Death and the author

Infamous Douglas McGrath
Running Stumbled John Maringouin
Stranger Than Fiction Marc Forster

Ion Martea
posted 7 November 2006

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

(Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus)

Plath's remarkable metaphor about the act of artistic creation is still unparalleled in its telling precision. The American poet found the key to the primal element that defines a piece of art - the extinction of its creator. This is not the same as Barthes' traditional theory of the 'death of the author', for in Plath's understanding the question is not about the triangle 'author-work-consumer', but the exhaustion, even disappearance of the living, human contribution (of creativity itself) at the point when a work of art is completed. The more exceptional the work is, the more torrential is the outburst of creativity, thus the more detrimental to the artist's metaphysical health.

The work itself is born only at the point of its completion. Through the 'death' of its author, art is reborn like Lazarus in a shape reminiscent of its 'dead author', yet purified of the artist's physical presence. The author meanwhile experiences a purgation of emotions (a veritable catharsis). This 'death' is not only a symbolic act necessary to the process of creating art, but also a fascinating subject worth recreating in the work itself, so that an audience can vicariously experience the catharsis of the author. It is not surprising then that some of the most unsettling and effective works of art have derived their power through a realistic emotional recreation of this kind of death. By focusing on death, the author recreates the same sensation one is experiencing at the moment of creating art - the passage 'body-death-external existence'.

Despite the abundance of death in film history, the intellectualisation of the concept of death and its cathartic power necessary to the creation of art is still essentially virgin territory for the medium. The 50th Times BFI London Film Festival, which demonstrated a remarkable state of creativity in film-making, proved that there are now serious attempts to make up for this, and more significantly, these attempts are bursting with ideas.

Last year's Capote took the challenge by horns, but Bennett Miller's concern with Truman Capote's morality (or lack of it) means he missed the essential element that marked the author's life during the writing of In Cold Blood. Emilie Bickerton managed on spiked to cut through the film's hype, observing: 'The film is obsessed with its subject, but not in order to understand him. [We] are being encouraged to stare at the man, but given little further insight into him as a person. So, we're left with a vacant fascination'. If instead, one were to consider the effect on Capote of writing In Cold Blood, which was such that he was unable to write another novel for the rest of his life, then one would be forced to consider more deeply this exceptionally intriguing character. Ultimately, what we get out of Capote is Seymour Hoffman's first class method experiment, which gives us a man's style, yet tells us nothing of his heart.

Douglas McGrath's Infamous, despite its celebrity-studded cast, is unfortunate to follow so closely in the shadow of Capote's commercial success. It is unfortunate, because we are presented with a credible Truman (Toby Jones) who is a living creature rather than a mere caricature, and thus we gain a better understanding of what it meant to write In Cold Blood for the writer himself, which ultimately makes Infamous a poignant account of how it feels to go through life for those who are blessed with the desire to create.

McGrath's narrative is straightforward and linear. We follow the New York parties (kicked off brilliantly by Gwyneth Paltrow singing an emotionally charged performance of Cole Porter's 'What Is This Thing Called Love'), the gossiping girl-friends (Sigourney Weaver, Isabella Rossellini, Hope Davis and the scene stealing Juliet Stevenson), the investigation with Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock at a career hiatus), the encounter with Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), the cold-blood executions running back to back, finally to a glimpse of Capote's demise as America's greatest living writer. All this is viewed with the eye of a documentarist, an effect reinforced by the re-enacted interviews with the characters in the story about the protagonist.

It is quite obvious that Infamous is more interested in understanding the emotional side of the story, rather than recreating the cathartic impact through cheap fictionalisation. McGrath makes it clear that this is an ideological quest into what made In Cold Bold both the masterpiece it is and the executioner of its writer. The film's answer is an unsettling one. Capote was not affected by the horror of the original murders, or his own guilt from exploiting them for his own fame, nor even by the fact that he was chosen as the only witness in the state execution of the two murderers. What really haunt Capote are Smith's words about his own fate: 'My whole life, all I wanted was to create a work of art. I sang, nobody listened. I painted, nobody looked. Now I murder four people and what's going to come out of it? A work of art…'

The writer's problem is his need for Smith's own execution to complete his work of art, the actual death of a non-fictional character. It is conceivable that the one thing that might make a writer at the height of his power abandon his vocation for the rest of his life is the need to sacrifice someone dear, like Abraham asked to kill his own child to show for his devotion to God. This is precisely where McGrath has the balls Miller lacks, as he makes the startling claim that Truman Capote and Perry Smith did not share only a common cause, but also a passionate physical chemistry. Thus, in desiring to produce a work of art, Capote requires his lover's death, and ultimately his own metaphysical death. The fictionalisation of an author desiring the death of a real character for the sake of art is thus both purgation for us, as viewers of the cathartical death, and for the character himself.

John Maringouin's second feature is a more unsettling work in this context. The raw documentary about his father, the alcoholic Dada artist Johnny Roe Jr, and the latter's depraved consort dying of cancer, really does raise questions about the morality of peeking so closely at a family's demise. Maringouin's distortion of colours brings an even closer fascination to the relationship of a couple who might have loved each other one day, only to have any trace of emotion between them destroyed by drugs and alcohol.

Given that this is a family portrait, the director seems much more fascinated by his mother in law, than his own parent, who seemingly attempted to kill his son and his wife (so claims the son, so denies the father). Virgie Marie Pennoui is not a woman who can be an example to anyone, nor does she cares to be, but in Running Stumbled, we understand that her continuous chattering and screaming has been more the result of being disappointed with love, than being affected by alcohol. In a heart-rending scene, she claims she still loves Johnny Roe, and then falls into silence. The director's exploitation of her emotions during the scenes is harsh, but it is truly endearing.

Given his lack of affection for his father, it is worth asking what Maringouin's intentions were in making Running Stumbled. Relations with his father only worsen, leading to a murder threat by the son. Yet, the film starts and finishes with Virgie's fate in mind. She claims she'll be dead by September, but the camera persists and waits for the day she actually passes away. Yes, the film reaches its emotional hiatus in a shot of the motionless body of Ms Pennoui, but would the symbolic killing of the father not have been enough for Maringouin to achieve a stunning piece of art?

Both McGrath's and Maringouin's works tend to suggest that the actual death of non-fictional character is the closest thing to Aristotelian catharsis in drama, closer than the death of a fictional character. Our awareness of the demise of a real human being brings us close to understanding the author's purgation at the point of finishing a work of art. We, like the author, are sensing the loss of a part of us.

Marc Forster seems to offer an antidote to this in his debut feature, Stranger Than Fiction. We are guided through the film by the voice of a novelist Kay Eiffel (a relentless Emma Thompson) who is writing her new book about Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), a tax auditor. We quickly realise that Eiffel's character is a real person whose life is in her hands, and we also discover that the unwitting author plans to kill off Crick, as an ironic take on the mechanised, emotionless society we live in.

Stranger Than Fiction aims thus at establishing the moral coda for our appreciation of art, particularly when at stake is a real human life. Forster puts the question before us: which book would you say is better, the one with Crick dying, or the one with Crick living happily ever after? Literature professor Dr Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman), whom Crick consults for help in finding his author, prefers the former ending, particularly as it fits with the classical concept of tragedy. The alternative lacks the emotive load we are expecting from a true work of fiction. Without spoiling the delights of this assured, slightly rough at the edges, feature - which brings, beyond the comedy, a debate that must be had in the development of creative writing - Forster's final choice proves that a true understanding of purgation is satisfying only with the feeling of loss.

This fascination with the death of non-fictional characters, particularly in American screenwriting, is potent enough to start an essential debate on the creation of art, and the role of the writer in this process. These artworks, cherished and fondled by their creators, benefit from a care rarely shown even at childbirth. The pain of the vanishing of one's text from one's soul is understood only by few, and it would seem pretty meaningless to the author to take a moral standpoint on this. Are authors monsters then…? No, rather parents in pain, made to sacrifice their souls for the sake of beauty. The audience's emphatic engagement with the works proves that the Faustian trade was necessary.