A Lesson in How Marketing Always Seems to Screw Up
Last night I watched the documentary Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk. It’s on Tubi and Kanopy, if you’re curious. The night before I’d watched Made in England, a documentary about the films of Michael Powell.
Regarding Love Express, I was struck by how the creator chose to present a series of strong images while refusing to state what they meant. In particular, I was struck by his collages and animations and how they’d inspired the Monty Python crew. Suddenly the 70s began to make a little more sense. Besides, I’m a sucker for surrealism and how it helps uncover aspects of us that we’re unaware of, especially when dialog is excluded, leaving even fewer clues for the viewer to find meaning in. The classic screw-up occurs once the marketing people have to synopsize the finished product. I’m reminded of an Eastern European edition of Fight Club the cover of which featured a naked Black man leaping out of a pile of paper money. I was like: What? Frequently a book’s jacket copy will either give away the entire plot… or get it wrong in an effort to short-cut to the reader’s attention. A good example is the jacket copy on the horror novel The House Next Door. To paraphrase, it says something like “A chilling study of the intersection between the the old South and the new South.” Again: What?
This is a head-shaking reminder that once the book is out of your hands, somebody will get the marketing all wrong. Almost every film actor I’ve met dreams of writing novels because they see that as having total creative control… but ultimately the book jacket is goofy when the story is serious. Or the jacket copy promises laughs when the writer intended heartache.
About the Michael Powell documentary, I enjoy the overblown, operatic aspects of the Archer films. It’s a sad lesson in how, once your signature style goes out of fashion, you’d better have a few experiments to fall back on.
Now For the Week’s Radioactive Story
Have you seen the Vanity Fair piece about Cormac McCarthy? Also check out the takes in The Guardian and The Spectator and Slate.
During an interview in Paris, a French journalist told me that France couldn’t grasp the idea of an MFA. Especially an MFA in fiction writing. I asked about the French equivalent. The reporter shrugged as if the answer were obvious. He said, “If you want to learn from an established author you fuck them!” He said the older teaches the younger, then promotes the younger writer, then bequeaths a legacy of fame on his paramour. This brings to mind Truman Capote who claims to have seduced the Classic professor Newton Arvin when Capote was 22 and Arvin was 46. Beyond high school, Capote had no formal education. As Capote put it, “Newton was my Harvard,” and in the unfinished Answered Prayers Capote depicts himself as a Lolita (Lo-He-ta?) getting his fingers sucked by the shy academic Arvin.
Christopher Isherwood began his romance with Don Bachardy when the former was 48 and the latter was 18, and that was after Isherwood had quit a relationship with Bachardy’s brother. Eyebrows were raised, but not many.
Zora Neale Huston was also charged with robbing the cradle. It seems she was arrested and the charges were dropped. But the accusations spelled the end of her glorious career.
David Foster Wallace had a torrid fling with the much older Alice Turner, the legendary fiction editor for Playboy. Biographers say the pair went at it for hours in Wallace’s college dorm room.
In the case of McCarthy, it seems that many people knew of the situation but helped keep it secret. Much like the case of a former Oregon governor whose affair with a teenage babysitter was an open secret among the media and politicians for decades.
How do these things stay buried for so long?
“If this is your first night at fight club, you have to jump naked from a pile of money.”
Looking for protege. Serious inquiries only.