The Sword of Wotan

The elaboration of existing props is a most fruitful means of stimulating one’s dramatic imagination. The first hint I had of this simple and effective method came from Richard Wagner, to whose extraordinary mind we owe so many basic musical and dramatic procedures…In the final scene of Das Rheingold, near the end of Wotan’s solemn greeting to Valhalla, a fortissimo trumpet intones the motif of the sword. Wagner’s printed direction for Wotan at this point says: “To be sung very decisively, as if moved by a mighty thought.” [Editor Felix] Mottl adds here the following remark made by Wagner to the singer [Franz] Betz, who was portraying Wotan: “Before Fafner leaves the stage, he contemptuously discards an insignificant-looking sword that belongs to the hoard of gold. Now Wotan sees it and, as a symbol of his ‘mighty thought,’ lifts it up toward the fortress.” Translating this into our terminology, we cay say that Wagner wanted to externalize Wotan’s concept of Valhalla as a defense against Alberich’s forces and thus hit upon the idea of reusing a prop in a manner not originally planned by him. This is precisely what we mean by the term elaboration…Dramatic ideas do not lend themselves particularly well to transposition, but when combined with props this method is surprisingly effective. I strongly recommend that young stage directors make complete lists of props and scan them systematically with the idea of locating useful transpositions.

—Boris Goldovsky, Bringing Opera to Life

The perils of cleverness

Oh, I get it, it’s very clever. How’s that working out for you?
—Fight Club

Earlier this week, I finally finished London Fields by Martin Amis, a novel that I grudgingly respected and intensely disliked. Amis is undoubtedly a genius, and the level of craft on display here is often stunning, but the deliberate flatness of its lovingly caricatured characters and its endless hammering away at a handful of themes makes it feel like reading the same smug, acerbic, glitteringly intelligent page five hundred times in a row. By the end, I was almost physically exhausted by the relentless progression of setup, punchline, setup, punchline, and the result, like Amis’s The Information, strikes me as a work of great misdirected talent. For all its ambition, it ultimately exemplifies, more than anything else, what Amis’s father Kingsley once called the “terrible compulsive vividness in his style…that constant demonstrating of his command of English.” And, I might add, of his cleverness.

Cleverness for its own sake, I’ve become increasingly convinced, is a pitfall for all gifted artists, especially novelists and filmmakers. It’s hard to say what cleverness means, at least in its negative sense, but I’d describe it as any artistic decision or flourish that doesn’t serve to advance the story, but only to be admired in isolation. Its defining characteristic is that it can be easily detached from the underlying narrative and inserted elsewhere in the story—or another story altogether—with minimal changes. At its worst, it feels less like ingenuity in service of narrative than a laundry list of interchangeable ideas. Watching a movie like Fight Club or reading a book like London Fields, I have the same feeling that the music critic Anthony Tommasini recently described in his review of Francesca Zambello’s San Francisco production of Das Rheingold: “I wish she had made a complete list of her ideas and eliminated a third of them.”

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for an occasional isolated flourish, like the moment in Citizen Kane when the photograph of the Inquirer staff comes to life. And there are some great films, like Casino, that aspire to be nothing but those flourishes. But the best sort of cleverness, like every other aspect of craft, is for the sake of story, which means that it’s almost invisible. Hitchcock is a fine example of both extremes. We remember the obvious effects of his style, like the distorting optical process in Vertigo, but far more clever is the structure of Vertigo itself, which takes place entirely from the perspective of the lead character until the last half hour, when it breaks from his point of view at a decisive moment. (This is a departure, incidentally, from the original novel, which, with its surprise ending, is clever in a more conventional way.)

The real trouble with cleverness is that it can easily be mistaken for the deeper qualities it can only superficially imitate: narrative ingenuity, humor, and organic inventiveness. In literature, it leads to novels that imitate the postmodern tools of Barth or Borges without ever having really engaged the earlier works on which they were founded. In film, you get a style like that of Tony Scott at his worst, in which every shot is tilted or saturated for no particular reason. And in comedy, it results in a mode of humor in which pop cultural references and winks to the audience have replaced real comedic situations. For this last manifestation, which is probably the saddest of all, I can do no better than quote George Meyer, the legendary writer and producer for the best years of The Simpsons: “Clever,” Meyer notes, “is the eunuch version of funny.”