In which the tone of the blog shifts dramatically.

King Kong

Donkey/King Kong - the miniature monstrosity.

There's a tradition (read: possibly a fib) in my mother's family that Fay Wray is a great aunt or cousin many times removed. My grandmother used to tell me, "That's where you get your blonde hair", a theory that flies in the face of logic and genetics, not least because Fay wasn't even blonde. Regardless, there's a certain mythology about this film which is a bit difficult to understand from a modern perspective. It's a significant stretch to link my blondeness to Fay Wray's through the tenuous connection of a shared family name, but clearly someone in the Australian Wrays was enamoured enough with the film, and with Fay, to insist that there was one. It might not be productive to interrogate King Kong's position as a 'classic' of the classical Hollywood tradition, but the reasons for the film's continuing appeal are an interesting entrance into its style and themes.

I've read other blog entries saying their automatic response watching King Kong was laughter, and I can definitely understand that. Parts of it are so clunky, the dialogue and narrative arcs so contrived, that it's hard to take it seriously. How much this is due to the passage of time and how much to actual flaws in the film is difficult to tell, although I think when watching the Peter Jackson version I rolled my eyes a fair bit as well. The notion of the love-struck beast carrying off the frail maiden just doesn't appeal anymore, and outside of maybe a James Bond I can't think of a recent movie revolving around the kidnapping by ruthless thugs of a dainty lass. Perhaps the St. George and the dragon mythology persists, but we're too cynical these days to accept a simple rescue scenario. If a lass is kidnapped, the most likely explanation will be that she was double-crossing the hero all along. I may be getting sidetracked with modern comparisons but the premise of the film certainly seems to have suffered over time.

The enduring appeal, I believe, lies in the idea of the primitive - not the coconut-bra wearing, grass-skirted, running and screaming 'natives' of the 1933 film, but the lasting sense of pathos and innocence inherent in our (perhaps patronising) notions of pre-modern or untouched civilisations. When Kong crashes through the walls of his enclosure it becomes clear that the structure didn't necessarily serve to keep him in, its best function was keeping the outside world out. Like my Donkey Kong, proudly smashing through the glass walls of his terrarium, intent on spreading terror and regaining his property, he is unaware that he's just a miniature in a world of skyscraping overabundance. Modernity has no respect for the natural, the untouched, but only for spectacle. Even our sense of pathos for Kong's death must be viewed through the lens of cinema, as Denham continues to force his story into the camera's frame by insisting, "It was Beauty that killed the Beast", when clearly Kong has been destroyed by a modern society impatient for spectacle.

Nothing to see here, folks.

Move along. Move along. Nothing but happy turtles and other such nonsense.

Charles and Ray Eames - Short films

Here's an interesting not-fact from Charles and Ray Eames's Wikipedia page:

Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architecture scholarship. After two years of study, he left the university. Many sources claim that he was dismissed for his advocacy of Frank Lloyd Wright and his interest in modern architects. He was reportedly dismissed from the university because his views were "too modern."

Sounds oddly familiar.

Thinking about what I wrote earlier about The Fountainhead and the way Rand kept pushing the idea that innovative designers were being universally maligned, I thought the video of the Eameses on The Today Show was interesting for what it revealed about design as high-concept as opposed to design as experienced by the majority.

Compare the H and eiffel based and wire backed chairs with the outfits the women are wearing. To me, it was like watching time travel. How could these objects, so clean and elegant in their lines and carefully contoured to the body, possibly have found popularity of this kind in a time when women still wore shin-length petticoats and corsetry? 

The Dior 'New Look' Bar Suit - 1947

Designed at the same time as Dior's New Look, an extremely flattering but not remotely natural triumph of boning and padding, (a fascinating look into the interior of these clothes, if you're into that sort of thing, can be found on Gertie's New Blog) the Eames chairs seem to belong to a different way of life. The Dior suit is most definitely architecture for the body, but maybe more architecture in spite of the body rather than in service of it. In making women resemble buildings or cakes, this fashion was restrictive, complicated, and completely altered the natural shape of the body. Odd considering Dior claimed his dresses were "molded upon the curves of the feminine body". According to this sewing blog:

If re-created accurately, New Look garments should nearly stand up by themselves; the interlining, linings, interfacings, bonings, and stiffenings Dior used all but supported his garments on their own.

Bit scary, no? (Although I have heard the argument that if women still relied on structured undergarments to create the ideal body shape, instead of diet and exercise, they wouldn't feel so much pressure to alter themselves and there'd be less of an epidemic of eating disorders and such. I get it but I also enjoy the free and easy motion of my ribcage and NOT dying of consumption.)

There's something asynchronous in the development trajectories of fashion and art in the middle of the century - design moves swiftly towards the sleek, the streamlined and the efficient, while fashion dawdles behind, aside from a brief flirtation with the look in the twenties. It seems incongruous to me that THOSE skirts would sit in THOSE chairs. Perhaps that's just me, and to other eyes the two styles seem harmonious. Or maybe it's that the designs of the chairs are so ubiquitous today that I tend to see them as distinctly modern things, whereas the Today Show presenter's background dress (it's called a background dress, don't ask me why) is emphatically From The Past. To me though, it seems an example of the disparity between the design ideals of the few and the actual lived experience of the majority - it takes a while for the latter to catch up with the former, or for the former to condescend to take the latter into consideration. This idea is probably still influenced more by Rand than by the Eames's films.

In a similar vein though, while I was watching the films, particularly Toccata for Toy Trains, and wishing the camera would just back up a little so I could see how the thing was done, I never wondered why. It wasn't until other people in the class said the same thing that I started considering it. Watching King Kong I never had any desire for the trick to be revealed and the illusion spoiled. My theory was that maybe in watching these short films we're constantly aware that it's just Charles and Ray playing with toys, filming it all in their office or their home. The sense of professionalism is lacking, and as a result we see it more as a kind of handicraft than a polished, commercially produced artwork. But I'm certainly not set on that point. Maybe it wouldn't matter who produced it, we'd still have that curiosity about the way it was done.

The Fountainhead - less crossly but still a little cross. And longer.

It’s difficult to look at this book objectively, since it’s a rare book I am physically violent against (it joins Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole in that dubious honour). These books are alike, in that I really, really liked parts of them and despised other parts with an almost irrational passion, mostly because they were so forced and tedious compared to the good parts. 

On an aesthetic level, much of this book is appealing. I found a lot of Rand’s figurative language, like the plot, forced and tedious, but purely for style this is a world I’d happily move into, for a little while at least. The spaces sound so elegant. Simple details, like Dominique's white chair or European god statue, give an impression of restrained opulence. The image of one of Roark's buildings, rising out of the black rock as if thrown up by the earth itself, gives chills. These are buildings, as the characters themselves say, that you would have to live up to. It's an appealing idea, to have yourself displayed to your absolute best in the form of your home, as somehow truthful and honest, not deceitful or fake.

It aims at an aesthetic ideal recognisable in other studies of interior decoration from the Victorian period onward. Two in particular: novelist Edith Wharton and architect Ogden Codman’s book The Decoration of Houses, published in 1898, and an essay by the writer Willa Cather called “The Novel Dèmeublè”, written in 1922 and published in The New Republic. The former addresses interior design, outlining the ideal way of decorating the home, and derides the ornate Victorian style of the time (like Peter Keating’s apartment), favouring a simple, elegant style which prioritises utility and function. The latter addresses furnishings in literature, decrying the Realist trend of accumulating detailed description of furnishings. Put these two together and you can see, as has been observed, that this trend against the overblown Victorian style had already been established by the time Rand was writing. Which isn’t to say Rand shouldn’t bother with her own argument, on the contrary I think it’s an admirable aesthetic philosophy, but there's a reason that kitsch and overblown decoration persisted (and you could say persists, even today). Like romance literature and melodrama, ornate furnishings fill a need. In The Architecture of Happiness Alain de Botton describes a housing estate designed by Le Corbusier. Despising the unnecessarily ornate styles of the past, Le Corbusier built simple, pared back structures with flat roofs, plain windows, and no ornamentation. But the factory workers who lived in the houses weren't tired of ornamentation. In fact, they needed it to escape from their daily work in the factories. So they added shutters to the windows, built picket fences, and even added pitched roofs to their boxy houses. Fortunately, Le Corbusier wasn't Howard Roark, and didn't blow them all up for their intransigence.

Perhaps what's so deeply offensive to many, and it is to me, about The Fountainhead is that this is an individual showing us how we ought to live, and what beauty really is. Rand's minimal aesthetic might be appealing for people who have always been surrounded by opulence. It might seem refreshingly simple to someone like Edith Wharton, who built this, to strip away the brocade and the flocked wallpaper and the gilt and live without clutter. Doing so may make them feel more natural, less buffered from the rest of the world, as though they are living more wholesome, simple lives. But to people who aren't inured to ornamentation, and whose lives are plenty simple enough, stripping away the upholstered surfaces and decorative touches - unnecessary though they may be - might only serve to remind them how little stands between themselves and destitution. This is how de Botton reads the tendency towards ornamentation, anyway, and in relation to The Fountainhead it seems to show why, after the new minimalist, almost utilitarian, style had apparently been adopted, Rand would still be railing against the foolish masses who don't know what beauty and greatness really are. It also partly explains, to me anyway, why this book ended up hurled across the room. Like the music in Man With a Movie Camera, this book is so BOSSY. Sure, the spaces sound appealing and the furnishings are amazing, but we don't want to be shown how to live. This book poses a phenomenological reading of aesthetics, in which everyone perceives the same things to be good or beautiful, you just have to get them to admit it. It's deeply reductive and really, sort of offensive.

Fountainhead - briefly and crossly

To my mind, The Fountainhead fails as a novel because it’s a polemical tract, and fails as a polemical tract because the novel it’s forced into contradicts its whole philosophy. Form ought to follow function? Eschew decoration in favour of utility? THIS IS A SEVEN HUNDRED PAGE NOVEL. If it was a building, it would have an eight-storey facade covered in plaster mouldings, with mullioned bay windows, carved lintels, Doric columns and gargoyles on every eave. Inside would be one long, narrow hallway which would twist and turn and lead you back every five minutes to the same room, with a statue of a naked Howard Roark with the words ‘YOU ARE RIGHT’ carved around the base. Because ultimately, all this novel tells us is that our basest, most arrogant impulses are correct: I am right, everyone else is an idiot, and the only reason they don’t admit as much is they’re jealous of how awesome I am. In this world you have to stand up for your ideals to be worth anything, and your ideals have to be Howard Roark.

The library of the sewer people

Bender: 'There's nothing down here but crumpled pornos and Ayn Rand.'