William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

In his notes on the film Schnabel happily bandies about the term “genius” as applied to Basquiat, but the idea is utterly risible. Basquiat was not a modern snake-oil salesman, not quite; but the currency of his talent, his ability, his “knack,” was on the lightweight side, and I suspect — and Wright’s deeply sensitive performance encourages this conclusion — that amongst the demons that hurried him on his way to his premature death were those that were whispering “fraud” and “sham” in his ear. One of the loudest messages this film broadcasts is that there is no medium- or long-term substitute for talent, hard work, elaboration and exploration of technique, intelligence, hard work, empathy, thought, virtuosity, hard work and so on. This is the serious artist’s lot — his or her via dolorosa, if you like — and the froth and spume of celebrity, of radical-chic acclaim and lots of easy money cannot drag you away from it. One smart idea may buy you all this, for a while, but unless you cultivate a redoubtable cynicism (and bank your loot) it will not stand you in any further stead. Plenty of other flim-flam men and women are coming along behind you with all their smart ideas. Soon you will be old hat.

Perhaps Basquiat saw old-hatdom beckoning, perhaps he couldn’t think of anything else to do apart from his graffiti stuff? But, in any event, the indictment is not his to bear alone, but must rather be the burden of the world and its denizens who fell upon him and pushed him into the lucrative glare of the limelight.

Basquiat was vulnerable from the start because he held the wrong concept of what an artist was, believing that “Your life was the price you paid for your talent.” Such ideas of “being an artist,” a poet maudit, a tormented genius, or whatever, demonstrate a fanciful romanticism of the most puerile sort (which is why they are more often found amongst very young rock musicians, or very deluded actors). No serious artist can afford to believe in this notion of afflatus, whether God-given, spontaneous or drug-induced. The art world may be indifferent, or reluctant to make such a judgement, but the world of the real artist is ruthlessly self-regulating. The Stoics’ famous rejoinder, “Be silent — unless what you have to say is better than silence,” casts a long, minatory and humbling shadow over all artists’ endeavours.

Julian Schnabel has made a fine film and he can be proud of his debut as a director, but it seems to me that what emerges is something different from what he may have set out to achieve. Schnabel has said that “Jean-Michel’s work mocks categorization. It wasn’t enough for him to be a great black artist, or a graffiti artist or even a young artist. He placed himself among the great artists of all time.” Good God. Well, if he did, he paid a heavy price for his hubris. But this is not what the film conveys: there is a marked absence of vainglory, of preening self-congratulation. As Basquiat is fêted and wooed by his well-heeled acolytes and hangers-on, his mood appears rather to start as one of gratified bafflement, shading swiftly into cynicism, self-disgust and ultimate despair. Basquiat, it seems to me, is not so much Icarus or Narcissus but a sort of latter-day, low grade, Manhattan Faust. Too young, too gullible, too insecure, too easily led, he made his own Faustian pact with the art world — he did the Faust deal — and got royally burned.

1996

I have seen Woody Allen in the flesh three times in my life. I’ve never actually met him but the encounters remain vividly memorable, not to say poignant. I regard myself as a committed fan, though not an uncritical one, and my acquaintance with his work began with his very first film as a writer and director, Take the Money and Run (1969).

I saw this film as a teenager in an open-air cinema one evening in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1970. I’d gone to the cinema — casually, uninformed — expecting vaguely to catch some American thriller. Instead I was presented with a wry, knowing, absurdist, comic vision of life that seems to have emerged fully formed and that has really hardly changed over the subsequent thirty-odd years. As the moths and other night insects dipped and dived through the projector’s beam, scattering their ephemeral shadows across the screen, I found myself laughing, first incredulously, then out loud, then painfully, at the Allen persona — nerdy, intellectual, inept, randily heterosexual, angst-ridden. I was eighteen and such first encounters with an artist you come to revere and admire remain embedded in the memory, anchored there by something close to shock: a shock of recognition — the pure thrill of finding your own sense of humour, your own view of the world, replicated by an artist in an art form. At that age empathy and identification are the shortest route to aesthetic pleasure. Who is this Woody Allen? I wondered. Where can I see more of his stuff?

As it happened I didn’t have to wait long, nor have any of us. By my count he has made thirty-four feature films as writer/director and (mostly) actor since that debut. A Woody Allen film is as predictable as spring or autumn — every year sees a new launch, new debate about its quality, new speculation about the stellar cast. Until this year, that is. Woody Allen’s latest film, Anything Else, was released in the US in August, indeed it’s available for purchase there on DVD and video from the end of this month. You can currently see it in cinemas in France but not in the UK. A British distributor, it appears, may or may not be imminent, but why the delay? It is some sort of ominous signal when the new Woody Allen film, as far as his UK fans are concerned, risks going straight to video. One reluctantly starts to wonder: have audiences begun to fall out of love with the Woodman?

The first time I actually saw Woody Allen was in New York. It was 1981 and it was my first visit to the city. I stepped out of my hotel and wandered north up Park Avenue gawping at the skyscrapers and the other New York clichés that were on display. Then the biggest cliché of them all came sauntering down the avenue towards me: Woody Allen in trademark baggy chinos and combat jacket. Even better — he was arm in arm with Diane Keaton. I stopped still and tried not to stare too intently. They were laughing and chatting freely, apparently unaware of the ripples of interest and rubbernecking their passage provoked. They passed close by me. Was I rocked slightly by the turbulent wake of their renown and charisma? Yes: it was an epiphanic moment and in a way I now expect to see Woody Allen every time I go to New York. It was almost as if the sighting had been arranged for first-time visitors by the New York tourist board, so synonymous is Allen with the city. And to see him strolling its streets within hours of my arriving there, with his co-star and lover to boot, seemed both a serendipitous blessing and unbelievably appropriate.

This sighting occurred only a few years after Annie Hall (1977), remember, and I suppose that film still survives as his trademark, signature work. So many Woody Allen tropes were established there, and to such an extent, that later films that have gone back to the source suffer badly in comparison. This is all too true of the latest: Anything Else is a kind of poor man’s Annie Hall but without its freshness. Two other actors — Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci — replicate the Allen and Keaton roles but are hopelessly handicapped by our knowledge of their forerunners. Biggs (of American Pie fame) is seriously miscast and Christina Ricci (a wonderful actress) seems strangely lost, out of sorts — as if she were too aware of the ghostly redolence of the earlier film and of her vain efforts to recapture its allure. I loved Annie Hall when it first came out and decided to re-watch it last year. I stopped after five minutes, not wanting to spoil the memories of those earlier viewings. Age has not been kind to it. Furthermore it has had a baleful influence on American comic acting — what you could call the Friends school of acting. Allen’s furrowed-brow, hesitant, stuttering, self-regarding delivery and Keaton’s ditsy, kooky, stuttering, self-regarding delivery have spread like a pestilence through American drama schools. Pale shadows of Allen and Keaton throng American TV sitcoms (Friends being the most culpable in my opinion — but the disease is spreading over here too — fast). Anything Else is a ghastly depiction of the malady. Jason Biggs can’t get out three words without a pause, a “mmm,” a “huh,” a twitch, an “I mean.” “No” emerges as “N-n-n-n-n-no.” Beside him even Woody Allen himself sounds as sonorous and articulate as John Gielgud.