J. M. W. Turner, by Cornelius Varley
In
my teenage years I read a couple of books by G. K. Chesterton, and they
practically knocked me off my feet. I of course had no idea what the man
looked like, but on the basis of his cleverness and his Englishness I formed a
very strong visual image: suave, svelte, elegant, dapper, clipped
moustache—John Barrymore, Errol Flynn type. Only much later did I see an
actual photograph of Chesterton—rumpled, fleshy, messy, Falstaff type. Though I recognized the absurdity of my
response, I felt a strange sense of unease, disappointment, almost
betrayal. There is a potency in
the visual image.
About
fifteen years ago—I remember the time only because the conversation came up in
the context of the “Y2K” flap—a student told me that “everybody knew” that the
CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The person who told me this was a very intelligent young man
who was born probably about fifteen years after the event to which he referred.
I
was shocked—not that the CIA had killed Kennedy but that a potential honors
graduate at Princeton would casually believe it had. My remonstrance, if it disquieted him at all, did so only as
a further demonstration of just how successful the conspiracy had been. Thus alerted, I began to appreciate
that many of his contemporaries held a similar view. And some of them would cite as a source of their information
a 1992 film by Oliver Stone, JFK. I had seen this film and thought
it junk from A to Izzard. Others
regarded it as visual history.
Then
last week a couple of experiences revived the issue in my mind. I came upon a newspaper article by
Jeffrey Zacks, a psychologist at Washington University, entitled “Why Movie Facts Prevail.” I think it
summarizes the argument of his recent book, which I’ll hope to read when it works its way through
our library’s acquisitions process, with the enticing title of Flicker: Your Brain on Movies. The gist of Zack’s research is this:
cinematic images tend to trump other modes of cognition. You can read a detailed history of the
battle of Gettysburg, but the facts on the page can easily be conquered by a
contradictory and fictitious cinematic version. So for millions of Americans the CIA will remain the author
of the Kennedy assassination. The
current hit film Selma is likely to command
the historical view of Lyndon Johnson for the next generation.
Pictorial
images require little connection with empirical reality to be convincing. I could have continued to imagine
Chesterton however I pleased had I not encountered the inconvenience of an
actual photograph of the man. Of
course most of the vast eons of history were innocent of the camera
obscura. Probably the most copiously
depicted human being in history is Jesus.
Not merely is there no photograph of Jesus, there is not a single word
of physical description of him in the gospels. But everybody knows what Jesus looked like: white guy with big hair,
mournful eyes, soupy expression and a slightly disheveled bathrobe. That is the power of the popular pictorial
image.
strangely familiar
Well,
Joan and I and our good friend of half a century, the artist Susan Hockaday,
went off last week to see the current movie about J. M. W. Turner. He may or may not be the greatest
painter who ever lived, but he’s right up there as they say. It seems only days ago—though I now
realize it was a few months—that I was writing with enthusiasm about my visit
to the huge Turner exhibition at the Tate Britain. So we could not miss the Mike Leigh film, entitled simply Mister Turner.
I
recommend it for some excellent acting and, especially, for its many moments of
superbly beautiful photography. But
I left the movie house grumpy.
What I will call the “historical” Turner was a complicated, difficult,
and by no means entirely admirable fellow. The less we actually know about historical figures, the
greater the freedom of the biographer or the actor, and Timothy Spall, who
impersonates Turner, exploits the useful lacunae very effectively in presenting
us with an indefatigable and monomaniacal genius, selfish, socially gauche, inarticulate,
and joyless and inefficient in his bovine sex life. Someone should have told him that it works best with the
pants off.
J. M. W. Turner, by Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall
Well,
OK. Compared with what Tom Hulce
did to Mozart in Amadeus, I have to
give them a pass on Turner himself.
What left me more or less fuming was Joshua McGuire’s rendition of a
minor character in the film, the young John Ruskin, who is presented as a
simpering fop. It is impossible
that this callow child whose only known accomplishment seems to be his wife’s
sexual frustration could ever have become the sagest of the Victorian Sages and
the brilliant writer whose Modern
Painters permanently and unassailably established Turner’s grandeur. Who reads Ruskin any more? In my experience, not even very many
graduate students of literature.
But in 1976, when I was conducting a series of seminars on “Morris and
Medievalism” at the William Morris Centre in London, I had to read deeply in his
copious works. I left the
experience knowing that I had encountered a great mind and a great aesthetic
sensibility. It pains me to think
that thousands who have never read a word of the man will go through life
informed merely by “movie ‘facts’.”
