About Author: Hilton Als

Ingres painted this portrait of the Princesse Albert de Broglie in 1853 and for a long time it was the only painting I wanted to see when I went to the Met because it said less about museums and history than it did about the modern world. Although the Princesse is sitting (standing) and being memorialized, she is also her own creation, relaxed and sad in her life position, and unremarkable beauty. What Ingres made of all that Flaubert made something of as well in “Madame Bovary,” and “Sentimental Education,” works that showed the female body no longer waiting for permission–even if it meant self-destructing. The Princesse is a body but she is also a dress, and the richness of her dress is a responsibility, not only for her, but for the many seamstresses and servants who have to help her maintain an appearance that Ingres does not romanticize, it is a burden in the way that wealth can be a joy and a burden. What I loved when I first saw the picture are her gloves and hat on the chair. While artfully arranged, they have the look of a woman who’s just arrived in a hurry to get somewhere else. Looking at Ingres work, I was drawn less to his gooey mid-eighteenth century pictures, than the incredible drawings of the eighteen-forties and social realist portraits such as his devastating 1832 study of Louis-Francois Bertin. There, Ingres began to throw up his own fashionableness and get down to work; he was more than a brilliant surface; he was acknowledging the world was as terrible as it was beautiful. The Princesse is terrible and beautiful, too, because she’s using the artist to be seen–his rendering is just part of her due. In a way, artist and model fuck with each other deeply in this picture: he is making his art while she does and does not give herself up to that idea as she makes herself.

The City

Hilton Als

– September 3, 2013

The city is so beautiful tonight. It’s emptied out, which means it’s full of feeling. There’s space between people and a lack of competitiveness about everything because there is no need. There are plenty of cabs, and enough coffee. And because there’s space between bodies, you can fall in love without being distracted by that person, or the next, because there’s only this person. It’s time to make love! you say to them, whoever they are, but first I must buy these cheap flowers, and say good-bye to the wet night air before the present atmosphere becomes something else, like Fall. The whole town is like a soft rock station played in the loneliest dorm room, or the waiting car, waiting and waiting for the beloved to trip down the stairs in their sandals and get in the car, momentarily quenching that seemingly endless need for absence.

Rich Kids

Hilton Als

– September 3, 2013

The only real reason to see Baz Luhrmann’s current adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” are Leonardo DiCaprio’s hands. For fans of digits–Samuel Delaney is our patron saint–DiCaprio has a fine pair of pencil pushers, a little padded at the tips, with lots of flesh between knuckle and the first joint. One doesn’t necessarily associate DiCaprio with pencils or any writing instruments let alone thought but watching his long and meaty hands clenched in amazement or wonder just beneath his Jay Gatsby tuxedo sleeves reminds one of the 1974 “Great Gatsby,” and Mia Farrow tapping her little gold pencil against her champagne glass at a Gatsby party as she encourages her husband, Tom, who’s full of lust, to borrow her writing instrument and take down a chorine’s phone number. Farrow’s voice was perfect as Daisy: carelessness on the winds, like her scarf in the winds, I never understood why that movie tanked. Perhaps because of Robert Redford’s hands, which always look as if they should be throwing a baseball, or have just thrown a baseball? Redford was attractive in his ice-cream colored Gatsby suits but he did not evoke what Bjork once sang about from a hand fan point of view: “His fingers promise exciting sex.” DiCaprio’s hands are big as dreams. You know the one, where he puts a little rouge or scent on your lips with his thumb and then wipes it all off with his index finger as softly or as hard as a kiss.

Gilbert Taylor April 12, 1914-August 23, 2013

Hilton Als

– August 26, 2013

Cinematographer on “Repulsion,” among other films.

It didn’t occur to me until recently that one reason Polanski’s 1965 masterpiece resonated so greatly with queer kids when it was shown in New York revival houses in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, was that Carol, so brilliantly played by Catherine Deneuve, was a queer body, repulsed by the status quo, and by standard ideas of beauty that did nothing to cover up the bitter work of aging, or silence women who had been made equally mad by their commodification, but who are socially acceptable because they can afford a facial, and complain about men. Carol is too repressed to join in those discussions because she’s queer and unsure of her body; indeed, she’s repulsed by her own form because she feels “different.” Carol thinks as she pulls off her gloves, fascinated by the peel: Is this my hand? My body? Is this what men make of it? And what are men? Do they really smell this way? Why is it that when I smell them I vomit? Carol gets hers when she invents the man or men she wants; they are largely faceless and as masculine as her dreams. And what Carol’s dreaming of, really, is power, and an aspect of her repulsion vis a vis the straight men who “like” her is their weakness, their demands, the physicalization–claiming–of whatever’s in their purview. She’s James’ governess in “Turn of the Screw,” but less hindered by propriety; instead of driving a child to his death through the building up hysteria, Carol kills on her own. (Both the James and the Polanski are set in the land of repression: England.) I don’t know how “crazy,” I thought Carol was when I saw the film because so many of her responses made sense to me across the distance of Deneuve’s blondness and beauty which I ordinarily wouldn’t respond to because it’s not a look I usually respond to. Still, it was a mark of Polanski’s genius to cast Denueve in the role: the world wants to be blonde. Via Deneuve Polanski asked: What if blonde was not synonymous with white beauty and the fantasy of erotic love, but with queer thoughts, and female perversions?

Oscar

Hilton Als

– August 21, 2013

Oscar Wilde published “The Decay of Lying: An Observation,” in his 1891 collection of essays, “Intentions,” and in that beautiful, arch, and sometimes misguided piece of writing, Wilde, who wasn’t yet forty, presented, as a kind of Socratic dialogue, this argument: art wasn’t meant to reflect nature but it’s own means, which is to say artifice; the natural world had nothing to do with artistic production. And the two young men who have this delightful conversation in “The Decay of Lying,”–Vivian and Charles–were not too far in spirit from a relationship I used to have with a man I don’t see anymore but I see in my heart, I loved him in the way that Vivian and Charles love one another, Charles and Vivian being another of Wilde’s complex male characters, they talk but they never talk of love, and yet they are together, usually bonded by ideas and something else, Oscar Wilde could not have one male character say to another in nineteenth century London I love you, which is a theme he struggled with in his 1890 novel, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” another treatise about appearances, and is it any wonder given that Wilde had to treat the love that interested him–love between men–as just another metaphor about doubling given the times but we’ll get to that in a minute.

Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854; he was the much beloved son of Irish intellectuals with an aristocratic bent–his mother was a famous feminist–and his class didn’t hurt in terms of his access to education, he studied Latin and Greek and was an utterly brilliant student, one of those astonishing people instructors love to hate, knowing he would surpass them, he was a born star, and he was, and that was part of the problem later on, he had been treated like a star from the time he was born, and was lead to believe he could get away with anything, having gotten away with so much by the time he published “The Decay of Lying,” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a book I have always found rather difficult to be around let alone read, Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations don’t hurt, but aside from that what disturbs me most about that book is Wilde’s coldness–the sentimental or spoiled are almost always cold at heart; they can only think of their own pleasures and have little tolerance for the needs and comforts of other people, unless it will lead to their further comfort or degradation, as in the case of Wilde and Bosie and that whole trip–and Wilde’s periodic coldness comes through in his depiction of Sybil, the actress in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” who gives everything up for love, only to suffer for it, Wilde’s sometimes spiteful interest in women was so strange to me, he wanted them to be some version of the grotesque (i.e. “Salome”) or dead, with Miss Prism in-between. In any case, Sibyl is ultimately just a plot point in that book, she represents the status quo that Wilde’s male characters turn their backs on so they can get on with their story of love that’s perverted by circumstances, just as Wilde’s own love was perverted by circumstances, I much prefer “De Profoundis,” to his narrative fiction, it being a self-portrait that’s without metaphor, self-pity, or tears, and had he lived it shows us how he would have moved on from what the law said he could and could not do in the privacy of his own bed, his own bed, had he lived I’m sure he would have realized his true self without mirrors, without the hard glaze of self-protecting irony, without misogynistic impulses, a lover of men who, being free in his love, learned to love the world.

Conquest 1939

Hilton Als

– August 19, 2013

A not terrible film that’s less about Garbo’s face than it is about her body. As Napoleon’s Polish lover, Maria Walewska, Garbo fucks for freedom. She submit’s to the little man’s humiliating grasp, loses her noble, older husband, and risks shame in her own country, to insure that her “sire,” will protect all that her people have, which is not much. Torn by her eventual desire for Bonaparte–she even follows him into exile, hoping he will escape Majorca dressed in the lady’s clothes she brings along–and her personal honor, Garbo does what any star would do in such a situation: she mimes torment in a serious of physical poses of great visual invention while dressed in Adrian. Lost, as always, in her fantasy about characterization–Garbo wants to “play” someone other than herself, always; more often than not her face wins out unless the part is so great it defeats the intensity and boredom of her self-interest–Garbo actually manages to become Walewska most credibly during her moments of shame, and play–i.e. when her brother, played by Lief Erickson!, chases her playfully around her modest castle. In “Conquest,” Garbo–who Alice B. Toklas once named Mademoiselle Hamlet–uses her hands a great deal to convey distress, and she laughs a great deal, too. Her laughter cracks through her natural propriety as a performer and shakes her beautiful body as it assumes another pose in a story of love no one believes, maybe not even it’s stars. Still, it’s the laughter that stays in the mind after the credits roll; two years later, Garbo would star in “Ninotchka,” where she got to laugh her head off. (Garbo liked to laugh at her own image best. During her silent film days with director Clarence Brown, he would play her rushes backwards; she loved that.) But I don’t think she could have done “Ninotchka,” without having laughed and played in “Conquest” first. Writing about that laugh in his book about the star, Barry Paris quotes Garson Kanin asking Ernst Lubitsch why he thought of Garbo for “Ninotchka,” in the first place. Lubitsch said:

Because she was funny. You couldn’t see it? You didn’t know how funny she was off screen?….and I knew she could be funny on the screen….Most of them are so heavy. Heavy! Bt she was light, light always, and for comedy nothing matters more. When someone has a light touch, they can play comedy, and it doesn’t hurt if they’re beautiful. There was only one thing that worried me a little. I wondered if she could laugh, because I didn’t have a finish if she didn’t have a laugh. She had the most beautiful smile. What am I saying? She had a whole collection of smiles….Warm, motherly, friendly, polite, sexy, amused, mysterious. Beautiful smiles. But a smile is not a laugh….I said to her one day, “Can you laugh?,” and she said, “I think so.” I said to her, “Do you often laugh?” And she said, “Not often.” And I said, “Could you laugh right now?” And she said, “Le me come back tomorrow.” And then next day she came back and she said, “All right I’m ready to laugh.” So I said, “Go ahead.” And she laughed and it was beautiful! And she made me laugh, and there we sat in my office like two loonies, laughing for about ten minutes. From that moment on, I knew I had a picture.