How to catch a tone, and what one betrays. James Franco is some kind of cultural phenomenon of our times; he has been called "Hollywood's workaholic", he himself has admitted an aversion to sleep since "there is so much to do", and for some time now has a flair for what may be his signature mode, that is performing artistic stunts, from cinema to video to installation and fiction.
Hart Crane is a different matter. Who is not - even slightly - taken aback at first encounter by his curious mix of idioms, mixing Elizabethan enunciation, coining even words, with exotic images (rum, calypso, pirates, mermen) that are witnesses to a grinding difficulty almost agonizing in his voice, a voice of such distinctive music, that one wonders this concoction of the archaic, the deliberately anachronistic and the hesitant, traumatic modern - what does it mean? Should we bother, as in a peripheral phenomenon? Or, and here is my stake, it is America's unique candidate for articulating how can one write poetry - and of what kind - in a traumatic modernity? From John Ashbery to James Merrill and all other major or minor gay poets of the '60's, everybody seemed at least baffled when asked about his relation to Hart Crane. This is crucial.
In my mind I tend to associate his act with Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" case of having two, not quite satisfying, versions of the novel, as if he too was coping with something. Alcoholism is a common ground, but I think is more symptomatic, and just not enough. To cut to the chase, what troubled Fitzgerald was how to integrate the ideal(ized) couple's disintegration as failing to conform in the eyes of the social order, the question "How the Big Other perceives me?" That social order, its stability, cracked in the dawn of 20th century modernity, and I think this is what troubled Hart Crane, too, as his pirate, clandestine imagery suggests.
Is all this relevant? It is. For I think James Franco shies away from confronting the specificity of the case in regard to his stance; for what we get is big chops of poetry reading and then a bizarrely inarticulate movie. There is a gap between these two modes that Fitzerald and Crane confronted - that is the gap in the social link that is to be filled/articulated with artistic production or love - and is not convincing, for one simple reason if you will: tell me what is the difference between this depiction, and the one Franco performed in "Howl"; both seem to fit a "maudit", more misfit than doom-eager artist of the '60s, let alone articulate, and there is where Franco's social sense betrays him.
On another level, let's look into this: the film, tellingly, evolved from Franco's thesis on Hart Crane. For all its borrowed cinematic vocabulary and merit, it has an "objectified" look, as referring to some external discourse, as if its "artistry" was compromised. Compromised by what? This is one case of what the french analyst Jacques Lacan called "the Discourse of the University", that is turning an object into quantifiable knowledge, that means taking Hart Crane or some gay, beat, marginal poet and integrate him (what an ideal object) in the academic machinery, domesticating exactly what resists it, its excess.
To put it plainly, there is no sense of bravura from the poems to inform the cinematic form, even what was instantly a surprise - the chromatic turn inside Notre Dame - misfires for it makes "the visionary company of love" a question of dubious religious upbringing or disposition (that recurring choir) and finally desexualizes the carnal, endangered alert of Hart Crane's poetry. No true sense of poetic threat or encroached lamentation or release as in "The Broken Tower".
In the end, it is a curio of cultural rather than artistic contours: James Franco has a disturbed, rebelled social sense without a cause that fitted him perfectly from the role that made him rise, James Dean, onwards for some time - I would even say he showed true allegiance with it. On the other hand, he is a post-Warhol era phenomenon: it seems his ambition is to perform literally Warhol's poker-faced phrase "I want to be a machine". But look what happens: instead of holding on to this rebellion, that sort of impatience that is such a virtue for the French people, he has collapsed the two into a machine without a cause.
Hart Crane is a different matter. Who is not - even slightly - taken aback at first encounter by his curious mix of idioms, mixing Elizabethan enunciation, coining even words, with exotic images (rum, calypso, pirates, mermen) that are witnesses to a grinding difficulty almost agonizing in his voice, a voice of such distinctive music, that one wonders this concoction of the archaic, the deliberately anachronistic and the hesitant, traumatic modern - what does it mean? Should we bother, as in a peripheral phenomenon? Or, and here is my stake, it is America's unique candidate for articulating how can one write poetry - and of what kind - in a traumatic modernity? From John Ashbery to James Merrill and all other major or minor gay poets of the '60's, everybody seemed at least baffled when asked about his relation to Hart Crane. This is crucial.
In my mind I tend to associate his act with Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" case of having two, not quite satisfying, versions of the novel, as if he too was coping with something. Alcoholism is a common ground, but I think is more symptomatic, and just not enough. To cut to the chase, what troubled Fitzgerald was how to integrate the ideal(ized) couple's disintegration as failing to conform in the eyes of the social order, the question "How the Big Other perceives me?" That social order, its stability, cracked in the dawn of 20th century modernity, and I think this is what troubled Hart Crane, too, as his pirate, clandestine imagery suggests.
Is all this relevant? It is. For I think James Franco shies away from confronting the specificity of the case in regard to his stance; for what we get is big chops of poetry reading and then a bizarrely inarticulate movie. There is a gap between these two modes that Fitzerald and Crane confronted - that is the gap in the social link that is to be filled/articulated with artistic production or love - and is not convincing, for one simple reason if you will: tell me what is the difference between this depiction, and the one Franco performed in "Howl"; both seem to fit a "maudit", more misfit than doom-eager artist of the '60s, let alone articulate, and there is where Franco's social sense betrays him.
On another level, let's look into this: the film, tellingly, evolved from Franco's thesis on Hart Crane. For all its borrowed cinematic vocabulary and merit, it has an "objectified" look, as referring to some external discourse, as if its "artistry" was compromised. Compromised by what? This is one case of what the french analyst Jacques Lacan called "the Discourse of the University", that is turning an object into quantifiable knowledge, that means taking Hart Crane or some gay, beat, marginal poet and integrate him (what an ideal object) in the academic machinery, domesticating exactly what resists it, its excess.
To put it plainly, there is no sense of bravura from the poems to inform the cinematic form, even what was instantly a surprise - the chromatic turn inside Notre Dame - misfires for it makes "the visionary company of love" a question of dubious religious upbringing or disposition (that recurring choir) and finally desexualizes the carnal, endangered alert of Hart Crane's poetry. No true sense of poetic threat or encroached lamentation or release as in "The Broken Tower".
In the end, it is a curio of cultural rather than artistic contours: James Franco has a disturbed, rebelled social sense without a cause that fitted him perfectly from the role that made him rise, James Dean, onwards for some time - I would even say he showed true allegiance with it. On the other hand, he is a post-Warhol era phenomenon: it seems his ambition is to perform literally Warhol's poker-faced phrase "I want to be a machine". But look what happens: instead of holding on to this rebellion, that sort of impatience that is such a virtue for the French people, he has collapsed the two into a machine without a cause.