Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 01:26:34 -1000
From: Lee Lady
Subject: Pollock
To: Friends
 
I went to see Pollock for the second time Sunday afternoon, just a few hours before Marcia Gay Harden was given the Academy Award for best supporting actress. Which she completely deserved, although how you can call someone who is on screen for almost the whole film a supporting actress is more than most of us can figure out. But if she'd been nominated for best female starring role, she would have lost out to Julia Roberts, not because Julia Roberts was better but because .... Because Julia Roberts is Julia Roberts.

Well, I don't have to tell you that. I'm sure you've heard it a half dozen times already.

Anyway, this movie was very meaningful to me, for a couple of different reasons. And I know eventually I'll watch it a third time, but maybe on video.

First of all, the movie did a very good job of portraying a scene that I was once part of in only a very very small way, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, but which has always been a very powerful influence on my life. The New York art scene. Greenwich Village, in the film, and, for me, also San Francisco. No, I wasn't old enough to be part of that scene in the Forties, when most of the film takes place, and, honestly, I've probably spend total of about seven days in Greenwich Village, and those not consecutive.

But it was also the people I knew in Washington, D.C. during my last two years of high school. The people who I met in Sheri Martinelli's apartment and who went to St. Elizabeths to visit Pound. And people I've run into since them at odd moments in North Beach (San Francisco) and other places.

Oh, this is not the point at all. It's too damned tempting to write about myself rather than the film.

Anyway, I saw the film and saw Ed Harris's portrayal of Jackson Pollock and said, ``Yes, I used to know guys like that. I used to know that world.'' Just as I also knew people like the character played by Lili Taylor in I Shot Andy Warhol. Just as I've known people like the artist played by Nick Nolte in the short Scorsese film Life Lessons which I've watched at least half a dozen times (and which you'll find as part of a movie titled New York Stories). Oh, I do so want to write about this film. Pollock. But I don't seem to quite know how to do it.

I can't claim that all artists, or even most artists, are like Jackson Pollock as portrayed by Ed Harris. I can only say that I've known a number who were. They'd been the kind of bad kids who always made life hell for their teachers, and for their parents. Now we've developed a lot of impressive labels to hang on kids like that. Hyperactive. Attention Deficit Disorder. Lack of Impulse Control.

And when they become adults (the film doesn't actually show Pollock as a child, I'm simply telling you about my own inferences), a lot of the more old fashioned labels work quite well. Drunken bums. Deadbeats. Ne'er do wells. Losers.

It's so easy to relate to people by means of labels. To use labels as a substitute for actually seeing people.

Ed Harris plays Jackson Pollock with a constant dazed, slightly scared look in his eyes. Nothing in the world ever quite seems to make sense to him.

Oh, I wanted to be part of that world. The artists, the writers, the theatre people. But I never had the courage. I was brought up to be a responsible citizen. Get on a career track and never get off it, because if you do people will never allow you back on it again.

Yes, I got off the career track a couple of times. That didn't work out very well.

The thing is, it wasn't just Jackson Pollock. That whole art scene was made up of losers. Not only the artists, but also the critics and the academics. Peggy Guggenheim, as portrayed in the film, was a rich loser. Her support was invaluable for many artists and yet .... Well, who would want to be Peggy Guggenheim? (Of course I'm only talking about the character in the film called ``Peggy Guggenheim.'' I don't know anything about the actual woman.) She wanted to be part of the art scene, and she didn't have talent but she did have money. Her money was an entree, but in a way her money was one of the things that prevented her from ever really being part of the scene.

To me, the academics always seemed the most pathetic of all. (But I don't remember any academics shown in the film.) The academics were on the make in the same way that the artists (writers, musicians, etc.) were. But at least the artists have the excuse of having some real creativity. The academics (i.e. the ones I saw hanging around that scene) were hoping to hitch a ride on somebody else's star, to have the glory of discovering someone yet undiscovered but who will in time become famous and thus bring a small piece of fame to the academic.

If the academics were like artists....

Well, to start with, there's one sort of artist who eventually, like Picasso, Salvidor Dali, or Andy Warhol, figures out the secret of understanding what the public wants and giving it to them. They learn how to become a charlatan.

But then there are the ones like Pollock. They have their own thing that fascinates them and which they know how to do. And they are frustrated as hell that the public at large doesn't appreciate what they're doing, but rather than change it, they keep on doing it and keep on being frustrated.

If the academics were like the artists, they would write about the things they really care about and be frustrated that nobody understood what they were saying, but they would not change it. They would not get tenure at their universities, they would not be published by influential journals. They would be living in cold-water flats and publish their articles in small chapbooks sold in obscure bookstores. It used to be that there were intellectuals like this, but no more. (See The Last of the Intellectuals by Russell Jacobi.) And yet even they (Lionel Trilling, Sartre, etc.) were the Picassos and Salvador Dalis of their world.

No, the artists are not like academics. They did not go to graduate school and study for comprehensive exams and oral exams and write dissertations approved by a committee. (Yes, now there are all too many artists around who have done these things. Maybe some of them do good work. I don't know nuthin' about art myself. The art world, yes, I know a little about that. Incidentally, Pollock is mostly about the art world, not about art. Which I guess is why it's meaningful to me.)

The artists, at least the ones I knew (almost all unsuccessful), yes, they were all on the make. They all wanted to make it big. But unlike the critics and academics, they hadn't made a career choice. They were people (and, again, I don't claim this is true for all artists in general) who were failures by the world's standards and who only knew how to do one thing and they did it because it was the only thing they knew how to do. And it became the only thing they wanted to do.

I'm not suggesting that the artists I knew were wild undisciplined talents. They worked hard at learning their craft and they were serious about it. Although they had not learn art at universities, they had studied with good teachers. (One of Lee Krasner's first question when she meets Pollock is, ``Who did you study with?'' At that time, in 1941, before he ever invented abstract expressionism, he had already been working seriously at his art for 10 years.)

The writers and artists I knew were always contemptuous of the critics and academics. Partly this was a resentment of the fact that the critics and academics had a sort of respectability that the artists lacked. But it was also because the critics and academics always got it wrong. They always missed the whole point. The thing is --- and I think the film expresses this attitude rather well --- you look at a painting and you see something. You see what it is. Or you don't. End of story.

You might see things that are good or bad, you might like it or not like it. It's not just that all paintings are equal, it's not just that everything comes down to a matter of personal taste. But you can only understand a painting by seeing it. As soon as you start trying to explain it and giving reasons for your judgements, already the painting has got lost in the bullshit.

Even from fellow artists... There is a moment shown in the film from the early days of Lee Krasner's relationship with Pollock. She looks at the painting he's working on and says, ``It's not really cubism. What is it you're trying to do, Pollock? (She almost always calls him 'Pollock,' even after they've been married for years.) Is this a bit of surrealism you're trying to inject now?'' And finally he just walks away and says, ``Why don't you paint the fucking painting?'' All the words, ``surrealism,'' ``dadaism,'' ``expressionism,'' ``impressionism,'' all the theory, those are just devices so that people who can't really see the painting can come to terms with it.

(And yet I think that a critics and academics can serve a useful purpose when they point to certain things in the work and help one see certain things, whether in a painting or a short story or a film, that one hadn't really noticed before. But I've written about that before, and it's not really relevant to this movie. And, to repeat, I don't know nuthin' about art.)

I guess one of the reasons I have such strong feelings watching this film is my awareness that unlike the artists such as Pollock, I was good at doing a number of things, and some of them were socially approved and supposedly guaranteed paths to a secure life. And so I never chose to devote my life to some one thing which was all I cared about. I spent most of my life dedicating myself to things I never quite quite really cared about.

There's no way I could have chosen to be a person like Jackson Pollock or Charlie Parker or William Burroughs or Janis Joplin or James Joyce. And yet....

I thought, I can have at a good job and make a good living and I can still be a writer. And there are people who have managed to make that work. But it never worked for me. Maybe if I'd been a bum, a junkie, I still would never have become a good writer. But in a way, as I now see it, that's not the point. Success is not the point. The point is.... The point is choosing to devote one's life to some one thing that one really cares about.

With Pollock, success came almost by accident. It wasn't Peggy Guggenheim or the critics like Clem Greenberg (although apparently Greenberg was almost the only one who really appreciated Pollock's work) who made him famous. It was the fact the LIFE magazine did an article on him. The Andy Warhol phenomenon, thirty years before Andy Warhol. And then, in the process of becoming famous, he became the person he had never been intended to be. A respectable, responsible member of society. (Well, not that he actually became completely responsible, but that was the role he was given to play.)
 

Okay, so that's one half of what the film is about. The other half is, to me, almost equally fascinating. Namely, Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden). Like Pollock, this is also a person I've known at various times in my life. I suppose that there still exist women like this in the world, but one doesn't run into them that often any more.

The woman who completely dedicates her life to taking care of her man. No, not just taking care of him. But seeing herself as the custodian of this man, this artist. Promoting him, protecting him from his critics, protecting him from himself. And seldom getting the appreciation she deserves for what she does, but that's not the point, is it? I mean if someone devotes an enormous amount of effort to restoring a painting by Vermeer, say, and protecting it from further deterioration and seeing that it's displayed to its best advantage.... One doesn't, after all, expect the painting to express gratitude. That's not why one does it.

Yeah, the world used to be full of women like Lee Krasner. (Or at least like her in their attitude toward their men.) I've met them married to academics, to ordinary businessmen. But at the moment, I can't think of another specific film where I've ever seen one portrayed this way.

Throughout the movie, even after they'd been married for years, when she talks to Pollock she seldom addresses him by first name, instead calling him ``Pollock.''

This is a film showing a pre-feminist era. It's taken for granted by everybody, including Lee Krasner herself, that helping Pollock do his own art takes priority over fulfilling her own artistic talent. His talent was greater (although how can we ever really know?), so that was what was important.

The first time Pollock vists her studio, he looks at her paintings and says, ``You're a damned good woman painter.'' Then there's a shot of Krassner's face and a moment where she might have said various things, but then somehow she manages to give a shrug of the shoulders with her eyes. Okay, so he thought it was a sincere compliment, and that's beside the point in any case, her eyes say.

It was thrilling to me that Marcia Gay Harden got an Academy Award for this role. Because in this movie, she is not a movie star. She's a tough New York Jewish broad, almost a little dykish, who can walk down the street without turning a single man's head. Throughout the movie, her hair looks like it hasn't been washed for a couple of weeks. She becomes Pollock's lover not because he's attracted to her, but because she decides that's what's going to happen and never gives him a chance to wonder whether whether it's something he wants or not.

In the movie, we see her walk into the bedroom and start taking off her clothes. For a while, Pollock stands in the doorway looking dazed (as so often), then finally decides it would be appropriate for him to walk into the bedroom too and stand close enough so that she can start taking off his clothes as well.

There are certain sorts of characters that are easy to portray in films. No, perhaps ``easy'' is not the right word, because it's not easy to do it really well. But they are characters we all know very well. One looks at a performance by Julia Roberts or Jodie Foster or Debra Winger (in their earlier films), and somehow this is a character that we have instant recognition for. Or Robert De Niro, or Melanie Griffith, or Meg Ryan, or Audrey Hepburn. Yes, they are the quintessence of people we know well. But we ``know them".... Yeah, we've seen people like that. We know them and yet they're not quite people we've known.

Lee Krasner, as Marcia Gay Harden portrays her, is a different sort of character. She's not an archetype. She's not someone who belongs in a movie. She's a real person.

-- Lee Lady
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Trying to understand learning by studying schooling is rather like trying to understand sexuality by studying bordellos.
      -- Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions