The World as Willem and Representations
by John Kendall Hawkins
A couple of years ago I read a book about Vincent van Gogh and reviewed it. I learned that being a painter was his third choice. His second choice was to be a writer. His first choice was to be a minister -- a decision he made after making a visit to the underground workplace of some miners in Berinage and feeling Christlike empathy for their plight. I almost wept while reading about it. Les Miserables is endless. And like Mickey Rourke says, playing the downtrodden poet Charles Bukowski, in Barfly, "Nobody suffers like the poor." Van Gogh charcoal-sketched many scenes from his time among the coal miners.
It's insane to think about it but van Gogh sold just one painting in his lifetime! And that, reluctantly, to a friend who admired his work and took pity on the way he lived in abject poverty, according to Mariella Guzzoni, one of his many biographers. He was given today's equivalent of $2000 for The Red Vineyard. Today, a single painting by van Gogh can go for as much as $66m at Sotheby's. Some collector buys it and stores it, or hangs it on a wall that only a few "friends" see, or lends it to a museum. Or it disappears into a vault.
Sometimes it's even worse. In The Lost Leonardo (2021), a documentary that tells of Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World), a dilapidated painting purchased at a "shady" auction house in New Orleans that is "discovered" to be a rare lost Leonardo da Vinci painting. After considerable restoration, the painting's value skyrockets and ends up sold as the most valuable painting ever at $450 million. As the IMDB storyline notes:
As its price soars, so do the questions about its authenticity: is this painting really by Leonardo da Vinci? Unravelling the hidden agendas of the richest men and the most powerful art institutions in the world, The Lost Leonardo reveals how vested interests in the Salvator Mundi are of such tremendous power that truth becomes secondary.
The painting is put in a vault, and it disappears from scrutiny, and its value is leveraged for other purposes. It's just another aesthetic object whose creative passion and genius is now under the control of someone "elite" and "refined." Savior of the World, huh?
It made me angry. I bristled for a while. Thought of the insanity of it all. Made me wonder anew how the Crown of Christ, "our savior," could ever have been purloined, dipped in gold, and ended up in the Notre Dame Cathedral. I mean, the f*cking Guy was the symbol of what's humble and pure and here He is, by way of the thorny crown, dipped in Baal juice. WTF? Is it just me that finds this peculiar, I wonder as I fire up a bone. And, imagine wanting to put a swimming pool up on the roof of Notre Dame cathedral after its restoration, as one wonk from the "elite" set proposed.
"Flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark," the Bard from Duluth observed long ago. "It's easy to see, without looking too far, that not much is really sacred." This is the effect created by a new film, Inside, starring Willem Dafoe, in a role that conjures up some of his best work in The Last Temptation of Christ, Antichrist, At Eternity's Gate, and, more recently, The Lighthouse. In this film, Dafoe acts alone in a setting that has him literally locked into a situation that requires him to survive by instinct and ingenuity. Essentially, Inside is a one-man stage play that's been filmed. Dafoe is an ideal actor for such roles, as his facial features are as complex as sin, and Dafoe seems unafraid to do things as an actor that can seem raw, crude or even ugly. In some of his roles, Dafoe can seem to be barely disguising savagery or insanity. Even his work as the Green Goblin (Spiderman) gave me the chillwillies. As Dylan says, Maybe I'm too sensitive or else I'm getting soft.
Inside was written primarily by Ben Hopkins and directed by Vasilis Katsoupis (My Friend Larry Gus, 2016). Hopkins, a Brit, directed Simon Magus (1999) and The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz (2000), and he is the author of Cathedral:a novel (2021).
Inside begins with Nemo (Latin for Nobody, which recalls Dylan's part in the film, Pat Garrett and Billy Kidd, where he answers the query, What's your name? with, Alias, followed up with the query, Alias, what? Wherein Dylan answers, Alias anything you please, which is the Dylan we all know and love or loathe today). Nemo arrives by helicopter drop at the NYC penthouse apartment of an owner who is away in Kazakhstan on a business trip and proceeds to break in to steal valuable artworks there. He deactivates the alarm. Nemo is working by walkie talkie with Number 3, who is to direct Nemo where to find the artworks. Right off the bat, the viewer is dealing with three 'nameless' characters. We hear a voice over that tells us:
When I was a kid, my teacher asked, what are the three things that I would save from my house if it were on fire. I answered: My sketchbook, my AC/DC album and my cat Groucho. I didn't mention my parents or my sister. Of course, most of the other kids did. Does that make me a bad person? My cat died, I lent that AC/DC album to a guy named Kojo and I never saw it again. But the sketchbook I kept. Cats die. Music fades. But art is for keeps.
That's right, Nemo: Life is short, and art is long. According to Hippocrates. Do no evil. Google it. Hypocrites. Make me sick in the head, as Dylan sings in Time Out of Mind.
So, what we learn from this is that Nemo is art-oriented from the get-go. Indeed, he produces. What quality or subject matter we don't yet know. But apparently he makes his living stealing artworks from collectors. A flash: One thinks of the Nazis stealing art, and the bizarre symbiosis of fascists hoarding the value of works that open up the representations of reality -- anti-fascist in energy and intention. Wagner's art, Nazi propaganda. Movies have followed this theme of theft and recovery; say, The Monuments Men. But Nemo is no Nazi. He's doing it for money, not ideology. (Per se.) But there's more.
Nemo has seven minutes to collect targeted works and get out. He zooms around the apartment collecting as many of the artworks as he can collect. He is especially after the works of Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele, in particular, a self-portrait that is worth $3m on the market. But he can't find it. Number 3 tells him to reactivate the alarm, take what he has, and get out of the apartment. As Nemo is reactivating the alarm system inside the apartment, it malfunctions and goes off. Number 3 tells Nemo that he's "on his own" and cuts communications. Doors and gates come down. The alarm is loud and rattles him. He's trapped. We note a pigeon on the balcony also gets trapped.
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