Wednesday, July 27, 2005
I finally got around to seeing Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango the other night & it makes for a fascinating study of what makes narrative. It was fortuitous since earlier that same day I’d gone ballistic reading the opening of Robert Pinsky’s column in the
Poems have plots. A poem happens in time: sometimes with an explicit, actual story and sometimes as the more implicit story of a feeling as it unfolds.
A poem does happen in time – even a single-letter poem has a beginning, middle & end – but the unfolding of meaning in time is narrative. Ascribing this to a projected external world beyond the language – a far different & much narrower thing – is plot, an exercise of the parsimony principle. Assassination Tango is a film with a lot more narrative than plot & in the difference lies much of its charm.
At 71, Robert Duvall wanted to make a film that revolved around his two abiding passions – his love of dance & his 30-year-old Argentine girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza. Assassination Tango is the result. John Anderson (Duvall) is an aging hit man, a one-time mercenary doing small-time assassinations for the local godfather (former boxer Frankie Gio) in the outer reaches of Brooklyn, living with a manicurist & her ten-year-old daughter, when he gets a three-day job to travel to Buenos Aires for a hit on an old general, a man responsible himself for many disappearances & murders. John’s experience hunting Sandinistas have given him the language & cultural skills to be the best man for the job. But when he gets there, he discovers first that his contacts in
But Assassination Tango isn’t about its story at all. It’s about the construction of John’s character, about the tempo & timing of interludes, about the quiet discourse between two people who aren’t all that proficient in each other’s language as they get to know one another. In its best moments, Assassination Tango has a feel to it that I associate with the films of the late John Cassavetes, which mumble & lurch toward much deeper truths than one can get out of
John’s character is built out of details & bits. The details are what we know about him – he was a mercenary, his love for the manicurist is notably less than his delight in her daughter (he’s never had children before), he talks to himself, he hangs out at a bar that offers dance lessons out by
The trick in all this is to get the audience to root for the assassin to get away with the murders he commits (four in all during the course of the film, two for hire and two others in the process of getting it done & getting away) – to see him as a human, vulnerable & plausible. It’s not that there haven’t been sympathetic hit men in the movies before – Jean Reno in Léon (also known as The Professional, the title under which it seems to show up on cable these days) is almost as adorable as he is inscrutable, an excruciatingly difficult star turn, poised as Reno is between two of the great scene stealers of our time, Natalie Portman (at the age of 12, no less) & Gary Oldman in his most over-the-top villain role ever, the psychotic narc who kills while listening to classical music over headphones. But Duvall the dancer is the antithesis of
The crux of Assassination Tango comes in the scenes that have the least to do with advancing the plot. John takes the Argentine out for coffee & they just talk – Pedraza has the flattened affect of someone who has never acted before (& Duvall manages to make it work in ways that his mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, does not with his own daughter in Godfather III, largely by keeping Pedraza’s dialog to scenes with himself and other very low-key actors – she never appears opposite Reubén Blades, Kathy Baker, Frankie Gio or anyone who might create a stylistic contrast). They just talk, she smiles, he smiles, we learn that he’s not going to lie to her about his relationships in the States (just as, before and after, we see him lying to Kathy Baker, the woman he lives with). Was that the point of the scene or was it, in fact, the give & take? Duvall, the director, is letting the audience here see what he sees when he looks at Pedraza. It's a remarkable moment, the key in many ways to the entire film.
In another scene, John is leaving a club with her & her friends & one shows him a trick to help him get over his bow-legged way of walking, by placing a quarter between his knees & holding it there as he walks down the street. This is like one of those scenes in a Harrison Ford film in which Ford creates a back story for the little scar on his chin – it doesn’t particularly move anything forward. But Duvall takes the time to stretch the scene out & films it from up high & across the street (the same angle John has been practicing for shooting the general). The pacing of the scene, its timing (the night before the hit), the dialog, both familiar & yet between people who will never know one another well, are more than incidental. It’s what you talk about when you don’t know that the moment you’re in stands on the precipice of great events. Except that one character in this scene knows that.
At the same time, Duvall also goes out of his way to give his own character an edge, to leave questions open. There’s a scene with a prostitute in the hotel in Buenos Aires that makes no sense in the movie until much later when the woman is questioned by the police & says that John made her call him Daddy, a term that suddenly casts his relationship between the old hit man & the young dancer, not to mention the old hit man & the manicurist’s ten-year-old daughter, into a totally different light.
Critics have generally not loved this film because they see Duvall moving the chess pieces around as he creates this piece. Yet shoving the pieces into position is so much what this movie is about that the charge feels churlish or just beside the point. There is a reason this movie’s title conjoins words from such dissimilar schema, like Godzilla Banana. Far from concealing the film-maker’s art, Assassination Tango renders the constructedness of it all as the absolute heart of a remarkably human film.
Labels: Film
There's the amazing passage in which this revelation comes to illuminate the plot, the character and the theme simultaneously and thus marks a passage THROUGH time, so that what is, is no longer what it was. It's a kind of alchemy.
This is an intriguing description of the film.
If you aren't changed by reading a single letter, you're dead to the world, Kirby.
There's an old mindfulness exercise of eating one raisin -- just one -- feeling it go all the way down, learning to understand how it impacts your body, your digestion, the extra weight you're carrying, the nutrition it delivers, etc. You should try it.
Ron
But you write:
“There is a reason this movie’s title conjoins words from such dissimilar schema, like Godzilla Banana. Far from concealing the film-maker’s art, Assassination Tango renders the constructedness of it all as the absolute heart of a remarkably human film.”
The schema are not dissimilar at all -- if you know El tango de la muerte
The movie is about, for me, the Tango – not just a dance -- and so that was what I watched. I am a Tango dancer, Chicago born (we moved later) and I remembered my father. The verses below show why.
Argentinean Black Catholic Jew
I.
Cante
He was an Argentinean Black Catholic Jew.
It’s too bad but I am one too.
How sadly I think of my father!
After Mass he would play
Hernando’s Hideaway
Then the Blues, then yell at my mother.
After Mass he would play
Hernando’s Hideaway
And bitch of the Schwartzes and Yentels
Then damn the Ofays
And, in his own special way,
Evict some of the Yids from his rentals.
II. Cante Cante
Take a Jew. Take my father.
Born in the beginning of the 20th century –
that century of universal disaster.
Born in the USA to a family of neurotic vaudevillians:
African American Jews who disguised their Jewishness
and pretended to be an Argentinian family of tango dancers.
An African American Jew dancing the tango:
the one dance that, above all, speaks of fatality,
of destinies engulfed in pain. It is the dance of sorrow.
Then take this Jew (my poor Papa)
and arrange it so that he falls in love in Berlin
months before Hitler takes over …
Falls in love with that fatal woman: Ilsa.
The rest of the family flees while my Papa,
the fake gaucho, is drawn inexorably
into the darkest of the dark underworlds that existed in Berlin:
the Nosferatau: the secret society of decadents with
their Vampire balls and Grand Guigonal orgies!
And my father and Ilsa dancing
El tango de la muerte there
while Europe descended into
madness and my father danced
Danced to the dark music of the bandoneon and the violin.
A long stillness as the watchers
waited in the dark and my father
and Ilsa waited frozen on the stage and then
the quick motion that begins the tango!
stillness…
and then the sudden violence –
the dynamic of a frozen world suddenly shattered,
the apotheosis of the twentieth century!
III. Cante Cante Cante
I stepped out into the night from the funeral home remembering
how horrible it must have been for my father
to pretend he was a Catholic.
This explained his strange melancholy
during my first holy communion and,
as I remembered more of the story he told me,
I thought back to those times when,
my mother gone to Novena,
how he would lock himself into the bedroom
and all we could would hear was "Hernando's Hideaway"
on the old record player and
the sounds of my father shuffling about,
breathing …
IV. Cante Cante Cante Cante
Ilsa said "I am IRA.
And I think I can get us away.
But you must be baptized
And then in disguise
We’ll go to the U S of A!"
They fled cross the dark Irish sea.
My mother was Ilsa you see.
And they remained in good health
And Pope Pius the Twelfth
Cried fie and fiddle dee dee!
Then they came to these shores at last
But the fad for the tango had passed.
What could a Jew do?
So, he did a soft shoe
Grateful that he wasn’t gassed.
He starred in some old minstrel show.
Papa said he wanted to go.
Mama said “You Black Jew
You’re working for two.
Dance – it’s all that you know."
**********************
What a film this would make!
I think I need something heavier, like, man, like, like!
Lutheranism is so much heavier than this Zen stuff. We need a dozen hamburgers and some beer, har har, before the revolution.
Old Aristotle thought the change had to be in the text, rather than in the reader. Or rather, the reader follows the change in the text. You think the reader will just change in response to a single letter. It's got the virtue of being economical!
Over here at Lutheran Surrealism we don't believe in mindfulness so much. We practice mindlessness.
Best wishes,
K. (a single letter!)
K-aaaa-y.
O, OTOH, only has a middle and an end:
oooo-w.
S has beginning and middle:
E-sssss.
E only has a middle.
The Apostle - also not loved by reviewers - is very similar, I think. It's Duvall taking risks in trying to explore something he thinks is important enough to invest in.
In Open Range there is one shot where Duvall, at the end of his line to Costner, makes a face. I backed up and watched his face three times. He made his character with that face, I thought, and changed the suibstance of the film.
This is why Reznikoff and Williams are meaningful, but Wallace Stevens is etiolated; this is why John Suckling is meaningful, but John Milton is not.
This is why the Beat writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac and Corso are meaningful, but too much of what has happened since LANGUAGE is not.
Language made a crucial mistake based on Saussure that the world is fundamentally language. No, it isn't. Space and time and morals and beauty exist outside of language, as Kant demonstrated in his three critiques. Saussure didn't mean to confuse the 20th century, I believe, but by now almost everyone is confused on this issue.
Too many people take signs as reality. The letter K, insofar as it doesn't relate to something in space and time, isn't meaningful.
Silliman is himself a strange half-way figure. He writes very well about his experiences in reality, as in today's post. He writes about a "faux" cafe in the Barnes & Nobles. This indicates that he realizes there is such a thing as the real. And in this blog in general he always seems to see this, which is why it is so virile and readable. But somehow the earlier theory dipped in Saussure still orients much of his reading tastes.
Rae Armantrout's poetry suffers from a lack of reality. As do Toni Morrison's agit-prop novels such as Paradise. The amphibolous nature of reality when it is shoved to one side and replaced with a theory becomes etiolated.
Pound says as much in his ABC when he writes, "Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish" (18).
To put language first and to dismiss the world is to dismiss meaningfulness itself. I say this as a tip to any younger reader who might still salvage some part of their writing life. Stick with reality -- it does exist, and it exists independently of language.
Yes Kirby, that is a good point.
I shall now go worship the letter S that begins both the english & swedish words for sleep.
I find this fact more interesting than the fiction of the film, I have to admit. I already feel like an old man now, as I sit here tapping out the words in my public office, musing on the high brow literary tug between Olsen and Silliman, whose justification for their respective positions seems to be based on the theories of dead philosophers. And as we all know, most philosophies can be broken down into simple equations, usually of a tertiary nature.
Aristotle gave us the three point plan relating to plot, and Saussure gave us the three point sign, signifier and signified.
Three is a magic number, as the song goes and it would appear that the human mind has some kind of inbuilt affinity with projecting whatever concept is under the intellectual knife onto the idea of a trinity. Precis it down to three basic components for ease of reference and grasp. Maybe the "truth" is situated somewhere between Newtonian absolutism and the infinite possibilities of Post Modernism, or on an ossilating surface of quicksand and rock of the Hegelian absolute idea, both existing simultaeneously by some crazy logic which we are yet to discover. This idea comes from a "maverick of the mind" whose name escapes me, but who reckons that
"..the world is fractal and everything that can be described
in it is eventually superceded by modes of being that require a more complicated description, which is currently unnavailable"
This approach seems the safest bet when one is ruminating on their ideas they have constructed over the years through much absorbtion of information.
Because, lets face it, all our talk on what is, isn't should, shouldn't, could or could not be construed as poetry, is only a sport of the mind, and we use the logic of whatever it is that fills our minds. What goes in is what comes out and the associated reasoning which this statement implies means that if I sit around watching reality TV all day, then this is what will inform my ideas. I may be wrong, completely so, and admiting that is the first sign that you are not falling prey to the lethality of hubris, which can infect poets of all hues, including myself.
And whilst I have danced off topic about swallowing raisons to suckle the nutrient of metaphor so poetry doesn't wither in the absence of sunlight, I do feel as though I am getting closer to whatever it is I am trying to say, in the Frost notion of not knowing what it is I want to to say until it unfolds by the alchemic surprise we poets are supposed to have now and again.
What is firming up is two things, one is the age gap between Duvall and his squeeze and the other is the Olsen/Silliman question about space and time's beginning middle and end and its relation to language and poetry. My take is that Langpo doesn't have to be composed of abstractions and the theoretical, although I have noticed that many who come to rest under this banner do write primarily in the adjective rather than the concrete noun which Pound, (or Ezrastotle as I coined him) advocates.
Neil Astley, in his introduction to the "Staying Alive" anthology rants that there is much mediocre poetry about nowadays because of 60's liberalism, which ran over into general current PC notions that anyone can write (without effort) and should be encouraged to do so.
Therapy poetry, poetry of chance form and poetry constructed using innovative mathmatically based forms (which is in essence from the same ballpark as metrical poetry but using different structural equations)is so misunderstood and misinterpreted that the more pedestrian and those without much natural poetic ability (probably unconsciously) think that it is a reletive easy genre in which to create. Just slop it all out on the page or create a masterpiece by engaging a highly complex formula to generate words, as though the intricate and tangled scientific nature of the process the poet uses somehow equates to work of "simple" worth.
And it is precisely because of the "innovative" and complicated natures of the langpo baggage that academics without much shine in the linear narrative of traditional poetry can hide amongst the abstractions and theoretical density of adjectival verse, which is often, in my view, package heavy and gift lite.
At least that's my theory, which I told Bernstein and which he tentatively acknowledged, (I think) although he may have just been being polite.
One way I compose in langpo form is to note down what I see in front of me when I am in a visually stimulating environment. I have acquired the skill of turning these notes into a Langpo of concrete images, with the occassional abstract punctuations, rather than the other way round.
It is up to each individual to make this form their own, should they choose to work in it. Langpo is a form that is difficult to fully articulate because we are still in the eye of the storm, or possibly in the wreckage of its wake with the real energy of our time being with performance and slam. But either way reducing the whole movement to its basics, from my angle, I see Bernstein being to Langpo what Pound was to Imagism, Olsen to projective verse, Hopkins to Sprung verse etc etc, so he is the impetus behind a lot of young kids churning out the langpo today, and I think that he opened a gate into a space which anyone can claim and there are effectively no absolutes with langpo, because absolute maxims are easy to grasp and at this juncture we are still quantifyinG.
Maybe by the time the dust has settled I'll be doing the tango with a thirty year old woman.
Rae runs rings around you!
Maybe you're not fast enough to keep up.
She thinks so fast and so dramatically that her leaps are like the flea!
She's our Emily Dickinson!
But I am giving her good company -- Auden, Milton, Ashbery, Edson, Tate, etc.
And positing a canon based on writing in space and time and about lived experience: Bukowski, for instance, would then be better than the above simply by virtue of having an empirical sensibility. To me, he is. I'd rather read his poems, as I get more out of them.
But who am I? A nobody. A Don Quixote of the non-canonical if that.
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