MOVIE REVIEW: BRIGHT STAR

BRIGHT STAR GPA: 3.4


Left: "To Autumn"

With a weekend approaching, I hope you'll consider seeing Bright Star, a movie I liked for at least an hour. It’s the story of the tragic British Romantic poet, John Keats, that small, frail man who died of consumption at 25, far from home, with no clue of his place in the literary history of the world.

Be warned, however, this film centers almost entirely on his tumultuous love affair with Fanny Brawne. Of course, you have to love a love affair in which two passionate 20-somethings address each other as Mr. Keats and Miss Brawne. Bright Star is very much a period piece, and it seemed authentic.

I stayed away from, or fell asleep in, some other Masterpiece Theater movies that many people liked: Room with a View, Howard’s End, and such. I found Bright Star better fare, though that might be the result of my knowing a little, and at times caring a lot, about Keats the poet and Keats the human.

So imagine my disappointment to find the movie becoming only a partial look at the life and poetry of Keats, focusing instead on the most marketable feature—trustworthy, fickle old eros. To be fair, we do see a version of his friendship with Charles Brown, along with the reason Brown did not accompany Keats to Italy. But we see precious little of Keats as under-appreciated young poet, loyal son and brother, medical student, and victim of vicious reviews. Where is the condescending Wordsworth? Where are Byron and Shelley? Where is the guy who called the diminutive hero "little Johnny Keats" as part of a literary review. (And we think the banter is rough in our time and place . . . ).

I was also surprised to see Fanny Brawne portrayed so favorably. I haven’t kept up with Keatsian scholarship, but in the days when I did, I had the strong impression that she’d done him wrong. Here, she’s heroic. Of course, I don’t mind that rendering if it's reasonably accurate, and it’s an interesting take on their relationship. But after that first hour, I stopped learning things and might as well have been viewing Titanic or West Side Story.

Well, maybe that’s hyperbolic grumpiness. Some revisiting of a star like Keats is better than none, and to be fair, many of the well-known aspects of Keats’s life are given at least a passing nod. Also, of course, this film will sell better than the one I’d have made. On the other hand, I doubt it will sell as much as it should, so please go see it. If you don't love poetry or Keats, this still serves as a useful foil to our times, an aid to perspective on how pretty or graceful or tough things are or are not these days.

Above all, Bright Star is visually stunning—foggy old, sunny old, flowery old England at its best and worst. It feels like a series of one still photograph after another, a reminder of just how many powerful images movies can offer in a couple of hours.

Stay for the final credits to hear a fine reading of “Ode to a Nightingale.” And maybe read "To Autumn" along with "La Belle Dame sans Merci" when you get home.

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THE NEW CRITICISM, Part 3, The Biographical Fallacy

The Biography of the Nut? The History of This Nut's Species? The Context of the Nut? What the Nut's Team of Psychoanalysts Said about the Nut?

Or the Nut Itself--Taste, Smell, Touch, Sight, and even Sound?

Regarding The New Criticism--my version of it anyway--the history, context, and so forth, of the nut are of no use, are without nutrition, unless the user has understood and experienced the nut itself. Once the nut has been experienced directly, by one who knows nuts, those other factors might make interesting playthings, but they will not feed the squirrel--who, I repeat--can distinguish a good nut from a rock, without memorizing Herodotus on the Peloponnesian Nut Wars.

Here's some more on the quasi-academic way of saying that.

Surely the “biographical fallacy” is a self-evident truth: good reading does not inject details of the author’s life into his writing. The author or his biographer might have gotten it wrong, might not have understood where a particular creative impulse came from. Or he might lie about it!

Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne, Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne, Nietzsche’s apparently pathetic life in relation to his bold notions, including that of a superman—these putative facts about the author’s life, juicy as they might be, should have nothing to do with the way we interpret or evaluate his words on the printed page. We’ll never actually know the biographical details, so let’s just do the honest, sometimes difficult work of interpreting the text.

Of course there are some qualifications. For example, language has changed since Shakespeare’s time, so we need an occasional footnote about telling “a hawk from a handsaw” in Hamlet or “’Sblood” as a recurring oath. And in Macbeth, it helps to know we can reasonably assume that childless Lady Macbeth’s comment about “the babe that milks me” probably refers to a child who died, given the commonness of infant mortality in eleventh century Scotland. What we must not do is jump to the conclusion that a significant theme in the play is, for example, a Shakespearean obsession with abortion-related guilt or the bard’s mourning the death of his own lost child.

Even the facts about the actual Scottish king should have no bearing on the Macbeth in the play, who is a fictional creation. Shakespeare played fast and loose with the sketchy historical facts available to him, so why should we bring them to bear on his plays, his works of art?

All this seems so obvious to me that I do not understand why the New Criticism has fallen out of favor in the last few decades, unless its proponents grew so extreme that they became absurd. I’m aware that the New Critics are associated with formalism in poetry; but I don’t remember, or never knew, if that was a justifiable connection or one created by their detractors. I see no reason why a New Critic’s careful attention to text—including punctuation and line breaks—should be limited to rhymed or metered poetry. Surely good free verse requires, deserves, and should invite the same kind of scrutiny.

Next, I intend to get back to Mr. Gothpunkrocker. But this should be enough for one day. Enough of what? Be kind. (Rewind?)