Oh, Those Magnificent Ambersons!

Two quotes from V.J. Perkin's book on The Magnificent Ambersons for the BFI Classics series. If I had to pick a favourite of Welles' films, I might well pick this, despite it's undoubted ruined state. I certainly love it more than Citizen Kane, great as the earlier film might be.

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"On paper Welles' ending looks inspired. But everything would turn on the question of tone, the balance between pain and compassion, humour and harshness, bleakness and generosity. It might - though none of the witnesses suggests this - have embraced the complacent despair that so often wins acceptance as the authentication of seriousness and Art."

[We'll never know of course, since Welle's ending was poorly substituted by RKO. It's the wider point that struck me though, since it seems to be a much more elegant formulation of what I was struggling to say in my last post about George R.R. Martin's work. On reflection, what I was really responding to was not the work itself, which as I said, I've neither read nor seen, and nor do I wish to. That part at least, is not really the best thing I've written on this blog. I was trying to respond to an element of the discourse which appears to surround the tv show. And the reason I find it so irritating is probably quite personal. I mentioned in passing the way in which the use of the term 'realism' seems to be replicating the sorts of claims which were made on behalf of the mainstream American comics which came out in the wake of the success of Watchmen and The Dark Night Returns. A typical defence of violence and 'complacent despair' was that it was more 'realistic' than the standard kind of superhero stories they were contrasted with. I worry that I've made that kind of argument myself, when I was younger, since it was in the wake of those works that I became interested in American comics (in the early 90s, around the time DC's Vertigo imprint was established). I worry that I've read work which has exactly the same failings as I imagine that a show like Game of Thrones does. The problem isn't that fictional works should depict violence or despair, or anything bleak or unpleasant, but there's a difference between a visceral presentation of violence or suffering as opposed to a relishing in it's depiction. It's precisely as Perkins says, that such representations are often used as a facile way of claiming seriousness for a work. It isn't an easy line to judge. Indeed, I'm not sure that it can always be so easily separated into the two contrasting approaches. And it's a mistake that seems particularly easy to make when you're a teenager, a mistake which I'm sure I've made on plenty of occasions. I was a very serious teenager. So there's an element of guilt now in my responses to any work which represents violence. An element that wasn't there before.

[This is also of course, related to the way in which genres such as comedy or romance get slighted, seen as something lesser. They aren't serious enough. But that's a separate argument.]

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"Accumulation has it's inconveniences but they are more tolerable than loss."

[Surely every hoarder lives with that contradictory feeling of wishing they could get rid of everything? Or is it just me?]