USING TIME

As I begin this post, I am just about 1/5th of the way through David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas. It’s a good novel.  Well written. Well reviewed. I’ve read Mitchell before, an earlier novel that I liked more than not. Then I starting putting his novels in a large private category: works that I would like to have read but wasn’t sure I wanted to tackle. There’s an old science fictional concept from the middle of the last century that applies. Books could be reproduced in pill form, and when you took one you would have read the book. You could experience languages, scientific concepts, sexual experiences, anything, in this manner.

I was drawn to tackle Mitchell’s novel after having experienced, several times actually, both in a movie theater and on Blu-ray at home, the Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s movie Cloud Atlas, which I found an easy pill to swallow indeed.

Will I pull back from the novel and stick the rest of it in that private category? Perhaps. Not sure yet. My probable path will be to continue on, a bit at a time, until I reach the end of its 509 pages. It impresses, but it simply is not as much fun as the movie. The carrot is that I will watch the movie again once I have finished the novel.

Both novel and movie deal with, among other things, time. Our passage through time, or its passage through us. A current that carries us along, or a flood that we struggle against. Patterns occur again and again. Is it we who recur or is it some kind of Platonic form in which our life stories take place? Doesn’t really matter.

The two works are quite different structurally. The novel, famously, is a series of interconnected tales over time, nested Russian dolls, if you will, beginning with the diary of a man on a ship in the Pacific in the 19th century, the next section a series of letters from a man in the early 1930s from an estate in the Netherlands to his lover in England, the third section dealing with that lover and his being trapped in an elevator with a young reporter some 50 years later, and on and on until the central section deals with events in the far future. Then we return through the series of nested tales until we end with the 19th century diary. And each section is told with a different voice, wonderfully captured.

The movie intercuts the many tales, making grand leaps through time (a period covering some 500 years or more), usually motivated by a visual image in one scene being echoed by something in the next. Tykwer directed the 1930s, 1970s, and 2012 sequences, the Wachowskis the 19th century sequence and the two set at different times in the future. The fact that I have liked Tykwer and the Wachowskis for many years now, even on projects that few others liked, no doubt has something to do with how much I enjoy the movie.


                                      Tom Tykwer, Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski

The movie also uses another technique of interest: the same actors are used over and over again throughout, makeup allowing them to be old or young, male or female, of any race. What does that mean? Who knows (although I could volunteer thoughts). Lots of folks hated it. I thought it lots of fun.


                                     Halle Berry and Tom Hanks in some of their incarnations

Reading a book or watching a movie of course are projects that involve the expenditure (some might say waste) of time. Almost invariably the actions within the work take place in and through time. (“Almost” is a good CYA word there, just to be on the safe side.) And so many works do involve the subject of time itself.

Proust. Need I say more about him? Only that “In Search of Lost Time” is such a better title than “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Time is there in the title of Garcia Marquez’s greatest work (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and implied in the title of its closest rival (The Autumn of the Patriarch).

The three greatest movies of Terence Davies involve time, something that is implied in their titles:

2001, A Space Odyssey has a definite year in the title, but its concerns range from the distant past until, well, it’s hard to say. Time and space become (well, are) indistinguishable. I’ve always thought that another good subtitle might have been A Time Odyssey. All of Stanley Kubrick’s movies involve time, if you ask me. And few directors have been as sensitive to the uses of time and timing within a work. He stretches time, he collapses it. Note the brilliant use of pacing in Barry Lyndon, for instance. And note his use of music as a correlative to time.

The Tree of Life begins before the creation of the universe, takes a long pause in mid-20th century small town Texas, and within its 2 and a half hour length takes time to show us the end of things. It is arguable that the movie attempts to show us a glimpse of the face of God.

The many techniques used by movie directors: The ticking clock. The count-down. The metronome. The leaves of the calendar flashing by. The sped-up growth or decline of a plant. The animal carcass that rots in seconds. Almost any montage sequence.

Look at how J. R. R. Tolkien and the later movie-maker Peter Jackson deal with embedding their tale(s) in other histories and stories to give the impression of great events taking place within a long period of time. Look at how the multiple endings of The Lord of the Rings, novel and movie, reinforce the idea that time doesn’t come to an end when much of the story seems to have done so. Stories embedded within larger stories.

Sometimes one is caught off guard by reminders of the passage of time in one’s own life.

The other night I was watching Some Like It Hot again. The film (it was film then) came out in 1959 and dealt with events taking place in 1929, some 30 years earlier. I can recall seeing it then and thinking how quaint everything looked way back the old days. To my amazement I noticed that some 55 years had passed between the time when I first saw the film and the present year. So I sat there in my old daze.

How strange it is to realize that things that happened in your own life have become history!

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Sergio Leone is one of the great cinematic poets of time. The word is used in 3 of his titles: Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in the Revolution (although that one is better known as Duck, You Sucker or A Fistful of Dynamite), and Once Upon a Time in America. All of his best films take time and twist it and elongate it and turn it in all sorts of ways, but it is in that last one that time itself becomes almost a character. It follows a gang of hoods through time, and we see these fellows as young boys already invested in a life of crime, as young men, and as older hoods ravaged by time. Leone’s work begins in the middle period and cuts back and forth to the past and the future, ending in a fever dream in an opium den. So what did they do for the American release? They reedited it into a chronological order, which meant that scenes intended to balance each other in certain ways no longer made any artistic sense. In addition the running time was cut down dramatically. It was a critical and commercial disaster, its brilliance not recognized in the American press until a cut more nearly like what Leone intended opened at the New York Film Festival on October 12, 1984.

(The history of the various cuts of this movie are fascinating. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_America 

I am eager to see it again, but now I will await the even longer cut that will be available on Blu-ray September 30 with a run-time of 4 hours and 29 minutes.   That’s a lot of movie and still not as long as Leone wanted it.)

The running time of movies and how it changes is in itself a fascinating topic. Loving The Thin Red Line as I did, I was eager to see Terrence Malick’s next one, The New World. What was released turned out to be a drastically cut version, shorter than Malick wanted. It seemed interminable. I couldn’t figure out why it had been so well received at the international film festivals. Then later I got the “extended director’s cut.” Now the movie began to make artistic sense to me. Longer was shorter.

Oliver Stone’s Alexander was an artistic disaster until his final and much longer cut made sense of it. Peter Jackson’s extended cut of The Lord of the Rings (which some folks call a trilogy and I call 1 novel and 1 movie) runs about 2 hours longer than the theatrical release. Although I liked and admired the theatrical experience, the additional 2 hours gives much more character detail and nuance to the work, and it plays better. There are those out there who still think Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is much too long and viewing it is like watching paint dry. I’ve always found the length perfect, and I am delighted that the director never cut it.

But Kubrick did cut the running time of 2 of his films soon after release: 2001, A Space Odyssey and The Shining. I was fortunate in getting to see the longer versions of each. My memory tells me that the longer cuts were best. Unfortunately, the cut footage from both has been destroyed, and now I will never be able to compare.

Pauline Kael was notorious for seeing a movie only once. It either made its point on one viewing or it wasn’t worth attending to. I love to return to movies. Every time I see one again, I am different. Older, if you prefer. The East of Eden I see today is different from the East of Eden I saw in 1955. (By the way, did you realize that if James Dean were still with us he’d have turned 83 on February 8!) Seeing Some Like It Hot recently I had a much less positive feeling about it than the one I had formed over the years. So much of it doesn’t hold up. Some of it does. It is intriguing to watch and try to figure out why. In both cases. Over time, one sorts things out. Why do I now like Seven Chances more than I like The General? (I could answer that, but I won’t. Not here.)

When Tom Miller was 76, he mentioned to his older sister Norma that the older he got the faster time flew. Honey, she said, wait till you’re 93! Well, he didn’t make it past 85, but he did learn what she meant. As did I. As do I. As did Maxwell Anderson. He knew that although it is a long, long while from May till December, the days do grow shorter when you reach September. The days as they dwindle down do become more precious. More and more I pick up a book or a movie, start it, and put it down, not that it seems intrinsically bad but just that it doesn’t appear to be worth the investment of what remains of my time. I make use of Jonathan’s Famous Filters, some of which are mentioned in a previous post of my MOVIES blog. There are a few relevant thoughts in my BOOKS blog post called “New Books & Old Eyes.”

As I move through my middle 70s I certainly feel Marvell’s wingéd chariot hurrying faster and faster as it tries to catch up with me. And it will. Can’t outrun it. He’s not the only poet to obsess on time. Housman with his cherry trees and with his heart laden with rue. Yeats old and gray and nodding by the fire. Frost standing at the crossroads on a wintry night. Comden and Green wondering where the time has all gone to. Seurat’s mother in Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George wondering at Sundays disappearing all the time when things were beautiful . . .

Tolkien’s Gandalf says, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Yes. I think he was talking about great deeds, heroic gestures, saving the world. I don’t operate on that level. I’ve done a few good deeds. I’ve helped out a few people who needed me from time to time. I’ve tried not to create bigger problems for the world to solve. My footprint is small indeed. (At least I’m not stomping people into the ground, and that counts for something.) At this point, getting through each day and enjoying it is about the height of my ambition.

Now much time do I have left? One never knows, do one? I am one of 39 first cousins who survived infancy, and there are only 9 of us left. My sister and I are the babies of the bunch, and it is likely that we shall see others fall away before us. Cousin Steve, who recently died at less than 3 weeks shy of his 97th birthday, was the one of us who (so far) lasted the longest. Is that an upper limit for me? My mother was 81 and my father 89 when they died. Tom was 85, right in the middle. Is that a realistic expectation for me?

Actually, I don’t obsess about how much time. Increasingly I’m just glad I got up this morning and the coffee pot still works! I will fill my day with little things, maybe a bit of mowing, maybe a bit of reading (now, while I’ve been working on this piece, I find that I have managed to get nearly 4/10ths of the way through Cloud Atlas! Looks like I may finish it after all), maybe watch a DVD or something I have recorded. Lunch, a cocktail this evening, a glass of wine with dinner (decisions: warm up some chicken tenders I cooked the other evening or bake a tilapia filet. In either case I’ll probably have sliced roasted zucchini with it). Just my quiet and usual pleasures. To get me through the day. To get me through the night. And with any luck I’ll wake up again tomorrow morning.