About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

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“Mrs. Soffel” (1984)

By
Hilton Als
– November 17, 2014

IMG_1613A vastly underrated film in which the real life metaphor of prison and escape mirrors a nineteenth century woman’s life prison of lovelessness and respectability. In it, Diane Keaton gives a performance that seems to be of a piece with the director, Gillian Armstrong’s, strong sense of black–black in the clouds, black in Mrs. Soffel’s high necked costuming, the black in her lover’s hair. Mrs. Soffel, like Masha before her, is in morning for her life, but what is her life? To discover that, you have to see the movie, and even then we don’t know: the film ends in silence, with Mrs. Soffel gazing at the image of her dead lover, her dead and living past falling about her like the folds of her skirt, the folds of the prison bars that cuts her face into twos and threes and our hearts into twos and threes as well as the camera leaves Mrs. Soffel to her memories and her love, with its plot thickening sadness, and regret.

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The Roosevelts

By
Hilton Als
– November 16, 2014

Portrait of Eleanor and Franklin as Some Aspect of My Parents.

10599148_10153141488097586_8889023192112088083_nThe Ken Burns documentary is very moving, not least because of what Daisy, a beloved cousin of FDR’s, is reported to have said about their relationship: They were always looking for each other’s approval, and there was something in their great love that prohibited them from ever relaxing in the other’s presence.

Daisy’s point is well taken if one thinks of romantic love and partnership as a way of “relaxing,” especially if, like Franklin and Eleanor, like my father and mother, one person is over loved, and the other person is under loved. (FDR’s strong willed mother could not take her eyes off her beautiful son, while Eleanor’s mother did not like looking at her eldest daughter, who she deemed unattractive; Eleanor’s father adored her, but was a hopeless alcoholic.) Neither understands the emotional language of the other, and the strain–the commitment–is in trying to decipher what is being said, communicated.

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Polly Platt

By
Hilton Als
– November 15, 2014

Many years ago I visited the fabled art director, producer, and screenwriter, in her snug little house in Venice. I wanted to write about her and it was the most nervous I had ever been about anything. To quiet my panic Polly offered me a drink; I told her I had taken a tranquilizer. I had the drink anyway. But then I noticed she wasn’t drinking. Because she didn’t. She was sober. I felt like one big slurred word next to her precision, humor, blonde quiet. She was writing her memoirs, she said, and I offered to read it. Oh, she said, instead, would I read something her daughter had written? I agreed. I read the paper, it was very good, I wrote to Polly (this was some months after we met) but never heard back. I only learned after her death that she had been ill with Alzheimer’s. When I unpacked my bags from that LA trip–the trip where I met the fabled Polly Platt–I found her address written in her own hand; we meant to stay in touch, but life did not allow for that. I had the note framed and it has taken me several more years–until tonight, in fact- to hang it, near my desk, if only because I didn’t want her death to be real. Then I began to think about it another way: given how I placed the memento, Polly was not looking over my shoulder, but towards it, and having a little rest there.

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Tango

By
Hilton Als
– October 28, 2014

“Last Tango in Paris.” (1973) The final devastating moments when age and need, once revealed, are too much for the female protagonist, despite Paul’s (Brando) insistence, all along, that names, truth, narrative are not valid, or particularly revelatory. Paul insists on their relative anonymity in their shared apartment because he knows what the world is: convention would limit their exchange, and trivialize it, and render everything “less,” including his existence. There is no “truth” to bodies and lust, just the expansiveness of feeling each other up. Slowly but surely, though, the young woman starts to introduce facts into their exchange–Paul is gaining weight, etc–because she is cinema verite itself and won’t be shut out of the world of facts. Eventually, when she finds out the truth–that Paul is an aging petit bourgeois, all the things he knows about himself but out of love and kindness never shared; what would be the point–and he is as needy as anyone else, she engineers a final rejection to free herself from the truth she once sought: his death. I did not know what the film meant until I, too, became Paul, another of time’s energetic ruins, and I can only imagine what it meant to my father who, most weekends, took my brother and I to see foreign films. My father adored Maria Schneider, Paul’s happiness and his ruin, particularly when she appeared, with Jack Nicholson, in “The Passenger”: All those long shots, all that white space. I wonder if, to him, the town Nicholson showed up in looked like his ancestral home, Barbados, and I wonder, too, if Maria looked like some version of the women he loved: foreign in spirit, fun loving, confused as to why he wanted to shut the world out as long as he could, and did.



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The Ladies

By
Hilton Als
– October 19, 2014

10511140_1529231113961451_9037281947834561329_nThe Ladies. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. 1974. Photograph by Jill Krementz. No words. What they have given us: stories no one else wrote before they wrote them and then, having done that, they wrote some more. What one never forgets, either: their physical beauty during that time and this, something for the visual taking by their admirers while they kept themselves, the better to describe various emotional worlds, all real, all imagined, all true.

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Bosie

By
Hilton Als
– October 19, 2014

1005437Lord Alfred Douglas. “Bosie.” Seen here in middle age. Oscar Wilde’s friend, the ruin of so much and the hope of so much. He has visited my apartment over the years and I have learned to recognize him and ask him to leave when the jokes turn mean and his insecurity and need for approval and resentment of that need becomes too much. I can feel it just as it begins and I have learned to end it, having become, for myself, Oscar Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde, one of Ireland’s foremost feminists, an overwhelming figure who taught her son to overwhelm his adversaries when he could. The last Bosie to spend time in my apartment had been invited to lunch because of a certain vulnerability he’d shown on several occasions–brief but potent. Over the lunch I’d prepared there was discussion of this Bosie’s father and how, in the end, his father was a racist and and and how it would mean this and this and this if he had ended up with a black man despite his own views on the subject. I cleared the table more than once: of the nice luncheon debris, and then of Bosie’s words and body, which went out with the trash that I keep to remember that there is, in the world, such a thing as a type.

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