Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Their politics don’t intrigue me as much as their sex lives; Louise is the focus of beach-house passion for both John Reed and playwright Eugene O’Neill, and, when that’s young Warren Beatty and young Jack Nicholson, well, that’s deserving of admiration. But she is more than that; she, too, is a writer. Or, she’s often asked, So, Louise, what do you do ? but her insecure peep of a response— I’m a writer —gets lost in the crowd. She keeps trying to assert this identity, but it vaporizes, it’s brushed aside. We never see her write; even John berates her for this, that she says she’s a writer, she wants to be a writer, wants to be taken seriously as a writer, yet she doesn’t write much, or write about anything serious . This strikes me as incredibly unjust; he, obviously, takes his ode to the lily pretty damn seriously. And we don’t see him write much, either, so why does he get all the respect? We never actually see anybody write; they talk about writing, they argue about the meaning and the goal of it, they put on their plays for each other, they make literary love. But dramatizing politics and sex is more, well, dramatic than the static shot of the writer at work; crowds of the proletariat marching for their daily bread, and riots that draw swords and blood, and tortured romantic triangles, naked moonlit romps in the ocean, all this is easier to act, direct, film, offer for visualization. It’s a movie jam-packed with writers, all of whom have more important and, yes, interesting things for us to watch them do than write. I learn how to manage a messy triangular love affair and rabble a crowd to overthrow a tsar — and this is fine with me, for now; all I want is the beach house and the literary sheen of love affairs with brilliant, literary men. And I learn calling yourself a writer really does seem to get the job done, especially for a woman — nobody may take Louise seriously as a writer or a revolutionary, but it doesn’t matter, she’s still the object of fascination and desire, she still hangs with the writing crowd, she’s still the star of the show.

The writers in Reds are actively trying to save the world, but Dr. Yuri Zhivago, in Doctor Zhivago , is trying to avoid it; he is a writer, yes, but he’s far more often shown in his capacity as a doctor, fine and admirable, rushing to stitch up bloody Muscovites trampled by tsarist cops. 102But his girlfriend, Tonya, really loves him because he’s a writer — she’s teasingly asked at a party if she’d ever marry a doctor and replies only if it were a doctor who wrote poetry, too. Writers, clearly, are hot.

But Yuri has the bad luck of being a poet and apolitical in Revolutionary Russia — his work gets him in trouble, not because it’s revolutionary, but because it isn’t. We don’t really know what he writes about — the poetry of this up-and-coming Russian poet is never quoted or read aloud — nor, again, do we ever see him write, at least not for the first three hours of the movie. But there’s a clue when his half brother, a minor Revolutionary official, comes to warn him that he’s in danger, that his poetry is “not liked.” Zhivago is bewildered (I feel the pang in my heart for poor Yuri, who seems far more stricken than Lillian did) and is told it’s because his writing is considered “petty, bourgeois, and personal.” Once again, the writer is a threat; but while Lillian, at least, could write her impressions of Berlin and thus, perhaps, reveal certain things the Nazis don’t want revealed, if this writer’s work is indeed petty, bourgeois, and personal, then why the hell would anyone care? I don’t understand where the danger lies.

And Yuri is not a dynamic kind of guy — he means well, but as a movie hero he lacks the drive to make things happen, he lacks the John Reed/Louise Bryant/Lillian Hellman anxieties and energies. It’s immaterial to him whether he doctors for the Reds or the Whites; he has no Big Cause, other than doing what he can for the patient in front of him. He doesn’t want to fight, all he wants is to be left alone (with either his wife or his lover, Lara, whichever woman he happens to be with); he tells his half brother he admires him for wanting to create a new and better world, but that meanwhile, people have to just live while that’s happening. To my mind, that makes him boring. Too passive. I bet he writes petty poems about snow and borscht and all those yellow flowers, and this is not the kind of writer I plan to be. We spend a lot of the movie watching him watch what’s going on around him — I suspect Omar Sharif was cast for the size and liquidity of those big brown eyes. I don’t buy the idea of Red officials being “after him” because of his writing — this man is strikingly insignificant, the very definition of small potatoes.

But there is one scene, late in the movie: Yuri and his lover, Lara, in the dead of winter, have fled to the icy ruin of a dacha while awaiting their fate, where they wear great turtlenecks and make love and eat hearty meals that materialize out of nowhere. One night, Yuri, unable to sleep, finds pen and ink and leaves of paper and sweeps dust from an escritoire. The balalaika music swells; he dips the pen in the ink and draws LARA in elegant Cyrillic letters at the top of a page. He glances back at beautiful Lara, asleep, then furiously begins to write. It’s the first and only time we see him write, a rare burst of Zhivago-passion, and we immediately cut away. Lara awakens in the morning to find the floor littered with inky, balled-up, abandoned pages, and one perfect sheet of paper with a perfect LARA love poem resting on the table.

It’s a beautiful, romantic image — yet he’s still no hero to me. So he wrote one poem, and a love poem, at that — where’s the sword, the glorious battle, the noble death, the contribution? I like the writing at dawn, the wolves howling on the steppes, and those Cyrillic letters are pretty — but it’s clear to me that Dr. Zhivago is far more vital, effective, revolutionary, heroic , as a doctor than as a writer. At least that way he saved a few people’s lives.

At college, I heard if you had a Creative Writing “emphasis,” you were excused from courses in both Chaucer and Milton, neither of whom I found comprehensible. But you had to submit “original creative work” to get into those writing courses. You can do this, I told myself. On your own, without stealing or stealth. Writing something “creative” can’t be worse than reading The Canterbury Tales . I sat at the IBM Selectric my grandfather bought me for college (his old manual typewriter had long since disappeared, alas) on which I tapped away my English lit papers at two in the morning and waited. I got a drink of water, a cup of tea, a bottle of beer. I got up to pee several times. Perhaps the Selectric was at fault; I found lined paper and experimented with a series of pens (expensive fountain pen I’d been given as a high school graduation present, a felt-tip that looked too intimidatingly like permanent marker, a Bic ballpoint whose scratchy letters looked too frail), a variety of pencils (No. 2 Ticonderogas were too soft, harder leads wrote too thin and faint). Chaucer and Milton loomed and smirked. I got up and put on a linen blouse. You’re Lily, you’re Louise, I told myself. Make Julia proud. Prove yourself to John and Eugene. Write a silly lily love poem, how hard can that be? I waited for the montage, the thirty seconds of typing that would Save the World.

I can’t remember the moment of writing. I know I didn’t plagiarize another apple/dapple poem — I wasn’t that stupid, these were college professors, not my gullible love-blind mother. I suspect I tricked myself, told myself this was not a “submission of original creative work,” it was just another school assignment not to flake out on. But I must have written something, cobbled together some meaningless anecdotes into a story, strung iambic phrases into a poem, because I wound up in enough writing workshops to become, emphatically, a Creative Writing person.