"This Means Something!"

"I figured it out, that's all. Will you just listen?... Have you ever looked at something and it's crazy, and then you looked at it in another way and it's not crazy at all?... Don't be scared. Just don't be scared. I feel really good. Everything's gonna be all right. I haven't felt this good in years."

I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind again the other day. It's a fabulous film in many ways, imbued with an almost lyrical technological optimism. Despite coming from a golden age of cinematic science-fiction, it's completely different in tone to anything else from the period. While Star Wars, for example, can be read as an allegory for the Cold War and America's struggle against another Evil Empire, Close Encounters is a plea for tolerance and understanding. Even the military appear relatively benign in it.

It can also be seen as having another, more unlikely, sub-text; one about issues of representation and communication. The film's central character is Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfus). Following a close encounter with an alien spaceship Roy becomes obsessed with visions of a strange, mountainous formation. He notices this shape everywhere: in the folds of his pillows, in the blob of aftershave in his hand and in a mound of mashed potatoes on his plate.



He starts to create maquettes of it in clay which become ever larger and more elaborate. Eventually, having alienated his entire family to the point where they move out, he creates an enormous model that fills his entire house. To make this model he ransacks the garden for materials, chucking them through a broken window into the living room to the horrified bemusement of his neighbours.

The resulting model is an utterly fabulous object, a grotesque assemblage of mud, vegetation, rubble, furniture and bits of string. It is both mimetically accurate (as we and Roy will later find out) and highly expressionistic, as if created by a bizarre hybrid of Robert Smithson, Jessica Stockholder and an acid-crazed model railway enthusiast.

Just as Roy is nearing the completion of this extraordinary object he realises what it means. The TV that he has blaring in the corner of the otherwise devastated living room has a news report about a bizarre shaped rocky outcrop in Wyoming. Roy looks at the footage of Devil's Tower and then back at his creation. He sits down in shock.



In some senses Roy is like a typically Hollywood-ian depiction of the artist: a half-crazed, anti-social lunatic in search of some intangible truth. Except he isn't an artist. Nor is he mad, just a little intense. And the film also wants us to take him seriously. His sculpture, as he repeatedly explains whist making it, really does mean something.



The film is obsessed with issues of representation and non-verbal communication. The famous five-note score that the scientists use to communicate with the aliens, for example, effectively replaces speech. The chief scientist is a Frenchman (played by film director François Truffaut) who makes no more than one or two gnomic utterances and is accompanied throughout the film by an ineffectual translator. The fact that none of the Americans can understand him seems to imbue him with some special understanding of what is going on.

Roy can't communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it. And he's not alone in his obsession. Another character - Gillian Guiler - is also obsessed with Devil's Tower. She draws it over and over again. In a brilliant scene the two of them converge on Devil's Tower aware that it's the location for the alien spaceship's landing. Trying to work out how to scale the mountain Roy reveals that his knowledge of its topography is vastly superior to Gillian's. "You should try sculpture next time", he deadpans.

In making a plea for tolerance the film also seems to implicitly reject language, as if our primary means of communication were somehow ultimately a handicap to understanding. Language seems to dissolve during the film, becoming ever more useless until it dissipates into the abstract lights and sounds used by the scientists to communicate to the aliens. It is, in many ways, an anti-logocentric film, a celebration of the non-verbal and the techno-haptic.

Unheimliche

I've been meaning to mention this for a while. More decay and dereliction, this time from wealthy East Hampton. Grey Gardens - a large timber clad mansion - was the subject of a 1970's documentary by Albert and David Maysles, directors of the Stones at Altamont film Gimme Shelter. The film followed the house's staggeringly eccentric owners - a mother and daughter, both called Edith Beales - and the self-induced squalor in which they lived.

The two Ediths (known as "Big Edie" and "Little Edie") let the house and gardens fall into a compellingly abject state of disrepair. Filthy, full to bursting with rubbish and home to semi-tame raccoons, it appeared in the film to be in the advanced stages of being re-claimed by nature. The Edie's themselves spent much of their time in a single room, mostly - in Big Eddie's case - in bed wearing an enormous hat.



Like the Mole Man of Hackney, the house became the subject of local authority inspections, and required extensive repairs and stabilisation. Even more bizarrely the work was paid for by Big Edie's niece Jacqueline Onassis. Little Edie's strangely stylish dress sense and odd terminology ("This is the only outfit for today") turned her into a cult figure, especially for fashion designers such as Mark Jacobs. Rufus Wainwright wrote a song about it and the whole story has recently been made into a film series starring Drew Barrymore.

What's most interesting about Grey Gardens from an architectural perspective is how it represents everything we fear most in buildings: structural instability, dirt, rottenness and the dissolution of boundaries. At Grey Gardens, nature has come creeping in over the threshold - literally in the case of raccoons - and started to overlay the carefully delineated domestic realm. The squalor here may be self-induced but that actually adds to its nightmarish quality. Grey Gardens represents a staple of horror films, the house gone to seed, a source of fear rather than comfort.

There is another more pragmatic sense in which Grey Gardens scares us and that is in the way it negates the literal value placed on houses. The insane speculative value that they generate means that their wilful neglect is an affront, an attack on our duty to carefully manage our assets and investments.

Today Grey Gardens has been restored back to its original luxury.

Titanic: A Big Big Love

Earth Capitol has a short but amusing post about the Titanic. I enjoyed this not only because the featured poem is so fabulous but also because I share EC's obsession with the Titanic disaster itself. Shamefully I have to admit to having seen every single film about it. As a consequence I can say that - contrary to what one of the post's comments asserts - James Cameron's Titanic is not the worst film ever made. The worst film ever made is in fact Lew Grade's Raise The Titanic.

Why this tragedy should have given rise to so much bad art is a mystery, but Raise the Titanic really is worth a look should it ever rear its head on terrestrial TV again. It concerns a bizarre cold war plot to find a mysterious substance ("Byzanium? That's absurd", says a character at one point, accurately) which has gone down with the ship. At the end Titanic is raised to the surface and sailed triumphantly into New York harbour, a wobbly toy boat covered in sea weed bobbing up and down against a badly painted backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. The plot summary is here, if you have the stomach for it.

Clearly Cameron's Titanic is equally bobbins, but the sinking scenes are technically phenomenal and actually quite thrilling. My colleague over at Strange Harvest has noted too that the CGI recreations of the ship can be seen as an inverted homage - or a strange endpoint - to modernism's obsession with maritime imagery. In Cameron's Titanic the awesome processing power of digital technology is utilised to recreate an Edwardian ocean liner, albeit with thrilling verisimilitude.

For all its technical prowess - and let's face it that's the only permissible reason to watch it really - the film sticks rigidly to the cliches of the Titanic story: the jigging Irish in 3rd class forever enjoying the craic, stoical band members playing as they descend into the waves, caddish upper class men stealing into the lifeboats etc.

It also contains a number of narrative absurdities and anachronisms. Chief amongst these is the fact that Kate Winslet's character is carrying several early modernist masterpieces in her luggage including Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. This is currently to be found in the Museum of Modern Art and not, as far as anyone is aware, at the bottom of the Atlantic. The film also includes one of the most exquisitely terrible bits of art criticism ever seen on film when Leonardo Di Caprio gazes at Picasso's painting and says "The colours, they're just so....intense".

Less facetiously I owe my obsession with Titanic to reading about its discovery in National Geographic as a child. Titanic was discovered by Dr Robert Ballard in the early 1980's and the magazine followed this story over several issues leading up to the incredible photographs of the submerged ship. I found it both moving and terrifying in much the same way that Earth Capitol describes. Amazingly, Ballard's discovery - achieved with state of the art submersibles and seabed scanning equipment - was actually a by-product of the cold war too. Ballard had been contracted by the CIA to search for the wrecks of nuclear submarines and, at the end of this period, had been allowed to spend a few extra days looking for the titanic. No mention of Byzanium though. Suspicious that.