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Not long ago, I recorded a Barely Literate discussion of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater,
an absolutely top-flight novel. But try to describe it with a verbal
reduction, and the book's appeal clouds: "It's about a late-middle-aged
man with an enlarged prostate who makes an impoverished, lecherous road
trip to his former business associate's funeral." "It's the story of a
perverted, arthritic puppeteer who lives his life hand-to-mouth,
manipulating everyone around him into doing his bidding." "There's this
old dude who masturbates on the grave of his ultra-promiscuous lover,
and he runs away from his alcoholic wife and along the way tears apart
the bedroom of a friend's daughter in a desperate search for n00dz."
And it's a work of genius... why now?
The describer of Mike Leigh's Naked faces the same problem. "It's about a 27-year-old bum who wanders around London conversing with a variety of other lowlifes." "It's the story of a wisecracking drifter who turns up on his ex-girlfriend's doorstep and proceeds to bounce from one grimy encounter to the next, making grand pronouncements about society and humanity all the while." "There's this scruffy guy who makes a move on nearly every woman who crosses his path and expounds on his nihilistic worldview at every opportunity." No evidence of brilliance is to be found in an examination of surface details.
But isn't this to be expected? Do we really believe authorial genius lies in the ability to think up intrinsically neat stuff to write about or film? Yes, this is the premise of a lot of science fiction — "Look, a world in the shape of a ring!" — and maybe that's why I tend to find that those particular stories fall somewhere short of satisfying. Where excellent creative efforts like a Naked or a Sabbath's Theater excel is not in their first-order qualities — those don't seem to have the capacity for excellence by themselves — but in the second-order and beyond. Not, as Ebert said, what they're about; how they're about it. Not their events; how their events happen. Not even their characters; how their characters are revealed.
Roth's novel and Leigh's film are specifically strong in their structural qualities: both build, expand and advance in seamlessly organic ways, opening paths whose rises, falls and turns their audiences don't feel as if they've followed before but which provide perfect vantage points from which to view their particular stories. When Johnny the tramp rolls into town, he begins a journey that does not announce its own size and shape in advance. He's not on a quest to reclaim his old ladyfriend; he reaches her almost immediately, and even then wants little to do with her. He's not racking up love-'em-and-leave-'em points; evidently by his own elaborate criteria, he's uninterested in several of the women he comes across. He's not locked in a failing struggle for survival; hand-to-mouthing it seems to work okay, and besides, he could always line up for the dole. (England, remember.)
Pontificating, prognosticating and quipping to anyone who will half-listen — the lockjawed skank who rooms with the ex-GF; a young, filthy, bickering, near-unintellible couple of Scots; a deist security guard — Johnny's journey is not only one that no other characters in the annals of cinema have have taken, it's one that no other character in the annals of cinema could have taken. Comparisons to classical myth have been made, especially by Will Self in one of the Criterion DVD extras, but Leigh denies them. Johnny occupies his story and his story surrounds and sustains him; the two are inextricably tied, inseparable. How has Johnny reached such a sorry state? When and where did he get the opportunity to develop such a wide vocabulary and body of theories about life, the universe and everything? What's the source of his inexplicable-seeming appeal to the ladyfolk? What's his history with Louise, the long-suffering former lover at whose pad he crashes and whose burnout roommate he, as they say in England, shags? (And why is she so impassive about it all?) Does he count as a rapist? Fortunately, the film does not bend over backwards to address these questions and thus mediocritize itself; in Johnny's travels, Naked displays the dips that hint at voluminous icebergs beneath the squalid, hopeless surface.
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