I Let A Song Go Out Of My Heart

The Wednesday night before Thanksgiving in Dallas was a warm one, residual summer in the night air's humidity. Driving west along a trolley-line narrow strip of Dallas thoroughfare known locally as Miracle Mile with the vents open and the widows down halfway, I tell myself this is what California must feel like against your skin and in your nostrils. Autumn isn't autumn there, really, it's just another degree of sunburn. My god, it honestly was almost as if I were a bumpkin wheel-barrowing my holiday in Hollywood. The Inwood theater (and lounge) is one of the very few old-fashioned cinemas still screening films in town. No joke; right now, the "I" and the "W" in the deco script on its up-jutting marquee don't light, so, actually, the " N OOD" theater is a towering square of white brick. It has real neon tubing and ersatz terra-cotta tile filling the foyer where there's a single, cramped ticket booth, the concession stand still sells Milk Duds and hot dogs wizening under a heat-lamp and the people behind the counter will give you a funny look if you ask for a Caramel Macchiato Latte (venti), and a nappy velvet rope separating the up and down lanes on the winding staircase that leads up to the converted balcony. It is only appropriate that Francis Ford Coppola's musical experiment One From The Heart, photographed by Vittorio Storaro and featuring a score composed and performed by Tom Waits, should be revived after more than 20 years of critical dismissal and popular neglect at the Inwood. Walking toward the warm, spectral glow of its wide entrance from a parking lot gerrymandered into long parallels of "Compact Car Only" districts and past a proliferation of surrounding strip mall shops (The Gap, an up-scale ice cream emporium, a major chain book store), obdurate in their offensiveness, the Inwood appears to be nothing but a persistent mirage, a facade, a crumbling leftover of back-lot architecture of which its parent studio -- in this case, the dream factory is the affluent Highland Park neighborhood that nestles against the southern edge of Miracle Mile -- has never divested itself.

The coming attractions for this re-release of One From The Heart worked, and worked very well, on me. The film I had paid to see 3 weeks before (Claude Chabrol's Flower of Evil) ending up being a disappointment, and I was surprised at how the unfettered tawdriness and romanticism of what I saw of the Coppola feature stayed with me. I think the allure of pure style must be that it is so easy to enter. Pure style, and One From The Heart is certainly that, comes with a price of admission, but, however inflated that price may be, at least you know the cost upfront, and you know how and who to pay. Staring into a barroom mirror under a red light that, in reflecting off his face, effaces nearly all the lines on his face, a man flips a cigarette into his mouth, proving to himself that he is still capable of the cool. A woman in a frowzy gray silk slip blows her bangs out of her face and teeters on her high heels towards the telephone and a call she really can't live with herself for making; the lighting fades, and suddenly she is pushed back into silhouette while a man in the foreground, in his own abandoned apartment, makes a similar phone call. A long 35mm camera glissando follows the pavement in front of a diner as tumbleweeds and prostitutes cross in the opposite direction. A tango performed by a man in a tight tuxedo and a woman in a tighter red dress. Old clothes, old furniture, old cars, old brand-names, old images... For someone like me, old America, America as it "used to be" isn't really to be found in Norman Rockwell and Irving Berlin, or even recreations of what happened at Bull Run or in the paranoia that consumed Brockden Brown’s Theodore Wieland and Poe’s A. Gordon Pym, but in personal gestures torn, like a page from a phone directory, from an older life that moved at a different rate of upheaval; in domestic dimensions -- the recess of a closet, the height of a kitchen ceiling, the width of doorways -- I feel much more than I can measure; in everyday accoutrements more pointlessly solid than they need to be; in modes of verbal articulation that refresh one's faith that the truth can be both simple and decent; and in dreams of urban mobility that long ago rode the elevator all the way to the penthouse of public domain. Nostalgia is a form of transcendence: I'm not committed to this idea because I'm not comfortable with all its implications, but my own faculties of remembering inform me that it is so.

I could want to live in One From The Heart's make-believe Las Vegas. Compositionally, the film is so strong that I have to forgive the lapses in pacing and absence of anything resembling comic deftness. The lighting is not necessarily psychologically incisive in its deployment of reds, greens and blues, but it is ingenious. And the blocking -- yep, the situation of actors in a consciously theatrical space -- is, for lack of a better term, "beautiful", visually uniting characters separated in time and space and heart, thus rendering their separation that much more poignant. At the very heart of the narrative, each romantic lead, looking to meet their respective one-night stands now that they themselves have called it quits, wanders the Vegas strip, just eluding one another in real time, not because the editor has inserted a missed opportunity in post-production. In a prepared statement on the film's production, Coppola speaks about wanting to try and capture the immediacy of a live dramatic performance such as used to be discoverable on television in the 1950's while still allowing recourse to "the elements of montage and mise-en-scène". So the male and female lead would appear to be across town from one another, their affection thwarted by pettiness and unthinking neediness, yet the only thing actually dividing them is a translucent curtain that dissolves as the director cues between lighting schemes. Every defined edge on the strip is a neon tube. Frannie and Hank share a Spanish-style, semi-crappy love-nest, holes in the plaster, bottles and ashtrays everywhere. Hank retreats to a lavish junkyard where cars and old casino signs are embedded in the sand like the gigantic busts of disowned pharaohs, defaced by erosion, when he needs a place "to think". I could hand myself over to full-time captivity in this world, partly because I already surrendered to a certain extent a long time ago. But even in 1982 that city was being renovated out of existence. The female lead in the film creates window displays for a travel agent based in the city's downtown, as if Vegas were as much a place from which to escape as it were a place to which to escape. Advertising bargain vacations with a cardboard Empire State Building and plastic tropical flora (the color of the sky is all wrong for Bora Bora, though, according to one character), these treatments are more that just a commentary on the self-conscious movie-ness of the identities the story's players want for themselves. One From The Heart is prescient, in miniature, of what Las Vegas would become, with its new theme casinos that create simulacra of other cities. Audiences in 2003 and 2004 may feel a very different pang upon seeing this film again, one for the lost innocence of lost vice.

Hank is played by Frederic Forest, and Frannie by Terri Garr, two actors who possess an unaffected "naturalness". Neither one is "leading", matinee idol, material; both have character actor looks and, more significantly, chops. Also, both can dance, as can Raul Julia and Natasha Kinski, who also play love interests. So that these actors also have to dexterous to the extent that they can enact Coppola's mildly screwball paeans to humdrum living such as the always-vain attempt to carry all your groceries from the car into the house in one trip. Yet Garr, Forest, et. al. also have to be alluring enough to render the flashes of nudity in the anniversary night love scenes that make up the film's prologue non-exploitative. These scenes proposition a titillation that is never fulfilled by later love scenes, thus endowing those scenes, even the one which just cut away once the kisses move to the throat, all that more fantasy-like. Hank and Frannie, though we learn very little about them in 100 (give or take) minutes, are very real examples of a man and a woman. Hank and Frannie are downright inarticulate about how they feel, but, ultimately, their feelings for one another do not fail. Unless, of course, you believe that emotions aren't fully felt, lived through, engaged until they are articulated... Hank and Frannie love one another, annoy one another, hurt one another in that perverse way human beings are often hurting one another, in order to strengthen their bond. Sitting out here in the audience, I can believe that these plain folks -- plain underneath the make-up and wardrobe and soundtrack -- can have the kind of Technicolor fantasies that come from the mind of a film-maker as skilled as Coppola precisely because, like me, their realities are otherwise ruptured by drabness and they require them. Why else would I be sitting in this theater, paying close attention to a film as vexing as this one can be? Oh, I suppose I might divert you with some verbiage that leads you to think I'm a cinéaste, but if you bother to peek behind this written persona, you'll find a lonely man marooned in the flatlands that lie between the peaks and valleys of failed relationships.

Only find my eyes in the dark so you can catch a glimpse of what it is I deliberately make them see. One From The Heart, conventional as its story is, LOOKS amazing. But it is how it SOUNDS that is perhaps most remarkable. Tom Waits' score is the most cinematic -- i.e., big, passionate, poetic -- aspect of the production, and therefore the part of the experience that filled me with the most nostalgic longing. This is the pre-Island Tom Waits, here working in the idiom of Small Change and Foreign Affairs for very nearly the last time -- and the last paycheck. Waits the sophisticated bum for hire, the Beatnik out of time, the bastard son of Charles Bukowski and Foster Brooks' comic drunk. His foil is the impassively pure-toned Crystal Gayle. Are these songs, several of them as bitterly funny ("Picking Up After You"; "I Beg Your Pardon") and as extravagant in their marriage of sumptuous melody and idiosyncratic imagery ("Old Boyfriends"; the main theme) anything Waits ever wrote up to this point in his career, just commentary to the action on screen? Or are they intended to be expressions we can associate with this or that character in the film? Waits' songs are so much more knowing than either Frannie or Hank, neither of whom would ever slip into the analogical synesthesia suggested by a line such as "is that a siren or a saxophone?" (I'm also sure neither one of them knows who Johnny Hodges is), go out to get a racing form (Hank is an upright blue-collar kind of guy, though he can put the drinks away), or liken loveless love to "broken bicycles... left out in the rain". Waits' lyrics, even mumbled and buried in the mix, diminish the perfunctory dialogue that has been allotted to these characters about whom we are asked to care. In some ways, Waits' fantasies are grafted uncomfortably onto Coppola's, as if all he wanted was to make his dazzling contrivances "moodier" and got much more than he bargained for. If Waits sings as Hank -- who also sings from himself in the film's climactic scene -- and Gayle for Frannie, then these voices have their genesis in the better, less cowardly, less inadequate selves buried kept in abeyance within each partner in this odd couple. Yet the film is confused and unequal. By the final reel, what began as the story of two people has really become the story of one man. There is something so American about the interpenetration of inner and outer world, or, more apt, something so American about an overwhelming conviction that one can, if only by trying hard enough, make one's inner world wholly manifest in the outer world, and that, contra, say, Kafka, this realization is self-evidently a good thing. There is an American cultural tradition that holds that desire is action, to want is to do; for Americans. There is no agnosticism regarding the essentiality of this notion in an American musical, which is assuredly what One From the Heart is.

All the world is indeed a soundstage. The songs in American musicals are the occasion for some affective explosion; the actors drops to their knees or leap around in postures of dance, throw out their arms, and, as they say, belt one out. But this is upon a stage hot as a griddle with optimism. The stage is one of those places where liberation, if not outright freedom, still seems possible. For many, this is a comforting thought. On the musical stage, people tread qualm-less in luridly plain declarations of the most common feelings. Are such feelings redeemed by the musical form alone? This is the hope with which One From The Heart would leave us, despite the fact that Waits' songs argue against the idea that expressivity is a solution to the problem of heartbreak. For, even if you believe that feelings can be fully re-covered, you also have to admit that feelings can be wasted. Some great works of art, many classic ballads from The Great American Song Book are just such needless, spectacular expenditures of emotional energy: musical equivalents of the pyrotechnic detonations in a summer blockbuster. Even if Sonny Rollins can work great art out of the sentiments shoveled thin throughout tunes like "Poor Butterfly", "How Are Things In Glocca Morra?", "We Kiss In A Shadow" or "Cabin In The Sky".

But, to have a surfeit of feelings that will not be abridged, synopsized, or done with -- resolved into well-formedness. To feel not just one's emotions, but also to experience their origins and contingencies, and to live through the consequences that follow from the revelation of those emotions... "I wonder if he's ever really comin' back," sounds so simple, especially when sung with real yearning. A friend of mine complains about endings that do not address the “underlying issues” (his word) of what has transpired in the story all along. That’s just the nature of endings, though… isn’t it? The devil in my mind advocates as much, but I can’t always be so contrary, not when I’m sitting in the dark, motionless but not unmoved, watching a dark blue curtain being drawn over a gravid moon. Will the person I was for the four-and-a-half years of my last serious romantic relationship ever come home? Can he even find his way home? If I cry out loud enough, if I reach for the rafters, will he hear and follow the sound of my voice? The last romantic chord of Waits’ title theme dims… Honestly, I don't want that person to find me; I'm better off without him.
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~Joe Milazzo