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Queen of the Desert dir. Werner Herzog 128 minutes
"I get very lonely," James Franco explains early on in Queen of the Desert. Then there is this odd scene where Nicole Kidman towers over her cousin (Holly Earl) like a giant. One of the weirdest scenes in movies follows; it is how you know this is a Werner Herzog production. Nicole manhandles the poor woman and kisses her on the forehead like she is a little baby.
The film launches into Nicole's voiceover of a letter to her father. She explains to him that James Franco is always there when you want him, and never when you don't. If only that were true.
As he enters middle age Franco has adopted this muted seriousness that is completely amusing but also transparent. It screams, "I am acting! Isn't this vaguely reminsicent of Robert Mitchum or something, I don't know LOL!"
That night Franco performs a magic trick for Nicole. For some reason as he is doing this, he starts whispering. It is daytime we see James next, and he is still talking in a soft tone of voice. You get the sense that Nicole shares a lot of qualities with his mother.
This all takes place in the desert. James kisses her in the desert outside Tehran. She tastes like dandelions and sour milk, in the desert.
Eventually he asks her to marry him, upsetting her family greatly, presumably because they don't view James Franco as being particularly reliable. Queen of the Desert has a roundly mediocre score accompanying these events, but what makes it truly intolerable is just how much of it there is. "I am in love with your smile," James explains, and then like ten minutes later he throws himself off a cliff.
Nicole takes this about as well as you would expect. She replaces James Franco with Damian Lewis, who is a major upgrade in pretty much every way. Unlike the vast majority of men, Lewis appears a lot more youthful when he has facial hair. One man wants to look old and looks too young. One man wants to look young and looks young.
Damian Lewis' eyes are soulful, maybe too soulful? He should just do his character from Billions in every movie, since Queen of the Desert can't possibly take its story the least bit seriously. Herzog's gift is turning reality into a surreal fantasy, but there is nothing interesting in the story of Gertrude Bell that he really understands, so it is all just molting, begging and staring.
Lewis doesn't do much more than stroke Nicole's hair. He says he wants to be with her, but he tells her his wife would commit suicide if he ever left. Gertrude seems sad but maybe not as depressed as she might otherwise have been. She was guilty of love once, but never again.
Queen of the Desert doesn't get good until we come to the most amusing casting of time: Robert Pattinson as T.E. Lawrence. Since Lawrence was gay or asexual, his charisma with Nicole is not much at all. "I'm not sure the right man for you has been born yet," he tells her, in an accent so bad it would be laughable if Pattinson did not have look of a sad, wounded puppy on his face. You want to slap the shit out of it.
"I'm under you of course," Lawrence tells Nicole, even though this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, she doesn't even speak the language and she is absolutely boy-crazy, how would she even have time for diplomatic relations. The score changes to from ten percent cultural appropriation to one hundred percent; all the Arab characters stand around in worship of Nicole Kidman. "You were great in Far and Away!" they scream over the din of their camels.
Lawrence has his picture taken with some really adorable lion cubs and Winston Churchill. It is made evident that the reason all these people are in the middle east is because they find England absolutely stifling. The last line of Queen of the Desert is an Arab king saying, "You know, she really is the unofficial Queen of the Desert" and then some text comes on the screen, like there is more information that will supplement our understanding of where Nicole Kidman is in her life now. We know everything we need to by that time.
Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of his writing in these pages here.
As for all your latest Mayan discoveries and poems, I want to hear every word of it if you want to transmit, or tell when we meet, but don't expect me to get excited by anything anymore.
The cultish obsession over Jack Kerouac, and to a lesser extent, Allen Ginsberg, has always been somewhat repulsive to me. Along with their revolting friend William Burroughs, the two shared an undeniable talent for writing, however unshapen and maladrous it was at times. Although Burroughs was the most talented of the three, they all wrote important but flawed works that undeniably captivated a great number of people.
The recently released letters of Kerouac and Ginsberg, edited in a spare and mysterious fashion by Bill Morgan and David Stanford, only reinforce this view. For many writers, the details of their biographies end up overshadowing the work itself. Since the work of Jack Kerouac consisted of a lengthy exaggeration of his real life that cast it in a more appealing light, this was never much of a problem. The fact that he ignored his biological daughter and every wife he had, drank himself to death, and was largely detested by many of the people he considered his friends moves out of focus.
Yet there is a redemptive quality about two men so desperate to become famous or rich through their writing that they would resort to any kind of behavior. As their letters make clear, much of the time Ginsberg and Kerouac were repairing conflict caused by carelessness or lack of sobriety. They often set friends against each other. Once Kerouac intentionally told William Burroughs that Allen wanted him to move to San Francisco and live with him, when that was the last thing Ginsberg wanted. He did such things out of malice and he did them often.
After getting discharged from the Navy for basically making an ass of himself, Kerouac married a rich girl, Edie Parker, because she could afford to bail him out of prison. He had been arrested for his role as an accessory to Lucien Carr's murder of his psychotic former gym teacher David Kammerer (Kammerer had once tried to hang Kerouac's cat). Parker was only one of the people who could tolerate his abusive, drunken phone calls, and she received them long into Jack's golden years after their marriage was annulled in 1952. Onward spiralled Kerouac's vagabond life, for he never was very good at holding a regular job despite how often his friends endeavored to secure paying work for him.
His breakthrough came with On the Road, a novel whose style he pretty much stole from one piece by Neal Cassady. These letters point out how ironic this is, because both Ginsberg and Kerouac, but especially Kerouac, are paranoid about other writers thefting their ideas. This was a problem only in the sense that they made it one. A sense of Jack's incredible ego is present in this early letter to Ginsberg:
August 17th, 1945
Mon garcon,
Yes, my friend, I long to be a proud possessor of a yiddishe kopfe's head. There is a head which senses the only true values: Returning from the summer camp last week, I had occasion to sit next to a gentleman of Yiddishe kopfe material. He was about fifty. I was reading The Counterfeiters — (it was a gesture, I must confess) — when my companion reached over and took the book out of my hands. Needless to say I was pleased by his informality. "Ah very good book!" he said, prodding me with his finger. "Ah very valuable book!"
"Yes? You like it?"
Nodding, he thereupon opened the book (whilst I relaxed in anticipation of a treatise on the choicer scenes) and removed the jacket. The jacket he examined very carefully, smoothing it lovingly with his sensual fingers. Then he bent the book back until the binding groaned, and examined that for a while. Finally, he turned the book upside down and peered like a watchmaker at the cover, at the gold paint, and then at the very pages themselves! These he felt between his fingers, and sighed. I said, "Do you want to read it? If you like you can. I've some other books here in my bag."
"Oh," he said, "you sell books."
"No — but I have some with me." I reached down and produced Plato's Republic. He immediately took it from my hand and presto!, with quick unerring judgment, with yiddishe kopfe foresight, with a sad, yet somehow shrewd smile — he handed it back to me. He tapped the book as it lay in my hand and shook his head. "Not so good, not so good."
So I went on with Plato while he, perhaps improperly, but certainly without conscious reprehensibility, continued to sigh over, and fondle, our good friend André Gide.
Bill in town. "Surrender night" found us reunited. We went out with Jack and Eileen. Bill and I didn't talk much. There was much drinking and charming madness, though I'm sure it didn't charm Bill. In the end he and I were alone trying to pick up women. He was wearing a Panama hat and something about his appearance must surely have had something to do with our failure to find women... As he stood on Times Square, one had the feeling that he surveyed not a sea of heads but a vast field of poppies "as far as the eye can see." Or maybe he looked like Lucifer's emissary, charge d'affaire de l'Enfer himself, and passer-by women caught a flash of red lining inside his coat. This is all nonsense of course. It was a night for servicemen, not for a Marijuana Tycoon, sober, and a hoodlum, drunk. After Bill went home, I went to Eileen's and laid her while Jack slumbered beside us.
Bill is going to join you at Sheepshead! You may not abandon your strenuous efforts to adjust yourself, for Bill is going to approach you and cry, "SNOOPY! When did you get out? DID YOU BEAT THAT INDECENT EXPOSE RAP IN CHI??"
I suggested he approach you and say, "SNICKERS! How CHARMING! WHERE have you been, YOU ELUSIVE THING!" — But Bill decided it wouldn't be in the best interests of either one of you.
I'll see Bill tomorrow and hope to talk things over with him.
When you write letters to me, try not to be sophomoric and moribund about your criticism of Jean et son weltanshauung. A little more finesse, please, or if possible, a dash of humour. Some of the cracks you make at PM-ish if anything; and you know, not at all in keeping with one's laborious tendings towards perfect Lucienism. He would be satirical, mon ami, but never ponderous and paranoiac. You "question the consciousness and validity of gestures." Never would you subscribe to "Thomas Wolfish fiery rejection and romantic disapproval." It pains me, my friend, it pains me. Perhaps you judge me too harshly, especially with reference to my latest goyesha kopfe "fiery rejection" at the summer camp, for you see, I was a busboy, and busboys live on tips, and tips must be substantial in order to provide for the livelihood of goyesha kopfe busboys who read Thomas Wolfe, only, you see mon vieux, in this melancholy instance, the guests at the camp were 100% middleclass yiddish kopfe, and after all, one has to make a living you know, so, with romantic disapproval, I sallied forth from there, and came away with Byronic dignity — a gesture, I fear, that meets with your unromantic disapproval, but which was, after all, grounded in the strictest urgency of reality, unless it be that I flatter myself, in which case I certainly deserve all the mild censure, the pity, and the sympathy which you have always held in reserve for me at crucial moments.
Happy cauchemars!
Your affectionate monster,
Jean
When they first met, Ginsberg confessed his crush on Jack, and the older man groaned — how often he had to tolerate the tiresome advances of young Columbia students!
Above all, the two thought they themselves twice the writers that they were in reality. What they really managed to be was prolific. Kerouac produced manuscripts of unending length that no editor was prepared to tolerate. His early manuscripts are so bad it is astonishing that they were published even after he had become famous. In comparison, young Ginsberg comes across far better, his life redemptive only because of the utter callousness of his former associates. He could be destructive, though, simply a note less destructive than his friend. He had sex with a woman for the first time at the age of twenty-four, when he penned the following abridged American Psycho-esque recap of the incident to his correspondent.
July 8, 1950
Dearest Jack:
If you are in any ennui or doldrums, lift up your heart, there IS something new under the sun. I have started into a new season, choosing women as my theme. I love Helen Parker, and she loves me, as far as the feeble efforts to understanding of three days spent with her in Provincetown can discover. Many of my fears and imaginations and dun rags fell from me after the first night I slept with her, when we understood that we wanted each other and began a love affair, with all trimmings of Eros and memory and nearly impossible transportation problems.
She is very great, every way — at last a beautiful, intelligent woman who has been around and bears the scars of every type of knowledge and yet struggles with the serpent knowing full well the loneliness of being left with the apple of knowledge and the snake only. We talk and talk, I entertain her in a grand manner with my best groomed Hungarian manner, and I play Levinsky-on-the-trollycar, or mad hipster with cosmic vibrations, and then, O wonder, I am like myself, and we talk on seriously and intimately without irony about all sorts of subjects, from the most obscure metaphysical through a gamut to the natural self; then we screw, and I am all man and full of love, and then we smoke and talk some more, and sleep, and get up and eat, etc.
The first days after I lost my cherry — does everybody feel like that? I wandered around in the most benign and courteous stupor of delight at the perfection of nature; I felt the ease and relief of knowledge that all the maddening walls of Heaven were finally down, that all my olden awking corridors were traveled out of, that all my queerness was a camp, unnecessary, morbid, so lacking in completion and sharing of love as to be almost as bad as impotence and celibacy, which it practically was, anyway. And the fantasies I began having about all sorts of girls, for the first time freely and with the knowledge that they were satisfiable.
Ah, Jack, I always said that I would be a great lover some day. I am, I am at last. My lady is so fine that none compare. And how can she resist me? I'm old, I'm full of love, when I'm aroused I'm like a veritable bull of tenderness; I have no pride of heart, I know all about all worlds, I''m antipoetic, I'm a labor leader, I'm a madman, I'm a man, I'm a man, I've got a cock. And I have no illusions, and like a virgin I have all of them, I'm wise, I'm simple. And she, she's a great old woman with a beautiful face and a perfect fair body that everybody in the neighborhood calls a whore. She's so sharp, and she never makes me shudder. She doesn't want war, she wants love.
Apparently I have quite respectable precedents — she was engaged to Dos Passos for over a year, he took her and kids to Cuba then, she lunched with Hemingway, knows all kinds of literary people. She was also engaged awhile and helped midwife Thomas Heggen with Mister Roberts; he later suicided (he-he!) But none, she says, compare to me. That's what a woman is for, to make you feel good, and vice versa.
Then her children, they are the most knocked out pair of flaming red haired angelic, wise young boys (age 5 and 10) I ever saw. They need a father, which alas (this is the crux of practical problems) I am sure I cannot be, for financial and other unhappy reasons, such as not wanting to get stuck permanently with the situation.
Allen
As wanderlust possessed both of them at different times, Ginsberg wrote his friend faithfully even when Jack's letters were slow in coming or gruff in their nature of reply. The two constantly apologized to each other like constant verbal make-up sex, a situation borne of Ginsberg's need for reassurance and Jack's world record self-centeredness. Kerouac's letter here is along those lines.
January 13th, 1950
Dear Allen:
Tonight while walking on the waterfront in the angelic streets I suddenly wanted to tell you how wonderful I think you are. Please don't dislike me. What is the mystery of the world? Nobody knows they're angels. God's angels are ravishing and fooling me. I saw a whore and an old man in a lunchcart, and God — their faces! I wondered what God was up to. In the subway I almost jumped up to yell, "What was that for? What's going on up there? What do you mean by that?" Jesus, Allen, life ain't worth the candle, we all know it, and almost everything is wrong, but there's nothing we can do about it, and living is heaven.
Well, here we are in heaven. This is what heaven is like. Also in the subway I suddenly shuddered, for a crack had opened, like cracks open in the ground when there's an earthquake, only this crack opened in the air, and I saw pits. I was suddenly no longer an angel, but a shuddering devil.
Mainly, I wanted to tell you how dearly I regard your soul, and value your existence, and wish for your recognition of my heart's desire, in short, I admire and love you and consider you a great man always. Let me boast a moment in order to give value to this, for what good is regard from a dunce, a spook, an elephant or a chocolate drop: My English editor, (ain't met him yet) sent G. [Giroux] a postcard showing picture of the antique Counting House in their firm, and said, "Place looks exactly like it did when we published Goldsmith & Johnson. Please tell Kerouac is in good company, and what is more, is worthy of it."
A beat American kid from a milltown, me, is now side by side with Goldsmith & Johnson. Isn't it strange historically? if not actually? Let us get on with the mystery of the world.
For instance, why do I write you this note in spite of the fact that I'll see you tomorrow night? – and live in the same city with you. Why is everybody like Sebastian [Sampas] in the record, stammering, stumbling at the end, fainter and fainter with all the scratching, saying, "So long, Jack old boy ... take it easy, please ... goodbye ... old friend ... see you soon, I guess ... goodbye ... take care of yourself, now ... farewell ... I guess ... 'bye ... so long ... goodbye old man." Most people spend their lives saying that to their best friends; they're always putting on their coats and leaving, and saying goodnight, and going down the street, and turning to wave a last time... Where they go?
Let me tell you what the Archangel is going to do. At a big Walter Adams party, or a Cannastra party, the Archangel is suddenly going to appear in a blinding flash of white light, among actual waterfalls of honey-light also, and everybody will keep still while the Archangel, with its voice, speaks. We will see, hear, and shudder. Behind the archangel we will see that Einstein is all wrong about enclosed space ... there will be endless space, infinities of Celestial Vine, and all the gores of the mires below, and the joyful singing of angels mingling with the shudders of devils. We'll see that everything exists. For the first time we'll realize that it's all alive, like baby turtles, and moves in the middle of the night at a party ... and the archangel is going to tell us off. Then clouds of cherubs will fall, mingled with satyrs and whatnots and spooks. If we were not haunted by the mystery of the world, we wouldn't realize nothing.
Jack
They were both great at making each other feel like a genius, and Ginsberg didn't reserve this authorial ability for his pal Jack only. Moreover, he was either hopeless politic about his friend's misadventures or willing to overlook them for love. In this abridged November 1950 letter to Neal Cassady that recounts Jack at his improvisatory worst, Ginsberg reveals a lot about how these artists view everyone else, especially women.
Dear Neal:
I got home today from Jack's wedding to a girl named Joan Haverty, which took place last night at 6 followed by a big party at Cannastra's pad which she leased and Jack is now master of — a big quiet party which began around 7, with the arrival of the wedding party from the Judge's apartment, several blocks away, where the ceremonies took place. Claude and I stood as best men, fumbled around in our waistcoats for the ring, kissed the bride, who's a tall dumb dark-haired girl just made for Jack. Not dumb, really, since she's "sensitive," and troubled (trying to be on own from family in big city at age 20) and has had men (Cannastra, once for a short season), but full of a kind of self-effacing naivete, makes dresses as vocation; but I don't know her well, but in my opinion (strictly between you and me as I am on hands off policy as regards interference with process of other's free cherce) she can't compare with Jack in largeness of spirit and so I don't know what she can give him except stability of sex life, housekeeping, and silent, probably sympathetic company while he's sitting around, and children.
He has been strangely out of town the last several months, in retirement and brooding on T alone, and when he rejoined N.Y. society he seemed to me to be more settled in reality, more sober. He talked in a more disillusioned way — not making a fetish of it as I do — but like a post 20's survivor. F. Scott Fitzgerald after the party of ego was over. Wondering what to do in the real world of men and women who were also alive and facing same problems and just as deserving of grace from above as he, tho there is no grace accorded anyone special. So, he seemed come down more than ever.
Meanwhile, he's seeing this Rayanna chick (who I had my hands on till I stepped out for Jack as she is too old for me) (but who I intend to see again unless I get attached before which I doubt), and she's sharp, a real N.Y. "on the town" pro type, but all of sudden appears on the horn this Joan, in C's pad, making a culturish shrine of it (on the pretext that they had been great lovers though he thought she was an insufferable prig), next door to Claude's on 21st St.
So, with Claude's encouragement, and prodding, I start moving in on her leaving notes at her door, making meets, etc in the hope of sleeping with her and ultimately taking over pad with her, also under impression she has money, which she hasn't. But when time comes, fuck up by being out of self-control, overbearing, and impatient with her sentimentalized version of self, not wanting anything but "friendship" with men folk wanting to be left alone and keep shrine and have big parties.
Anyway, I never figure her or myself out in relation to her, and return from field depressed. Next thing I know Jack ran into her, two weeks ago, slept and stayed on, decided to marry, and did yesterday. This is a very sketchy account, not even an outline, but I am just jotting down distorted recollections.
The main things I see is this increased wariness and caution in life of Jack, and this mad marriage, they hardly know each other. But maybe it will all work out for the rest of his life.
Allen
It is no particular surprise that the men who believed themselves part of the counterculture had the exact same attitudes towards women evident in the culture at large. Kerouac would leave his wife while she was pregnant, and it took eight years to get him to admit he had a daughter, and he ignored her after that. In same ways, their misogyny was even worse — for if they had learned anything for the expedient reading they pursued to accompany their art, it should have been a healthy respect for women. Kerouac's ex-wife Joan Haverty penned a 1961 article for Confidential magazine titled "My Ex-Husband, Jack Kerouac, Is An Ingrate."
joan haverty kerouacThen again, Ginsberg's 1952 letter to Neal Cassady shows he wasn't exactly an admirer of Ms. Eliot or Ms. Woolf. Naturally, it is all male:
Rob Jeffries and Jeffrey Friedman's light ode to Ginsberg, Howl, hit theaters for a limited run last month. It is hagiography of the first order. The film's bizarre screensaver renditions of some of Ginsberg's most mediocre poetry are dreadfully dull. Jon Hamm plays Lawrence Ferlinghetti's lawyer and he does his entire character from 30 Rock for no discernible reason. The film actually does flashbacks in black and white. (Weirdly, it's only a flashback from about ten years earlier.) Scenes shot in Central Park practically include cell phones. At 85 minutes long, it's about as satisfying as the Shrek Christmas special. David Edelstein must have had his eyes closed.
Then again, James Franco's constant reading of "Howl" that occurs throughout the film draws attention to the poem for all the wrong reasons. Keroauc gave "Howl" its title, and the only good part of it. Completely unmusical, it is only tolerable in comparison to Keroauc's writing, the best of which is probably his rambling poetry. As Kenneth Rexroth once put it in a review of The Subterraneans, "This book is about jazz and Negroes, two things Jack knows nothing about."
It's obvious from the poem "Howl" if not the film that the period Ginsberg referred to is a fantasy. He pretended to mythologize it, but it remained in actuality full of many horrors. The romance of the pre-civil rights era is mostly illusory. At the end of it, you're just a fat poet with a beard with a lifetime to apologize for the person you nearly were. The real pleasures had to be the literary ones, for there existed no others.
Then again, it was actually better to be Kerouac, for he could never have repented for the man he was in life, but in death his evident downside is so effortlessly ignored.
March 4, 1955
Dear Allen:
Enclosed is a letter for Bill I want you to mail because I actually cannot afford overseas stamp and anyway write to him. Here is my itinerary:
1. At present in South, babysitting and washing dishes for family, writing great new book already half-finished, about Buddha. WAKE UP
2. In May go to N.Y. and pick up 100 pounds of manuscripts and mother and bring down to her, in truck (brother's)
3. In July hitch and freight hop to Texas with pack and sleeping bag and sutras, for uninterrupted Samadhis —
4. Two months in desert
5. S.P. Zipper to Frisco in September — Now for Krissakes don't leave before I get there
6. November back to South via freights
7. Xmas work for Paris and Tangiers $ (for brother-in-law) (for boat and Arab bread)
8. Europe in '56 (Africa...India bus...)
I wrote to Cowley. If everything you say is true about Rexroth, etc., please write by letters to Sterling Lord (my agent) and tell him score, I will hip him about you. Has he mailed you Sax yet? I told him to. (All this Cowley talk and never any loot.)
After Buddhist handbook now, I shall write a huge Visions of Bill next, like Visions of Neal (don't tell him, please remember not to tell him, it will spoil great spontaneous studies of him.)
No typewriter so that ends my big dharma letters for awhile. Some of the Dharma is now over 200 pages and taking shape as a great valuable took in itself. I haven't even started writing. Visions of Bill will be very wild and greater than Tristram Shandy. I intend to be the greatest writer in the world and then in the name of Buddha I shall convert thousands, maybe millions: "Ye shall be Buddhas, rejoice!"
I've realized something utterly strange and yet common, I think I've experienced the deep turning about. At present I am completely happy and feel completely free, I love everybody and intend to go on doing so, I know that I am an imaginary blossom and so is my literary life and my literary accomplishments are so many useless imaginary blossoms. Reality isn't images. But I do things anyhow because I am free from self, free from delusion, free from anger, I love everyone equally, as equally empty and equally coming Buddhas. I have been having long wild samadhis in the ink black woods at midnight on a bit of grass. There is no need for you to go on in a state of ignorant worry and greed for worldly pops,
Later
Jack
See you in Sept!
After he achieved notoriety, Kerouac immediately turned into a bitter old crank who despised whatever remained of a hippie generation and was as negative towards the counterculture that followed On the Road as he was to the mainstream culture when it obstructed his aim of becoming rich and famous. He resisted the changing technologies of the period; unsurprisingly, he was unable to write outside of his time. During a bizarre appearance on William F. Buckley's Firing Line in which he was clearly plastered, Kerouac reveals himself.
He was forty-six years old, and he looks broken. This is the first iteration of "What Was The Hipster?": a conversation that should have taken place before the phenomenon in question ceased to exist. The world today would be a nightmare to men like Jack Kerouac, just as the world William F. Buckley lived in was to him full of nightmarish permissiveness. This new world is open and frank, as the counterculture requested — but the resulting American mood murdered the counterculture. This country's monomaniacal, single-minded theater of ideas may be difficult to tolerate, but it is a far lesser evil than a single-minded person.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the Showtime series Dexter. He tumbls here and twitters here.
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