True to the Muse:

Keith Gordon’s Life on the Fringe

(From Dogville Vs Hollywood, © by Jake Horsley)

‘“The critic is a soldier in an army put to rout, who deserts and goes over to the enemy.’ And who is that enemy? The audience.”

—Jean-Luc Godard, quoting Jules Renard

The shadow of George Lucas is Keith Gordon, an artist as marginalized as he is gifted. The inverse consequence of a system, culture, and public that creates legends out of merchants is a talented filmmaker condemned to obscurity and “failure.” Theoretically, this imbalance is what critics are there to correct; in practice it rarely works out that way, and less and less so as film criticism devolves into mere PR. Inevitably, critics have next to no effect on behemoths like the Star Wars or Matrix franchises, since fans are going to see those films anyway. All the slings and arrows in the world cannot stop a juggernaut. When it comes to helping a small film find its audience, however, critics do help, or at least used to. Unfortunately, movie critics these days appear less and less inclined to stick their necks out or go against the current of the consensus. It is now more or less de rigeur for critics to slam Brian De Palma, for example, and to praise Stanley Kubrick, Wes Anderson or Alexander Payne. Critics, even when they are immune to the more blatant pressures of marketing, hype, studio and/or star seductions, and popular tastes, allow themselves to be swayed—however unconsciously—by critical consensus. They are only human after all. Film criticism has always suffered from accusations of elitism and of being out of touch with (or indifferent to) public likes and dislikes; but lately critics seem to have succumbed to the pressure and adjusted their standards accordingly, betraying the very faculty that made them critics to begin with. Critics can sell out, too, and for exactly the same reasons as filmmakers: wealth, fame, and mass appeal. In a word, the desire to be liked.

This may be a simple matter of resignation (and realism) on the part of critics, however. As Keith Gordon discovered with the release of his fourth feature, the power of critics to sway the mass is negligible at best.

“One of the most depressing but fascinating things about Waking the Dead was there were cities where we got nothing but rave reviews and there were cities where we got nothing but bad reviews and it had almost no effect on the box office. That’s the one thing you think with independent film—“Well, reviews are going to make all the difference.” But we could not have gotten better reviews than we got in Los Angeles. And it still didn’t make any money in Los Angeles. We couldn’t have gotten worse reviews than we did in Philadelphia and it didn’t do that much worse in Philadelphia.”[1]

Among critics, Pauline Kael was a noted exception; in her willingness—at times her perverse determination—to go against accepted critical opinion, she took delight in trashing revered filmmakers and adulating ones she felt unjustly neglected. In the latter case, Kael often took her support of a beloved filmmaker to absurd degrees, undermining her own credibility in the process, such as when she praised Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite (and even Convoy), or eulogized Brian de Palma’s The Fury. But it was the spirit with which Kael championed individual films and filmmakers that gave her such a persuasive and influential a voice in movies, and her passion undoubtedly helped many films find the audience they deserved.[2]

This current essay is admittedly something of a personal aside on the part of the author, an expression of despair, not so much for the state of movies but for the state of film criticism. When a film like Silence of the Lambs or American Beauty is unanimously hailed as a work of art, when even Spiderman 2 is greeted as an outstanding piece of entertainment while the latest Brian De Palma is ignored, the rot goes deep. And when a film as rich, complex, and audacious as Keith Gordon’s The Singing Detective is more or less roundly dismissed by critics and so denied the audience it deserves (and that audience likewise deprived of a movie it would probably enjoy), critics have a lot to answer for.

Keith Gordon is a director whose consistently thoughtful, sensitive, and wholly original work has gone almost entirely overlooked by audiences. In a different world—a world where George Lucas produced but was never allowed to direct, and in which critics knew what they were talking about—Gordon would by now have established himself as one of the dozen or so most gifted and challenging filmmakers working in America. Instead, he is almost unknown, and despite having made five of the most interesting independent movies of the past seventeen years, he remains almost criminally ignored by Hollywood and its money men. Since his debut in 1988, Gordon has averaged a film every three-and-a-half years. In his own words, “I’m now a full time fundraiser. That’s the great reality of independent filmmaking in America—my job is raising money, and I direct as a hobby.”

Gordon’s approach to life as an independent Hollywood filmmaker is nothing if not pragmatic, and he has shown the wisdom to keep a low profile in more ways than one:

“I’ve been lucky enough right now, and I live simply enough. . . . I mean, not to say that I live like a monk—I live in a nice house—but I learned a lesson growing up with parents in the business that you don’t trust what the future’s going to bring economically. So I haven’t run out and bought a Porsche, I don’t buy Armani suits. I try to, when I make some money doing a movie, to put it in the bank, so that if it’s three or four or five years before the next one, that’s OK. And because of that I’ve been able to do this thing of really pursuing the things that excite me and do the things I love and have it be less about how much money can I make and more about how much do I care about this story and how much creative freedom can I get. I mean, I’d much rather lose a zero off of my salary and have more control of the film than make a film for a studio and be paid a million dollars but have somebody else reedit it.”[3]

*

“Once you’ve proved you aren’t the next George Lucas, then your stock goes down. . . It doesn’t get easier, it gets harder, ’cause with each film you define yourself more, what your limitations are. If you haven’t had a financial success, you get smaller and smaller.”

—Richard Linklater

Gordon’s love of movies began when he was seven years old and his father took him to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unable to fully understand the film, but aware that something was going on that he couldn’t grasp, Gordon soon developed an almost obsessive interest in movies (as well as a perhaps excessive regard for Kubrick). In his mid-teens he began acting in school plays and in 1978 (at seventeen), he was persuaded to audition for a part in Jaws 2. To his surprise he got the role, which led to a part in a TV mini-series “Studs Lonigen.” Then, in 1979, after a meeting with Brian De Palma, he landed the lead role in De Palma’s student project Home Movies (filmed at Sarah Lawrence college). By this time, Gordon was determined to be a filmmaker himself, and working with De Palma (on what was essentially a film studies production) provided him with the perfect opportunity. As Gordon put it many years later: “Working with De Palma was a major education . . . it was the world’s best film class for me, as an actor and an aspiring director.”[4] In effect, De Palma became Gordon’s teacher and mentor, a fitting relationship considering that Gordon became something of a De Palma surrogate (his teenage alter ego) both in Homes Movies and the following year in Dressed to Kill. Gordon continued the process of learning by osmosis (and relentless questions) with another master director, John Carpenter, when he was cast as the psychotic car-lover in Carpenter’s Stephen King adaptation, Christine, in 1983.

Soon after, in 1985, he wrote the script for the haunting cult film Static, directed by Mark Romanek and co-produced by Gordon.[5] In the late ’80s, having played Rodney Dangerfield’s son in Back to School in 1986, Gordon withdrew from acting and in 1988 made his directorial debut, an adaptation of The Chocolate War, the engrossing but infuriating novel by Robert Cormier; the film, though well-reviewed, was not a commercial success.[6] It took Gordon four more years to make A Midnight Clear, based on the book by William Wharton. A subtly affecting, heart-rending wartime tale told with remarkable assurance and restraint, the film was once again well-reviewed but soon disappeared without a trace. Though according to Gordon it was his most successful picture to date, it was severely injured by a release date coinciding with the Rodney King riots. As Gordon put it, “Even if you do everything right, it can fail.”[7] A Midnight Clear is a beautiful, poetic work, haunting and surreal; an overwhelmingly affecting character portrait full of richly observed, subtly memorable moments and marvelous performances (Ethan Hawke and Gary Sinise are among the ensemble cast), it is probably the best anti-war film since Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. But, like all Gordon’s subsequent films to date, it slipped under the radar to become one of the most under-appreciated American films of recent years.

Gordon’s third movie, in 1996, was also an adaptation. Mother Night, taken from the book by Kurt Vonnegut, dealt with an American spy (Howard Campbell, played with devastating pathos by Nick Nolte) who poses as a Nazi and broadcasts their propaganda on the radio, sending coded messages to the Allies. Mother Night was above all a character study about a man who loses his identity from the lack of an adequate frame of reference. Campbell (Nick Nolte) is neither American nor German, neither Nazi nor Ally; he is simply a playwright who takes on the ultimate challenge, a challenge that proves to be beyond him (not beyond his talents but beyond his moral strength). There is a scene in the film when Campbell first realizes he has lost his will, and simply stops on the New York sidewalk and stands motionless, as the crowd and the hours pass by, devoid of reason to move. Interestingly enough, the scene evoked a moment from Brian De Palma’s equally neglected Home Movies, in which Keith Gordon, then an actor, sits on his suitcase in the middle of the train station, day after day, having become “an extra in his own life.”

Like Midnight, Mother Night was largely overlooked, perhaps due in part to its ambivalent view of Nazism. Like the book, the film refrained from judging its characters, preferring to deal with Campbell’s conscience (or lack of it) rather than the moral question of Nazism itself. It’s conceivable that the film was punished for its refusal to toe the party line, but whatever the case, once again Gordon found himself being marginalized for the very qualities that made his films so outstanding: their subtlety, sensitivity, and intelligence. Gordon described Mother Night as follows:

“The real deep theme is of personal responsibility. The idea that you have to be careful about what you pretend to be because what you pretend to be is what you are, to me that’s completely timeless. World War II was just a convenient device. The thing about World War II is that it heightens everything. You’re taking something that’s always seen in the blackest of blacks and the whitest of whites, and showing that even there behaviour is a very grey thing. The most dangerous thing to do is to deny the dark side of yourself, to not take responsibility. Howard’s crime is not so much that he acts like a Nazi, it’s that he doesn’t think about and take responsibility for his actions in any direction. I like the fact that neo-Nazis are ironically the comic relief in the film, because again it makes you reconsider who everybody is. In a perverse way they’re the most honest people in the story. Everybody else has triple identities, but these are the only persons who really are true to something they believe in. Which is in no way defending them, but it gets into the complexity that these perverse, pathetic guys are not the danger. The guy standing on the street corner screaming is not what’s dangerous. It’s the Howard Campbells, the people who should know better, who have a chance and are smart enough to stand up and say no—those are the people who bear responsibility. There’ll always be an Adolf Hitler in every society at every moment, screaming that if we just kill these people or those people it’ll solve all of our problems. They’re not to blame—they’re just nuts. It’s the people that listen who make it go one way or the other.”[8]

With remarkable fidelity and affinity for the material, Gordon and scriptwriter Bob Weide uphold the spirit of Vonnegut’s novel and perfectly capture its sad, ambivalent, and ironic view of life. As a director, Gordon seems to have a natural affinity for the schizophrenic experience, for isolation, despair, and the twists and turns of the broken human spirit. None of which exactly makes for a roaring success in Hollywood, or for “the next George Lucas.” Yet such empathy is above all what makes Gordon’s work so unique and affecting, and what makes him such a remarkable creative presence in today’s movie climate.

His fourth feature, Waking the Dead, made in 2000, once again suffered from the whims of fate and bad timing when the company that funded it, Gramercy, went bankrupt just prior to its release. Of all Gordon’s films, Waking the Dead is probably the least known (which is really saying something), as well as being I think his least successful overall. Despite empathic performances by Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly, and a noble attempt by Gordon to create a magical reality in which past and present, fact and fantasy co-exist, overlap and finally intermingle, the film comes across as meandering and sentimental. As ever Gordon connects at an emotional level to the source material (a novel by Scott Spencer), but since the material is already somewhat mawkish, the director’s sensitivity here somewhat clouds his vision. What is called for to strengthen the film’s meditations on pain and loss is a harder, more detached approach, and Gordon is perhaps a little too personally involved in his characters, and lacking the necessary distance, to do full justice to their story.

Gordon’s most recent film, The Singing Detective, released towards the end of 2003, is easily his most ambitious work to date. Based on a screenplay by Dennis Potter, the film was produced by Mel Gibson’s Icon Pictures and shot in 35 days for $8 million. Gibson (who also plays a role in the film, gleefully out of character as the psychiatrist) was instrumental in initiating the film as an “independent” project; the script had been floating around Hollywood for ten years, ever since Potter wrote it, and it’s largely thanks to Gibson that it finally got made. The film is a strange animal, all right, a work sans genre, and at times Gordon seems to have overreached himself, grasping for effects he isn’t quite able to achieve. The various styles, moods, and genres give the film a slightly garish, amateurish feel, yet in the end (perhaps consciously on Gordon’s part) this very awkwardness works in the film’s favor. The Singing Detective is a remarkably ingenuous work, fresh and daring, almost childlike in its lack of pretension, and easily one of the most original American movies of the last twenty years. Above all, it showcases Robert Downey Jr.’s raging, embittered psoriasis-afflicted pulp writer, inside whose head the whole movie (more or less) takes place, and Downey gives an inventive, powerful performance, what may be the apotheosis of his enormous talent. Praise for Downey notwithstanding, on its release Gordon’s film met with a wall of critical resistance, a veritable consensus of contempt. This may have been due in part (in the UK at least) to a fondness for Potter’s original TV series; but it was perhaps due even more to the basic incompatibility of Potter’s idiosyncratic, scathing vision with mainstream (critical) tastes.[9] Whatever the case, the movie once again tragically failed to find it s audience.

As with his previous adaptations, Gordon respected the source material without revering it, and as a director, he has a rare gift: the ability to fuse his own sensibility and talents with his subject at a fundamental level. In the case of The Singing Detective, it was a somewhat less seamless fusion; Potter’s vision (his bizarre blend of musical fantasy with bleak psychological realism) was so startlingly original it required another sensibility at least as strong and eccentric to fuse with. Gordon doesn’t quite possess (yet) the surrealist gifts to make Potter’s vision his own, or to take it to the next level (David Lynch might be the only director capable of that). He’s a proficient director in every way, and seems to be blessed with a natural rapport with actors (perhaps why so many good ones want to work with him). Yet Gordon isn’t a visionary director, and this was a visionary script. Fortunately, he had a visionary actor at a career peak to take up the slack, and Downey carries the day.[10]

The Singing Detective isn’t a masterpiece; it’s flawed and fractured and at times thin, even facile and occasionally redundant (most especially in the pseudo-noir sequences). But it’s an imaginative and fearless piece of cinema, an admirably eccentric work that manages to do something like justice to a brilliant piece of writing. Full of inventive delights and heartfelt touches, it leaves most other recent American films in the dust. Yet it flopped badly, both in the UK and the US, being so poorly reviewed that many people (myself included) gave it a miss, wary of the stench of failure. As it happened, the bad smells came not from the film but from critics too corrupt and jaded to recognize a work of art when they saw it. There’s no accounting for taste, and no sense in getting riled over a lack of it on the part of critics or the public. C’est la guerre, and in a war, everyone must take sides. Hollywood has helped create a world where Titanic did not sink and George Lucas is the unchallenged Emperor who rules the waves.[11] Movies are founded on mass appeal, and the mass is characterized by its lack of discernment, after all; the critics (those who have joined the enemy at least) are little more than servants to that mass. In the end, success and adulation, however desirable, are besides the point. Like Hal Hartley, Keith Gordon may thrive in obscurity, and his talents can develop all the better for being mostly unsung (this piece notwithstanding). Audiences (as well as Gordon) can be grateful he’s allowed to work at all, and that there is at least one American filmmaker who has stayed true to his Muse.[12]

For More on Keith Gordon, go to Griffin Lore

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[1] See Peter Tonguette, “Keith Gordon on Keith Gordon,” http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/33/keith_gordon.html

[2] In 1967, Kael was responsible more or less single-handedly for rescuing Bonnie and Clyde from critical and commercial oblivion with her review of the film (her first for The New Yorker). It was a move that also helped to make her own name in the business, as the guardian angel of the New Hollywood. As Robert Towne put it, “Without her, Bonnie and Clyde would have died the death of a fuckin‘ dog.” Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, pg. 41.

[3] Tonguette, “Keith Gordon on Keith Gordon.”

[4] Cynthia Fuchs, “Interview with Keith Gordon,” www.popmatters.com

[5] Static relates the tale of a young inventor who begins building a mysterious device in a small town. The curiosity of the town inhabitants grows steadily to fever pitch, especially when the young man promises that his invention will banish all their troubles forever and make everybody happy, free from fear. When he finally unveils it, however, it appears to be an ordinary TV set. The young man insists that his device can pick up transmissions from Heaven; no one besides him is able to see anything but static. In desperation, the young inventor kidnaps a busload of old-age pensioners; the police surround the bus and open fire and a stray bullet hits the gas tank. The bus explodes and everyone is killed. The young man has indeed shown them “heaven.”

[6] Cormier’s novel (in a rare case of the artist knowing less about art than the businessmen) was initially rejected by several publishers largely due to its gratuitously pessimistic ending, in which evil and despair prevails. For Chinatown, this may be a legitimate finale, for a young adults’ novel about the price of conformity, it was not, and left the reader with a message of, as Gordon put it, “You can’t fight city hall.” Cormier refused to change his ending, however, and the novel was eventually published to great success. Recognizing the nihilistic nature of the book’s ending, Gordon made some subtle but perceptive changes, much to the frustration of many of the book’s younger fans.

[7] Tonguette, “Keith Gordon on Keith Gordon,” © 2004.

[8] See http://mondofausto.com/interview-gordon-vonnegut.htm

[9] A similar fate had befallen Herbert Ross’ adaptation of Pennies from Heaven, with Steve Martin, which was also a commercial flop and seemed to baffle critics and public alike, though in this case, Kael was there to champion the film.

[10] Downey was just out of jail for drug abuse (and still on probation) when he made the film, and it’s impossible to imagine any other actor of his age group bringing such intensity, humor, and depth to the role.

[11] Actually, according to Premiere’s 2005 “Power List,” Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) is now officially the Emperor of Hollywood, closely followed by Steven Spielberg. Poor George must settle for 11th place.

[12] His most recent work, in 2005, is slated to be Billy Dead, starring Ethan Hawke, for which Gordon attempted to finance through an “initial public offering” (IPO), via which the public was invited to buy shares in the finished film, so providing the budget. Unfortunately, there was insufficient interest, and Gordon was forced to take the more conventional route. Gordon was also commissioned to write a script for a Cruise/Wagner production of Isaac Asimov’s novel, The End of Eternity, though at present “seems pretty much dead” (Gordon to the author). Gordon expressed no regret to me over this, however, and I can’t help but think it may be just as well, since Cruise and Muse do not easy bedfellows make.