directed by Nicolas Roeg
screenplay by Edward Bond
after the novel by James Vance Marshall (pseud. for Donald G. Payne) (1959, originally published as The Children)

Criterion Collection #10.

A montage set to blissful music that cuts directly from a naked teenage girl to the fat bubbling up through the skin of a roasting lizard would be strong stuff even if it didn’t really mean it. But this movie really means it. This movie is strong stuff.

Yes, this movie is a noble-savage, return-to-Eden, industrial-civilization-makes-us-crazy type of movie. If you are of the mind that nobody selling anything of the sort should be given credence, you might not have patience for it. I am very much cynical about fantasies of reversion, and feel an instinctive defensiveness on behalf of industrial civilization when its values are snidely impugned. It’s easy to knock industrial civilization when you’re just sitting around with a beer – i.e. when you don’t really mean it – and that irritates me. But like I said, this movie really means it. It is not a hippie fantasy, nor does it actually espouse any kind of revolutionary shift in human behavior – it knows that’s impossible. It simply expresses a deep nostalgia for, and awareness of – or nostalgia for awareness of – man’s actual place in the violent, indifferent order of the cosmos. I can get behind that. And the movie put me behind it.

Several times I thought of the Camus I’ve read (The Stranger and The Plague) – the method was to make absurd anything that wasn’t “the truth,” simply by reminding us of the truth. Here, “the truth” was a sort of “living desert” nature documentary footage, which is heightened yet understated. Just like nature itself. It includes some unnerving stuff – like, yes, an incredible swarm of maggots devouring a carcass – and then other stuff that is simply handled so well that it becomes unnerving. Everything on the screen is either decaying, devouring, or defending itself.

Actually, to get back to the comment about nostalgia, I see the movie as being built on the tug of opposed nostalgias, or at least constructed so that you are able to sympathize with either pull, according to your personal inclination. The girl (who is the real protagonist of the movie) is never so enamored of the state of nature that she considers giving up civilization, but once she gets home, she’s no longer satisfied there either. The Aborigine boy who represents the state of nature is ruined by his desire, but inability, to connect with this girl, who I take to represent, in relation to him, the allure of a world ordered by man. The tragedy in the movie is not that modern man isn’t primitive anymore; it’s that the two ways of being cannot understand each other or strike any lasting compromise. In Roger Ebert’s essay, included in the box, he says that he sees the film as being about the failure of communication, which I suppose I agree with, but principally in terms of honest communication between the modern and the primitive within the soul of mankind. The girl comes off as reasonably sensitive and reasonably intelligent, but ultimately too reliant on standard proprieties to comprehend “the truth”; this is modern man. My comment about wanting to warn the people in A Night to Remember that they were being much too British, in light of nature’s indifference to their deaths, was here more or less the point of the movie.

That this essentially philosophical material works at all is a testament to craftsmanship; all the moreso that it works rather well. I have very great respect for Nicolas Roeg for pulling this off. Having this movie described to you would be absolutely and completely unlike watching it. That is a sign that poetry and craft are crucial to a work. It’s not always necessarily a compliment. In this case it’s a compliment.

The only Nicolas Roeg movie I’d seen prior to this was The Witches. I’m now very interested, if a bit nervous, to see his other movies.

The photography is lovely.

Many critics, I see, have talked about the mysterious aura about the film, but none of them have addressed something so I want to come out and say it. I think the specific casting of Jenny Agutter has a lot to do with the distinctive atmosphere. Her prettiness is of a particular type that is somehow reminiscent of the girls one is interested in at a distance in middle school. She doesn’t look at all glamorous, nor does she look ordinary; she is blankly, tentatively pretty. Also, the actress herself has clearly and remarkably been caught on film at exactly the moment of life being portrayed: newly aware of the potential to be a grown-up but not sure what to think of it. I see that some people have criticized the movie for leering at her, but I think that’s an important part of what’s at work. Lots of guys on the internet are not at all shy about expressing their lust for young Jenny Agutter, but they all seem to think it’s something they’re sneaking in under the table, and that maybe Nicolas Roeg was too. None of them seem to recognize that the tension of deciding whether you ought to think of her as a hot girl or not is an important (and presumably intentional) part of the movie. For me, a good part of the success of the film had to do with its ability, through her, to bring back memories of a certain time of life, a time at which the question of what it meant to be a person was vitally open. This may only be work for men. Though I would think that women could recognize themselves in her tentative self-possession, and be brought back to the same set of memories. Any thoughts, women who’ve seen Walkabout?

So here’s the key track from John Barry’s score, the central montage described above, which happens to be the only piece of music without dialogue over it in the film. The end credits track is essentially the same material, anyway. This track (called “Back to Nature” on the soundtrack LP) does have sound effects, I’m afraid, and to give you the album version would be to break my pattern of using rips directly from the film, so you have to live with the sounds of kangaroos being clubbed to death and lizards being impaled. I think the foley work in this film was fantastic and evocative, so it’s fitting that you should get a little of it here.

Without the movie, this piece of music falls easily into a certain category of 70s pseudo-classical silky Hollywood lovey-dovey junk, and doesn’t seem to have a lot going for it. But once the images have been seen, the music seems to soak up their conceptual essence; I’ve come to really like it. It’s like tunes I hear in dreams but then can’t successfully recreate, because the point wasn’t the music itself, it was the strangeness that infused it. The dreamy, spacey feel of the music in a lot of “normal” 70s movies – music that is, to me, often unintentionally unnerving and thus a little icky – here finds its philosophical match. This time, for once, the sounds of otherworldly rapture aren’t supposed to be comfortable or easy to take; their sleazy frictionless quality becomes part of the effect rather than just tacky period ambiance.

The whole film, I suppose, is similarly an honest, intellectually whole incarnation of 70s flakiness. I felt myself drawn inside a feeling that was familiar but usually easy to dismiss as having been an intellectual/aesthetic fad. Perhaps this movie was the source and I have only known the imitators; perhaps every muddled, superficial fashion of a period stems from a charismatic source that will age better than its offspring. Perhaps something becomes “dated” in inverse proportion to how intellectually whole it is. The culture of every age has its characteristic points of philosophical laziness; the objects that age poorly are those that obliviously embrace that laziness, which becomes glaring and obvious when the philosophical wind changes. But thoughtful work will survive no matter how of its time it seems. The great novels of the 19th century are still going strong despite being so 19th-century, whereas the advertisements, the jokes, the pulp of the 19th century all seem irredeemably quaint.

This movie was very 70s but it was not quaint.

I think I respond well to things that seem have had their own thoughts, but not to things that seem to simply be relaying received thoughts. Even if they’re the same thoughts.

The essentially sympathetic thing in art is the having of ideas, not ideas themselves.

Things that I feel obligated to mention to maintain consistency with other entries:
1. The commentary (Nicolas Roeg and Jenny Agutter, separately) is well worth hearing even if it’s not consistently interesting, for exposure to the two personalities, both of which are very much part of the film itself.
2. A soundtrack was released on LP but never yet reissued on CD.

Having drawn a connection to A Night to Remember, I’m inspired to note the recurring themes in the Criterion Collection thus far. A little look back at the first ten selections.

Grand Illusion, A Night to Remember, and Walkabout are all about disillusionment with civilization’s received wisdom; about the ways that we make an ASS out of U and MANKIND. They all practice, as I said, some form of Camus-style absurdism.

Amarcord and The 400 Blows are both about childhood, psychological coming-of-age, and the memory thereof. If you want to psychoanalyze, Beauty and the Beast is sort of a failed version of the same, complete with a spitefully phony “maturation” at the end, to complete the impression that the whole thing took place in the imagination of a spoiled child. At any rate, it’s sort of an insincere exhibit B in the “memories of childhood” category.

Seven Samurai, The Killer, and Hard Boiled were all about morality, about codes, compromises, and the ethical ambitions and struggles of individuals in relation to groups. But these issues were deeply deeply stylized. I personally feel pretty cynical about the simple way that the phenomenon of “morality” is often depicted – up to and including the noir attitude that a less-than-black-and-white “morality” is something really grim and mature. The fact that all the movies here selling that line were actually about, you know, exciting fights and stuff, feeds my cynicism. They were also all Asian, so, as I said a few entries ago, who knows.

If you want to stand even further back, all three of the thematic groupings above could be characterized as being about a loss of innocence/loss of faith. In pretty much all of the movies thus far, I could identify a loss of faith at play.* And that’s the ur-story of the 20th century, right? You know, I hate it when cultural critics talk this way, but I’ve worked myself up to it and I can see what they’re saying. Or, in this case, what I’m saying.

Of course, there is one odd man out here that I’ve been avoiding. The Lady Vanishes is really and truly about a Lady Vanishing. Not coincidentally, it is probably the only one of these movies I would have liked as a kid.

I.E. PRIOR TO MY LOSS OF FAITH.

No, just kidding.

Er, I guess.

* In Beauty and the Beast, it takes place in kitschy retrograde.

That was supposed to be the end of this entry except it occurs to me now, later, that The Lady Vanishes actually fits rather well into the “don’t be so sure, civilized man!” category, considering its rather explicit message that foolish British complacency is oblivious to nasty realities. Its characters, traveling through political danger zones in the seeming safety of their luxurious train, need to be seriously shaken before they see that they are not immune to the outer world, and in the end find themselves holed up in the compromised train, fighting for their lives. It has lots in common with A Night to Remember. I missed that when I did the round-up above, I guess, because I would have understood it as a kid, free of “meanings.”