The Madness of King Scorcese
Saw The Aviator yesterday with my family – wife and two teenage kids – at a multiplex called Fun Republic in Andheri. We like Fun a lot a better than the other very nice multiplex across the road, Fame Adlabs, only because it has a nice food court and you can sit for a while before the movie (or after, if you prefer) and eat something more filling than popcorn and samosas.
Over various sundries, my wife mentioned that she’d read a column by a well-known Page 3 queen in which said maharani talks about how, since she’s started going to multiplexes, she’s totally stopped visiting single-screen cinemas. I don’t usually read columns with pictures of the author over them – I once used to write several such columns, so that probably accounts for some of the ‘avoid’ factor – but p3-queen had a point. Even we, an inveterate movie-going family that likes to see every possible worthwhile movie on the big screen (and then only check out the rest on DVDs, which we also consume in large numbers) have become a total multiplex family.
It almost makes me wonder, what’s going to happen to the old, heritage-building cinemas that I grew up watching movies in, like Regal, Sterling, Eros, Liberty, to name just a few. Will they go the way of other oldie-goldies like Strand (after which Strand Bookstall took its name, because Padmashree T. S. Shanbag began his famous landmark as a little stall – hence the appellation – outside said theatre)? I guess so. Or they’ll do as Metro is doing, i.e., convert themselves into multiplexes to keep pace with the a-changin’ times.
Anyway, to get back to the movie.
The Aviator more or less did what I thought it would. It Hollywoodised Howard Hughes’ life, which was fine, because Hughes lived a very Hollywoodish life anyway. But what it also did, and I liked a lot about it, was that it treated the biopic as a character study a la Scorcese. Which meant that old Marty felt free to descend into entire sequences of hallucinogenic madness, sequences which would be utterly familiar to viewers of at least two of his earlier films, The Last Temptation Of Christ, and Taxi Driver, two similar films which, while dealing with completely different subjects, were nevertheless also biographical studies of single characters who resort to a type of functional insanity while dealing with, well, let’s face it, an essentially non-sane-sical duniya.
It made for difficult viewing. I mean, it was nail-bitingly difficult to watch the protagonist, the world’s first billionaire, descend to the level of urinating in milk bottles and repeating the same dialogue several dozen times over, with more happening in his head than on the screen for about ten minutes at a stretch. The thing I didn’t like at all, this being a biopic and presumedly subject to some laws of truth-telling, was the way the film totally erased all mention of Hughes dependency on painkilling drugs after his near-fatal air crash in Beverly Hills. For that matter, the two biographies of Hughes I’ve read over the years (came home and looked them up) list so many famous stars with whom he was linked publicly that it was a wonder why Scorcese simply dropped all that juicy stuff from his retelling. Or the whole WWII campaign.
But what worked brilliantly was the fact that after this spell of madness, Scorcese, with a brilliantly true portrayal by the wholly under-estimated and hugely talented Leonardo DiCaprio, gives us a terrifically stimulating comeback. Like a Rocky down in the penultimate round, Hughes emerges from the swamp of his mental anguish to attend the Senate hearings. And the way he lashes back at his nemesis, the corrupt Senator (backed by the Pan Am president, Hughes primary business rival) makes you marvel all the more. When Hughes walks out of that senate hearing, reporters pumping his hand and shouting “Hughes! Hughes!” like loyal fans at a Mohun Baga game, you really feel vindicated and triumphant.
Eventually, you realize, it’s knowing that he sank so low into madness just before he came back to win that victory that gives that comeback its punch. Like Jesus’s resurrection in The Last Temptation or the taxi driver hero’s assassination of the President in Taxi Driver, that final commuppance wouldn’t mean half as much without the travails that the hero suffered just before it. Never mind that Hughes went on to live thirty more years, or that his role in the Watergate scandal and so many other major controversies were far more newsworthy than that Senate hearing, or that he lived to actually see his visionary dreams fulfilled – passenger jet aircraft were indeed the future – or that his real ammassing of wealth and teenaged mistresses had only just begun (or that several of those mistresses he never actually got around to having sex with, or even visiting!) and so many other enticing tidbits that are left out. Those, like the facts, are just quibbles, right?
In the end, The Aviator is more about Scorcese than Hughes. Like so many biographies these days, it’s the teller not the tale that makes for compelling narration. We won’t read Vikram Seth’s upcoming non-fiction book because it’s a true story (about his aunt and uncle? who cares!) but because it’s Seth’s new book. We didn’t care that the Russell Crowe starrer A Dangerous Mind tampered dangerously with the truth, altering whole sections of the real life to suit movie-making purposes as long as it made a good film in itself. And we make successes of books like White Moghuls by William Dalrymple not because the main protagonists lived two hundred years ago but because Dalrymple is telling their tale here and now. Or The Master by Colm Toibin which is presented as a novel rather than a biography of Henry James (incidentally, one of my most-loved authors) because fiction laced with a stiff dose of truth is wholly desirable while truth laced with a stiff dose of fiction is wholly unacceptable.
Reality, like Hughes’ hallucinations, is only a means to an end in narration today. It’s what you do with the reality that matters more than the reality itself. Like reading seven newspapers a day, as I do, and seeing the same events reported so differently – often with wholly different factual details – that you come to realize over time that we live in a world where everything is POV. In a world controlled by the media and its storytellers who care so much more about the telling than the tale (why else do you think reporters call their articles and news reports ‘stories’) even disasters like tsunamis are only fodder for the mill, a means to sell more newspapers and grab more eyeballs.
At least in the hands of a true artist, like Martin Scorcese in The Aviator, a life altered almost beyond all recognition comes close to resembling art. And he uses well-paid actors, not real dead bodies on a Sri Lankan beach, to sell his pictures.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 21st, 2005 at 12:33 am. It is filed under Ashok.
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