Devils in Daylight
by Junichiro Tanizaki
New Directions Publishing, 96pp., $9.95
“I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the thing that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.”– Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Early 20thcentury, Japan. You, caped in shadows, find yourself watching two men who are watching, through a grainy peephole, two other people, a man and a woman, who are seemingly killing another man. The entire thing is busy, complex, furtive; erotic in its staggered geometry. Outside, where you are and where you aren’t, the rain-slicked street holds tiny concentric halos of light projected out from the window of an Inn that dizzies its patrons with licentious allure, while Rockwell’s paranoia blares from a jukebox — It always feels like somebody’s watching me, tell me is it just a dream — and you can’t help but look over your shoulder as you see a lantern-eyed black cat, smiling. Mind you, the song and the jukebox haven’t been invented yet, and Rockwell lingers as a figment awaiting popstar iteration, but still, they are there, this is happening, a confluence of elements, which includes you and five other people (one of them now very much dead), and the whole thing gets you thinking about the dreamlike immediacy of voyeurism, or the pyramidic folds of role-playing. You have entered that place between realms, where the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki so comfortably dwells. [Read more…]
“But at three o’ clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work — and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’ clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retreating into an infantile dream — but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza — one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality.” –Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)
For the past forty somewhat years, David Lynch has dreamscaped a long day’s journey into night, taking audiences on a hallucinated tour through the underworld of their own splintered psyche. In a world, or perhaps I should say industry, often bereft of visionary spellcasting, Lynch has been the equivalent of a cinematic shaman, a goofball deviant in bi-polar shades, trafficking in symbols, archetypes, glyphs, images and impressions, fished out from a fathomless substratum. His oeuvre, a steam-punk Frankenstein of interchangeable parts, speaks to the savvy and glee of a mad scientist at play, while his blending of the eternal with American pop has given us a surrealistic soap-opera with an eye toward the numinous. Carl Jung eating apple pie in a diner while riffing on anima with a gum-clacking waitress named Flo; the red-jacketed ghost of James Dean partying on top of a toxic mushroom cloud while Marilyn Monroe lip-syncs “Happy Birthday” in Yiddish; a blue jukebox isolated in the desert where it serves as an altar for a congregation of devout rabbits . . . these could be dispatches from a world of Lynch’s making.
If I had to choose one face as the truest and most magnetic testament to Miss Desmond’s proud claim, that face would belong to Renee Maria Falconetti in the 1928 classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Falconetti, who was a stage actress and comedienne (Joan of Arc was Falconetti’s only major film role, and her final one) delivered what you might call a virtuoso facial performance, unparalleled in its plasticity of range and soul-felt expressiveness. Or in the words of the late film critic, Roger Ebert, “You cannot know the history of silent film unless you know the face of Renee Maria Falconetti.”
