man of grit, honesty, and persistence, capable of both compassion and great love, but also as a bastard with a mean streak a mile wide. The film left me wondering about the stereotype of the artist as a selfish jerk. How accurate is it, generally? Does it have to be that way? What role does the nastiness and short temper play for the artist? I could see it as a smokescreen generated by a hypersensitive individual to keep people distant or just as a reaction to the intolerable stress of fame. I can also see it as arising from a sense of privilege—acting badly because they deserve better than others, or simply because their fame and money let them get away with it.

Not every great singer comes from hardscrabble poverty—Bob Dylan was the son of a dentist who bought him a pink convertible—but Martin Scorsese’s four-hour documentary about him, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, is high on my Netflix queue. I understand he was—is—a sarcastic jerk who has alienated a great many friends.

I don’t fall for the idea that the Arteeeeeste is a higher life form who can be forgiven anything. But I wonder how much art has been lost because the potential artist is too damned nice to create emotional space for the work. And that’s an issue that has personal significance for me, not just cinematic.

The Mystery of the Author’s Decline

After finishing The Murder Room by P.D. James, I have one question: Who’s been putting Xanax in the Baroness’s coffee?

Warning: spoilers for Murder Room, Unnatural Death, Death of an Expert Witness, A Taste for Death, Cover Her Face, Shroud for a Nightingale

Much of The Murder Room reads as though James is just too tired to flesh out the plot, the interviews, and the characters. Too much is told in summary, rather than scene. Even the obligatory horror story embedded in the middle is given short shrift, and I still haven’t figured out the relevance or the details of the betrayal in the anti-Nazi underground group.

But it’s more than just the weary, phoned-in quality that bothers me. It’s the drawing back from the painful consequences of murder. PD James has never been afraid of hurting (or killing off) sympathetic characters. Indeed, much of her appeal for me has always lain in her ability to show the humanity in all her characters, even the killers, while she nevertheless treats them with the ruthlessness the book demands. The lesbian novelist trying desperately to save her home and the life she’s made with her lover? Dies while attempting the gentlest form of blackmail. The over-driven, emotionally exhausted single father who wants to keep his family together? Murders to save them, but loses them when he’s caught. The devout old lady who befriends a street waif? Loses her faith, loses the waif she’s grown to love as a son, although he survives.

The Murder Room is different. The decent, humane older woman who has finally made herself a home doesn’t get killed or lose her home. The museum (for the sake of which the murder is done) does indeed stay open. Dalgliesh doesn’t lose a lover to the exigencies of his job. In fact, he gets engaged.

I do not insist that Adam Dalgleish stay celibate for his job; he’s had lovers before. But now he has proposed to some woman he’s never even fucked. There is very little indication in this book that he even knows the woman. I certainly don’t know much about her, except that she teaches at Cambridge and has never been to his flat. I missed the previous book (Murder in Holy Orders), in which Emma and Dalgleish apparently fell in love.

Isn’t it a bit tacky to be cruising murder scenes for pickups? Although that at least is in character. He became involved with Deborah Whatshername, whose mother he arrested for murder, and nearly married her. But she dumped him and went off to America while he was on vacation—where, of course, he stumbled over several interesting corpses. (That book, Unnatural Death, is in many ways a critique of the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries; she even swiped the title from Sayers. Must write about that at some point.) He was also strongly attracted to a suspect in Shroud for a Nightingale, who turned out not to be guilty of various other crimes, including the original murders, but took justice into her own hands by killing the murderess.

I’m also a bit troubled by the age difference; Dalgleish has always, as far as I could tell, aged naturally—that is, as calendar time passed in the world, it also passed in the books. His wife and child died during the 1950s. Thirty years ago he was in his early 40s. Now he’s got to be in his 70s—well past retirement age. Has he ceased to age at all? I don’t know how old Emma is—she could be anything from mid-twenties to forty-something, I suppose. The age parameters are that she has a PhD in English but is still fertile, since Dalgleish was even mooning over the possibility of their having a child together. Somehow I can’t see that obsessively fastidious man dealing well with the daily chaos, noise, and mess of child-rearing.

Baroness James is 85 now. Perhaps she is mellowing with age, or she may want to leave her detective—and her readers—on a hopeful note. I salute her very great achievement over all these decades, and I hope she can bring us a few more good murders before she follows so many of her characters into death.