2/16/21: Howards End (1992) — An Object for My Personal Meditation (like all of the other movies) #poetry
You know that all of these pieces about movies are really about me, don’t you?
You know that all of my writing that you read is really about you, don’t you?
We all see different things
intention seems like folly
I see things in Howards End that its creators probably took for granted
It represents so much of what I want
Hipsters might laugh at it and call it middlebrow
Young people might think it is terribly old-fashioned
to the point of inaccessibility
Those criticisms and reservations may even have merit
Surely they do
In a way
For some people
But they are not what I see
The first thing that I see is the audience which existed in 1992, and I think exists today (you’re reading this aren’t you?)
that doesn’t have to be flattered in any way
An audience that comes to hear the artists out
Before I started writing, I talked a lot
The talk charmed some people, and got on a lot more people’s nerves
But that is all an artist wants to do
He or she wants to share all of these thoughts and feelings he or she has inside of him
and he wants to say it in his or her particular way
He or she wants to breathe
to share their view of the world
The artist doesn’t want to manipulate your out of your money
He or she loves you, you know
He or she pays all sorts of attention to you
and wants the same
But he or she wants to be honest
wants to be real
not to make you agree
or defer to his or her ideas
or be showered with your admiration …
Not for anything vain as all of that …
We live in solitudes
We are all alone
That’s what I think
and we warm each other with words
Communicating who we are to one another
and recognizing ourselves in the mirror
We don’t have to save the world;
by living in the world
by participating
we make the world perfect
Artists just need someone to talk to
and so do audiences
We get to be consciously alive
we don’t have to work on the assembly line
or be put together on top of it
and sold in a showroom when we are done
Movies are popular art, and so is my writing
By popular I mean movies are accessible
There are no prerequisites
you just start watching them
Accessible
that word again
Howards End is accessible
but the audience has to work a little
A good audience listens actively
engages the piece
When the artists try to make something in a way that their audience finds interesting
They lose the soul of the piece
It either interests a person or it doesn’t
The artist doesn’t have to think about it
TV commercials grab your attention
but who really listens to them
Commercials share information
and stimulate desire
You can’t sell a soul
That’s why art traditionally has such a difficult relationship with money
Art can generate money
but the trick is to get it in front of the people who want to hear it
not to sell people who could care less
like serious movies that look like comedies in the Coming Attractions
and then piss off the suckers who get a challenging evening when they wanted a laugh
I don’t think Merchant Ivory planned a thing to sell an audience
But Merchant, the producer was a genius at finding the people who would love what they made
I love the collaboration
Merchant did the art business
Like an art gallery owner
not like a car dealer
Ivory directed the movies
Hired other great collaborators
Great writer
Great actors
Great composers
Great cinematographer
Great art direction
Great everything
All of the perfect parts
a collection of masters
Exquisitely rendering their separate and distinct tasks
Singing their soulful arias of their visions of the world
all harmonized by Ivory
and sustained in all of their material needs
by Merchant
Even their names are perfect
Merchant is a classy word for buying and selling
Nothing corrupt about it at all
And what is more pure
than Ivory
Art has to be sincere
Art has to be authentic
It doesn’t try to be pure
It just is
or its not art
and God knows not to be superior in any way
Just to be
to be what it is
The world needs the unadulterated soul expressed
The Soul is here
It can’t be ignored …
The soul dies
People die from being ignored too
We need the truth
It’s not optional
We have to know the way that we are
Masses of people live being pushed to and fro
Never understanding the forces that determine their lives
Never aware that such forces even exist
We need to engage the mystery from which we come, live in and go back to …
Art doesn’t transform us
we transform naturally
It is our consciousness that transforms
The more we know ourselves
and our predestined roles
The more we serve the world
The world is an artist
and we are its paints
All subtly different colors on an infinite spectrum
Mixing and contrasting with one another
Once we understand that
we stop wasting our time
Howards End takes it’s time
No anachronistic music on the soundtrack
No scenes of the Napoleonic Wars scored with covers of Bill Withers tunes
Maybe the director guides us past visual art and symphonic music with the reverence and civility of a museum docent
But I like that
I like civilization
I like reverence
I like creator and audience respectfully encountering strangeness together
The strangeness of a bygone historical period
The strangeness of art
We are given an opportunity to access
but we have to take it
Howards End was marketed like every movie has to be
But in an expert way
The movie itself isn’t marketing
The story comes from the soul of a great writer
Not survey cards from test audiences
I used to love the Merchant Ivory movies
I never saw this one before
but I got to see several of them at the Paris Theater in New York
Off of Fifth Avenue near the Plaza Hotel
A neighborhood of great aspiration
at least it was in those days
A confident pursuit of beauty and power
A great neighborhood for Merchant
and Ivory
I had a romantic view of New York City in those days
It never really existed
this dream of wonderful art and responsible wealth and power
I saw the actor James Spader waiting for the light to change near the Paris Theater once in the eighties
Just at about the time that he decided to go exclusively for the money
and he looked like it — like his art was just his path to the auto showroom
kind of smug and selfish and a little mean
He wasn’t paying attention to the city at all
or the people in it
He was focused on something else
all Merchant and no Ivory
and my dream of New York City ended
for the City
but not for me
and I still think it’s possible
As a matter of fact I think it si the time for my dream to be real
I think people are desperate for it
And I live in a kind of anticipation
a hopeful feeling buoyed by something greater than reason
The soul and the world turn toward each other
and when they are both ready
They embrace …
One time Francis Ford Coppola was waiting in line outside of the Paris and in front of me
The Godfather and his other movies seem like they emerge from a frightening chaos
Frustration is followed by an explosion
and the result is a surprise
a relief
a miracle.
Coppola is a daredevil on the edge
of art or disgrace
fortune or ruin
Masterpiece or disaster …
I love Francis Ford Coppola movies
Like Orson Welles he is a fat indulgent genius
Genius is fat and indulgent
It isn’t moderate
It takes discipline
but it is a discipline of another kind
A discipline that requires obedience to all of genius’ unreasonable demands
all of its excesses
Genius
fashions a generous world
a world of operatic feeling
a free and thrilling place …
A place beyond all fearful and arbitrary boundaries
Welles and Coppola, fat martyrs who sacrifice themselves to assert the world’s glory
The glory that most people are too timid to see
let alone acknowledge
Merchant Ivory appeals to something else in me
I like their films’ civility
Their order
Their social structures
however imperfect
and at times the social structures are monstrously cruel
The characters are tragic
and I find the whole thing reassuring
hahahahahaha
at least they have a structure for their suffering
The characters belong to civilizations
most often Great Britain, but France, America and India too
that tried to make something out of nature
Nations as
Grand epic works of art
Culture is where the soul meets the material world
Merchant Ivory films are so cultured
Not missing the dark bits
or the light
The struggle to make something of this damn thing
this world
this life
come to think of it
the same glory and failure of Welles and Coppola
of us all
told in such a controlled way
How beautiful and wonderful and sad
The Remains of the Day is one of my favorite movies ever, and it is so beautiful and wonderful and sad
The characters’ sadness in The Remains of the Day is a much more preferable state than the deranged feeling of the last episode of the recent hit TV series, The Queen’s Gambit
a show that had all of Coppola’s tormented fury
and Welles’ desperate innovation
and all of Merchant Ivory’s precise and ordered artistry
in all elements of its film making
for the first five installments
and then ends
THUD
with the pulse pounding triumph of The Karate Kid
with what people who aren’t thinking
think is a happy ending
The Queen’s Gambit gives up
Coppola and Merchant Ivory never quit …
This poem is a message in a bottle
a piece of yearning and fulfillment
notes on a blueprint
all the art that we can make out of the natural world
What’s more real
The concrete of the Paris Theater and the Plaza Hotel
or the grand dream their creators wanted it to be?
Our true dreams have nothing to do with desire
Our souls are seeded
with the future of the world.
Copyright 2021 Richard Thomas
