Home Theater

by Lons

Issue 6: "Every grey hair on my head, I call Kinski."
 
In perhaps the best scene of Lucky McKee's woefully underseen 2001 masterpiece May, a wannabe artist invites a very peculiar girl over to his house to show her his violent and sarcastic short film.  He's one of these hip mid-20's pseudo-intellectuals who's obsessed with the macabre - gory Italian horror films, gruesome or outragoues "outsider" art - and yet when he discovers that his latest female conquest is actually a blood-fetishizing headcase, he freaks.  He's in love with the idea of psychosis and insanity, not the practical reality.
 
It's an understandable impulse.  The disgusting, unpredictable, nonsensical and bizarre can be fascinating when considered from a safe distance, like the back of a movie theater.  The only "problem" with art that reflects these kind of basic, passionate, intense and even taboo human emotions is that it has to come from somewhere, from an artist capable of reaching out and touching that which is dark and primal and unspoken.
 
Several terrific documentary films have taken a look at such artists, those who reside so close to the border between genius and madness that they can get stranded on the far side, unable for a time to claw their way back.  These movies offer a view of artists that's more complete than what an afternoon at a gallery could offer yet the additional insight and information sometimes only clouds the real issue.  We see the men (and all three of the films I will discuss deal with male artists) as looming over the art which they create, which can be an illuminating view but also a deceptive one.  After all, the films or music or drawings are meant to stand for themselves, and the meaning changes when you watch them in the context of the artist's biography.
 
Often, as in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, the work itself is seen as a weapon to fight against encroaching insanity.  Legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb has a surprising amount in common with his brother, who lives with their mother and never leaves the house.  Beyond simply a family history with mental instability, Crumb's addled with some rather severe personality quirks and unusual obsessions - from leather and fishnet stockings to piggyback rides and incest.  But he's able to express these ideas in a way that is not only universalized, that is, comprehendable in some way to anyone who looks at this drawings, but also accepted and even lauded.  The neurotic compulsions that drove his brother to low-grade agoraphobia have earned Robert considerable fame and even a little bit of money.  (We see this in a scene wherein a female fan gives him a piggyback ride around a bookstore during a signing.  She's doing that most likely because he's famous and she likes his work, not because she appreciates the value of a good piggyback ride as Crumb does.)
 
Director Zwigoff has a reputation as something of a pessimistic misanthrope.  What else could be expected from the director of Ghost World and Bad Santa?  And yet his view in Crumb is about as hopeful a portrait of a troubled artist as one could hope for, possibly because the two men are friends in real life but more likely because Zwigoff had to somehow cojole Crumb into letting him make the movie.  Rather than focusing on Crumb's problems, Zwigoff shows how they have fueled the man creatively, how they have contributed to his success and reputation.  His doodles, in other words, saved his life, giving them an additional significance above even the high praise earned for their own intrinsic value.
 
Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend likewise examines the relationship between madness and greatness, but doesn't take quite as positive or inspiring a view.  Herzog collaborated on five films with the infamous German wildman Klaus Kinski, after living in the same apartment complex with him years before, and for his 1999 film, he revisits the locations for these films and reminisces about their relationship and the specific nature of the actor's lunacy. 
 
Kinski was prone to violent tantrums and rages, including an incident Herzog vividly recalls in which the actor raved in their shared bathroom for 48 straight hours, crushing all the fixtures and furniture into a fine dust that could be sifted through a tennis racket.  The term "fiend" seems appropriate, if a bit of an understatement, implying mere villainy as opposed to Kinski's delusional and frequently psychotic cruelty.  Old footage finds him screaming at an entire auditorium full of people, claiming to be Jesus and threatening to murder or torture disbelievers.  A photograph shows the man on the set of Cobra Verde, holding a knife at his director's throat.  Herzog is grinning in the picture, but Klaus doesn't appear to be joking.
 
In addition to noting how their personalities complimented one another and provided for a relatively stable professional (but not neccessarily personal) relationship, Herzog focuses on the ways in which Kinski's madness would alter, degrade or even enhance his ability to perform on stage and in film, depending on his mood.  He would lose himself in his characters, bringing them with him long after films had stopped shooting.  (Having played Paganini in a film prior to Cobra Verde, Herzog finds that Kinski's personality has become bitter and confused, and no longer wants to work with him.) 
 
We see a sequence from Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, first enacted by Jason Robards and then again by Kinski after Robards dropped out of the project.  Robards, who was going to co-star with Mick Jagger in the film, does a fine job - his version of the character is immediately more funny and charming than Kinski's, who presents a different side of his typical obsessed, delusional madman with a desperate urge to conquer all he surveys to demonstrate his strength of will.  He tends to play all characters as extensions of his enormous ego, not assuming a role so much as he'd swallow characters up and assimilate them into him own persona.
 
At times, Herzog would intentionally trigger Kinski's anger, encouraging him to work out his fits of rage before shooting to make the performance more level and pure.  He shows a scene from Aguirre: The Wrath of God , one of the greatest portraits of madness and self-aggrandizement ever filmed, with Kinski as a failed and dying conquistador, stalking around a now-depleted raft tossing small monkeys over the side.  The scene is a monument to Kinski's energy and presence on screen, as he stalks around, whips his eyes about, plots to marry his daughter and conquer all of South America and seems to take up the entire frame with his hulking, armor-clad mass.  This scene was only possible after Kinski had raged at no one for 90 minutes.  Without the tantrum, Herzog believed, the emotion would not translate through the frenzied haze of Kinski's anger.
 
Crumb and My Best Fiend occupy two different sides of a divide: an artist who happens to be mad, and a madman who occasionally pulls it together enough to create art.  It's impossible to say for certain where one ends and the other begins.  It's possible to romanticize the slightly insane but creative artist, who must "control" his or her most severe impulses but also draw upon this deeply-felt passion and energy in order to create meaningful work.  So much of art is about passion, imagination and energy, it's only natural that those with an abundance of all three traits would be great artists.  Yet these are also traits that, when held in excess, tend to indicate insanity.  If you see someone ranting and raving on a street corner, or if they spin for you a fanciful tale about being abducted by aliens or meeting with the U.N. Security Council, your first thought probably wouldn't be, "This guy must be a great artist!"
 
The question becomes: At what point does appreciating the work of someone who may be insane become exploitation?  Are we enjoying this art because it has independent meaning or because it's insight into a deviant mind that satisfies our curiosity?
 
This dilemma lies at the center of Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnston.  A loving but also frank portrait of the troubled titular singer-songwriter, Feuerzeig presents a man whose artistic output is as voluminous, sweeping and brilliant as almost any singer-songwriter working today, but who can't really live the life of a productive musician because of his uncontrollable urges and delusions.  Suffering from bi-polar disorder (and probably some other unnamed disorders), Johnston is rather fundamentally limited.  He's able to hold down the occaisonal job - a charming sequence of the film focuses on his long-standing gig working at an Austin, Texas McDonald's, even as he's negotiating record contracts - but lives in his parent's basement and occasionally finds himself in trouble with the law due to his outbursts.  His father sadly relates that his son's unpredictable life does have a pattern - as soon as things begin to look up for him, everything falls apart.

 
This is not, Feuerzeig seems to say, the case of a brilliant musician unfortunately addled by sporadic bouts of insanity.  He's not just a songwriter with an unfortunate disorder that sometimes distracts him from his work.  Johnston's crazy and it's largely his craziness that makes his music work as well as it does. 
 
Other local musicians are interviewed - including Gibby Haynes of Austin legends The Butthole Surfers while having his tooth drilled - all of them people constantly chasing real passion and authenticity on stage.  It's hard work getting up there each night and forcing yourself to work through all these songs you wrote months or years ago anew, as if the feelings were still fresh, and make them resonate with your audience.  Making this emotion seem both authentic and effortless in some ways is what makes our greatest singers so great.  Every time you hear Stevie Wonder sing "Tuesday Heartbreak," even today, it sounds like he really wants to be with you when the morning comes, even though he wrote that song 30-some-odd years ago.
 
But Johnston isn't acting or applying a craft when he gets on stage.  If he's singing to you about Casper the Friendly Ghost (a popular theme of his songs) and crying, it's because right at that moment, he's thinking about Casper the Friendly Ghost and feeling sad.  (It's probably the concept of dying young upsets him so, or that he finds Capser relatable because he's friendly and well-liked and yet clearly an Other, a ghostly outsider, who can't truly be one of the regular kids in the neighborhood.  But who knows?)
 
His one-time manager points out that Johnston never had master recordings for his early "albums" (collections of songs he'd write on a synthesizer and self-record).  Every time someone would ask for a copy of an album, he'd sit down at the synthesizer and play it all out again, making each recording unique.  As no rational person would ever go about starting a recording career this way, such imaginative and beguiling projects are the sole domain of the compulsive.
 
This both appeals to and horrifies the people who inevitably gather around Johnston, masses who are touched by his music and then put off by his dangerous and irrational behavior.  An ex-girlfriend and former Austin musician confesses that she initially saw Johnston as an angelic figure, innocent and childlike, but eventually came to view him as something of a monster.  Other local writers, scenesters and hangers-on all wind up having a similar experience, revering the guy because of his mastery of Beatles-esque pop songcraft and the power of his writing, which is utterly free of artifice or self-congratulation or cynicism, and then discovering that he's also capable of being a violent, uncontained loon. 
 
In the end, like the art school poseur in May, we're all left on the "outside" by a lot of this outsider art, free to take a look at it and appreciate it at face value but unable to thoroughly reconcile the situation by which it came to exist.  Thankfully, you don't have to embrace the creator to appreciate his or her creation, no matter how tempting it may be for some people.
 
But would it be worth sacrificing Johnston's tremendous body of work for his sanity?  Is it even fair to ask that question?
 
I sense that for Johnston and his parents, that would probably be an acceptable deal, a normal and unglamorous life in which no one was making documentary films about him or listening to "Hi How Are You," and Matt Groening from "The Simpsons" wasn't showing up at his gigs to heap praise upon him, but in which he could have a loving, steady relationship and a bit more financial and emotional security.  That certainly doesn't mean that it's wrong to enjoy his music anyway, to be sure, but does it mean anything at all for Daniel Johnston fans?  Are they appreciating the songs themselves or the curious, inscrutible and fevered mind that created those songs?