* [Special issue on time, Forbes ASAP magazine, November 30, 1998.]
11
THE GUARDIAN QUESTIONNAIRE*
When were you happiest?
Snorkeling for an hour with a comically disciplined and curiously attentive squadron of six, fat Caribbean reef squid off Akumal beach in Mexico.
What is your greatest fear?
Imprisonment. I must be free!
What is your earliest memory?
Green olives bobbing in dark water in a wooden barrel at Tedeschi’s grocery in Endicott, New York, the factory town where I was born.
Which living person do you most admire and why?
Germaine Greer. She is a feminist colossus—bold, learned, and devastatingly witty.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
Furious impatience with bureaucratic inefficiency and torpor, the stubborn realities of modern life.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Ruthless, soulless careerism, a leading attribute of elite academics in the U.S.
What was your most embarrassing moment?
When I caused a violent methane explosion by dumping too much lime into the latrine at the Spruce Ridge Girl Scout Camp in the Adirondack Mountains. Toxic brown clouds churned up into the trees for half an hour. I was utterly mortified.
What is your most treasured possession?
A massive brass 105 MM Howitzer artillery shell given to my family 50 years ago by an uncle in the National Guard.
What do you most dislike about your appearance?
I am small, plain, and worn. However, this mediocrity has proved advantageous to me as a social observer. I can lurk at the margins and fade into the woodwork.
Who would play you in the film of your life?
Brenda Vaccaro crossed with Judy Davis.
What is your favourite smell?
Freshly laundered white cotton sheets sun-dried on a line—now only a poignant memory with today’s sterile launderettes.
What is your favourite book?
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.
What would you most like to wear to a costume party?
David Hemmings’ gold-braided hussars uniform with rakish double jacket in The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Cat or dog?
I adore the Egyptian elegance and proud independence of cats. (I have two.) Dogs are good-hearted but too pantingly sycophantish.
What do you owe your parents?
Social critique. From my infancy, I listened to them sharply analyze American culture from the immigrant outsider’s point of view.
What or who is the greatest love of your life?
Writing—a strange process of anxiety crowned by pleasure.
Which living person do you most despise and why?
Vice President Dick Cheney, who sat on George W. Bush like a mattress and stampeded the U.S. into the folly of invading Iraq.
Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
“Okay?” It’s my annoyingly default cattle prod to ensure that weary listeners are surviving the rapid-fire barrage.
What is the worst job you’ve ever done?
I earned just one badge in Girl Scouts and was sternly informed by the troop leader that I was the “least-qualified camper.” Camping, with its grubby dampness, remains my bête noire.
What has been your biggest disappointment?
The shocking decline of artistic quality in Hollywood movies over the past 15 years.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
The arrogantly militant Amazon feminism which I foolishly tried to impose on an entire campus during my first teaching job at Bennington College in the 1970s.
If you could go back in time, where would you go?
The 1920s, when jazz, theater, movies, Art Deco, and smart-mouthed flappers were on the boil.
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Persisting with the insanely gargantuan project of Sexual Personae, which took twenty years to write and was rejected by seven publishers. It was finally released, to a storm of controversy, as a 700-page book by Yale University Press in 1990.
How would you like to be remembered?
As a dissident writer who defended free thought and free speech.
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Deep social change takes time.
* [Rosanna Greenstreet, interviewer, The Guardian (U.K.), April 4, 2008.]
12
THE DEATH OF GIANNI VERSACE*
DEAR CAMILLE:
Do you share the gushing press appraisals of fashion mogul Versace that have appeared since his murder?
READY TO WEAR
DEAR READY TO WEAR:
Yes, indeed, I am a Versace fan and in fact defended him to The New York Times in 1992 when he was under heavy feminist attack for his s&m designs (see index of Vamps & Tramps). Gianni Versace was a true decadent artist—that is, a visionary of a “late” phase in culture, with its cosmopolitan breadth, sexual pluralism, and stylistic “too muchness.”
With his deep knowledge of art history, theater, opera, ballet, and film, Versace synthesized Western sexual personae and re-projected them not just on the fashion-show runway but in his brilliant magazine layouts, where the models seemed like towering, brazen, pagan idols. I loved his deft allusions to classical antiquity, the Renaissance, Weimar Berlin, and so on. His gaudy, glittering, iridescent patterns always reminded me of that master genius of the Baroque, Bernini (one of my idols), who used twenty different colored marbles for the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Artistically, Versace understood both surface and structure—a rare combination.
Versace had a wonderful instinct for how to present public women on key occasions. His eye-popping, see-through, premiere-night dress for Elizabeth Hurley—a couture version of a feverish Frederick’s of Hollywood fantasy that twenty years ago only s&m call girls would have worn—instantly propelled her onto the world stage. Versace’s simple, elegant white dress for Courtney Love at this year’s Academy Awards not only exquisitely redefined her in the public eye (after her grungy past as rock-waif/widow and strung-out porn-concubine in Milos Forman’s film) but seemed to magically reshape her own world-view, so that as an onstage presenter, she floated above and outclassed the formidable Madonna herself, who was huffing and puffing through a flat Evita tune.
Versace clearly had a symbiotic relationship with his tough-as-nails sister Donatella, who was not only his creative Muse but in some way his transsexual alter ego. She’s like a School of Monica Vitti tigress/drag queen. It’s very interesting that Versace’s omnipresent logo is the head of Medusa. He constantly acknowledged how much he owed to his seamstress mother, who ran a factory-like dress shop with a corps of toiling females. Versace was a classic example of the kind of mother-dependent, mother-adoring, but mother-fearing gay man who ruled the pre-Stonewall fashion and performing arts world. Snaky Medusa is, of course, the ultimate earth-cult symbol of woman as barbaric dominatrix of the universe. Freud interpreted her writhing hair as a pubic motif, representing boys’ castration anxiety at their horrifying first sight of female genitals.
The Versace shocker is reminiscent of one of my favorite films, The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), where Faye Dunaway at her most fabulous is a take-it-to-the-limits fashion photographer trifling with Helmut Newton/Deborah Turbeville s&m scenarios. It degenerates after 45 minutes, but that mix of fashion, decadence, and murder was amazing and amusing. I also recall a made-for-TV movie—possibly She’s Dressed to Kill—from the late 1970s or early 1980s where Jessica Walter (I’ve loved her since The Group and Play Misty for Me) imperiously presided over a resort fashion show inconveniently strewn with corpses.
* [“Ask Camille,” Salon.com column, July 22, 1997.]
13
THE ITALIAN WAY OF DEATH*
Italians are masters of the concrete, from the vast engineering projects of the Roman Empire to the gritty manual labor of Renaissance painting and sculpture to our domination of the trade in paving, masonry, ironwork, garden ornaments, and gravestones in modern America. We specialize in the markers and monuments of the messy human transit of birth and death.
Italians view death in simple, pragmatic terms, as a physical process to be efficiently planned and managed. Our culture is strongly ritualistic, with the public theatricality of early tribalism. Italian funerals are major events where, despite our reputation for histrionics, extreme emotion is strictly limited. The gravity and dignity of Italian funerals predate Catholic ceremonialism and probably originate in the Etruscan death cult, whose inspiration may have been Egyptian.
As an Italian-American, I was raised with respect for but not fear of death. Italians dread incapacity and dependency, not extinction. Since the dead are always remembered, they are never really gone. In rural Italy, cemeteries are like parks where the survivors picnic and tend the graves. In America, family plots are purchased like vacation condos; one knows one’s future address decades in advance.
An education in death is part of the Italian facts of life. From childhood, I was accustomed not only to seeing the dead laid out in open caskets but also to kissing the corpse’s chilly forehead on the morning of burial. At home, elderly relatives burned votive candles before framed photographs of the deceased. Anniversaries of the date of death, recorded on plasticized saints’ cards, are still marked by special Masses and devotions.
The Italian realism about death was formed by the primitive harshness of agricultural life, where food, water, shelter, and sex were crucial to survival. Country people are notoriously blunt and unsentimental about accidents and disasters, which tend to traumatize today’s pampered, squeamish middle-class professionals. Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 hit song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” preserves something of that pre-modern flavor when a crusty Mississippi farmer, indifferent to his daughter’s feelings, reacts to the news of a young man’s fatal plunge off a bridge by remarking, “Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense. Pass the biscuits, please.”
The steely Italian stoicism and even irreverence about death have often gotten me into trouble in American academe, where bourgeois pieties reign supreme. Hamlet’s black humor about Polonius’ corpse—“I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room”—is very Italian. Informed of a death, we shun the usual polite, unctuous hush and take great interest instead in the technicalities: “How did it happen?” Italians recognize both the inevitability of death and its unique grisly signature, which seems fascinating to us in a way that strikes other people as morbid or insensitive. And as in TV soap operas, we like prolonged debate about how a death will affect others—pathos and voyeurism as mass entertainment.
Movies about Italian-Americans have rarely caught our essence. We are, after blacks, the most defamed and stereotyped minority group. The over-praised Prizzi’s Honor (1985) and Moonstruck (1987), for example, are grotesquely bad, with all the ethnic verisimilitude of a minstrel show. Woody Allen’s films, in contrast, convey a keen sense of America’s social codes as perceived by an anxious, alienated Jew. Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose (1984) deserves more attention for its comparison study of Italian and Jewish style and thought, notably in regard to death.
Allen’s preoccupation with death is well-known, a haunted pessimism partly produced by the persecutions of Jewish history. But Allen turns his terrors into candidly self-revealing comedy, which is why I prefer his work to that of overly ironic literary modernists like T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. In Annie Hall (1977), his alter ego, Alvy Singer (played by himself), announces, “I’m obsessed with death,” as he presents two books as love gifts to the perky, ultra-WASPy Annie (Diane Keaton) after their first sexual encounter—The Denial of Death and Death and Western Thought. The film’s amusing refrain is Alvy’s attempt to reeducate Annie by repeatedly taking her to Marcel Ophuls’ dour, four-hour epic on Nazism, The Sorrow and the Pity. Busily packing boxes after their breakup, she reminds him, “All the books on death and dying are yours.”
In Broadway Danny Rose, Allen plays a compassionate, ethical Jew for whom suffering and death define the human condition. He belongs to an exquisitely internalized guilt culture: “I’m guilty all the time, and I never did anything,” he sighs. Danny has a madcap adventure with a tough New Jersey broad, Tina (brilliantly played by Mia Farrow), whose honor-based, vendetta-filled shame culture is completely Italian: “I never feel guilty. You gotta do what you gotta do,” she proclaims. Her slangy speech has an aggressive Mediterranean flamboyance: “You’re lucky I don’t stick an ice pick in your goddamned chest!” she yells at her lover as she trashes the apartment. “Drop dead!”
Allen wonderfully catches the brusquely routine Italian attitude toward death when Danny drives Tina away from a (somewhat caricatured) Mafia lawn party. He asks if she and her husband are divorced. “Some guy shot him in the eyes,” she says casually. “Really,” says Danny, horrified. “He’s blind?” “Dead,” she flatly replies. Danny cringes with pained, nauseated empathy: “Dead? Of course—because the bullets go right through—[gestures behind his glasses]. Oh, my God! You must have been in shock!” “Nah,” she replies, “he had it coming.” Ethnicity has reversed the sex roles here, with a man about to faint from a woman’s bloodthirsty bluster.
That the Italian directness about death is part of a more general world-view is clear in the first two parts of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972, 1974), based on Mario Puzo’s bestselling novel. True masterpieces of our time, they dramatically demonstrate the residual paganism of Italian culture, with its energy, passion, clannishness, and implacable willfulness. The stunning, choreographic violence of these films is like a sacrificial slaughter where blood flows as freely as the waters of life. Coppola constantly juxtaposes and intercuts images of food and death to suggest the archaic Italian, or rather pre-Christian, cycle of fertility, destruction, and rebirth.
Don Corleone’s right-hand man, Peter Clemenza (Richard Castellano), is the primary vehicle of this theme. “Don’t forget the cannolis!” his wife calls out to him from the front porch. On an airy highway in the New Jersey marshlands, he says, “Hey, pull over, will ya—I gotta take a leak.” While his back is turned, three shots blast into the driver’s skull from the shadowy backseat. Ambling back to the car, Clemenza curtly tells his henchman, “Leave the gun. Take the cannolis.” The white pastry box is tenderly lifted from its place next to the corpse bloodily jammed against the steering wheel, and burly Clemenza primly carries the pastries away. Now, that’s Italian!
In another scene, the don’s inner circle hangs out, tensely waiting for news of his condition after an assassination attempt. Clemenza is happily making tomato sauce. “Hey, come over here, kid,” he calls to the don’s youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino). “Learn sumpin’. You never know, you might have to cook for twenty guys someday!” Instructions follow about olive oil, garlic, tomato paste. “You shove in all your sausage and your meatballs”: as Clemenza’s big, hammy hand slides the grey meats into the pot, we can’t help thinking of the corpses piling up in the plot. And indeed his next remark is a cheerful aside about the roadside execution: “Oh, Paulie—you won’t see him no more!” Cooking and killing are as intimately related as in the Stone Age, with past guests easily ending up on the menu.
One of The Godfather’s most gruesome rub-outs occurs at Louis’s Restaurant, “a small family place” in the Bronx where a drug kingpin advises his crony, a corrupt police captain, “Try the veal—it’s the best in the city.” Moments later, their dinner companion, Michael Corleone, shoots them both in the face with a pistol. The astonished captain, laden fork raised over his bib, gurgles and chokes as if still chewing, t
hen slams headfirst on the table, bringing everything to the floor with a crash. As Michael flees, we can see the overturned table stained with red splotches that could be wine, tomato sauce, or blood—or perhaps, in the Italian way, all three. Coppola then inserts a montage of headlines with real police photos of gory gangland hits, followed by a staged shot of a big bowl of leftover spaghetti being dumped into a garbage can. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The Godfather is full of these vivid visual effects that show death as a barbarically sensual experience, integrated with the body’s normal and abnormal functions and spasms. For example, in his famous final scene as Don Corleone, Marlon Brando, cutting monster teeth out of an orange peel, frolics with his grandson among his tomato plants in his arbor, a re-created patch of Italy. Death comes quickly but subtly: the don’s steps turn to a stagger and his laughter to gasps for breath, until his heavy form topples and sprawls on the ground. Or death can be a terrible explosion of the nerves, as when the don’s disloyal, pretty boy son-in-law, Carlo, is garroted from behind by Clemenza and convulsively kicks out the windshield of a moving car.
My favorite scene in The Godfather (sometimes censored for TV broadcast) shows the Italian cultivation of death as an artistic strategy, an operatic spectacle of hands-on activism. Vito Corleone (played as a young adult by Robert De Niro) revisits Sicily to settle an old score—the murder of his parents decades before by the ruthless Don Ciccio. Vito and his local business partner, bearing a gallon of olive oil, respectfully approach the feeble and nearly deaf don, who genially asks, “What was your father’s name?” Leaning in close on the sunny veranda, Vito softly replies, “His name was Antonio Andolini, and this is for you”—as he jams the don with a knife, ripping his gut crosswise to the top of his chest. Magnificent and inspiring, in my Homeric view. “Turn the other cheek” has never made much of a dent in Italian consciousness. Death Italian style is a luscious banquet, a bruising game of chance, or crime and punishment as pagan survival of the fittest.
Provocations Page 10
