The Phrenological Journal & Haunted Typebox Blog

Elegy, we’re told in the ending credits, is based on a Philip Roth novel called The Dying Animal. I haven’t read the novel, but I think the title is more apt and more honest than the one chosen for the cinematic adaptation. I suppose the producers thought that Roth’s title wasn’t marketable. Or that it might be too revealing of the story’s unexamined truth. Elegy is one of the most offensive and misogynist films I’ve seen in some time, made all the more so by its constant insistence on its own substance. It’s ironic that a film that chooses as its protagonist a man who deconstructs texts should be so unaware of its own subtext. Scrawling Roland Barthes across a blackboard as the film opens, Kingsley’s character namechecks the philosopher but leaves him there.

Not to ruin any surprises, but Kingsley seduces Cruz. They have great sex. He plays the jackass and then she disappears. Kingsley needs redemption for his whole life. His best friend dies, but that’s not quite enough. Kingsley must be redeemed by Cruz; she reappears stricken with breast cancer, asking him to redeem her body. That’s all he can redeem with her because that’s all she’s allowed: sickness and sex, a body that’s meant to be used (not just by Kingsley, but by us too). Sure, Kingsley’s friend (played predictably by Dennis Hopper in his perpetual role as philosopher) says that we never see beautiful women, never really see them. Except that film seems to want us to see her. In particular, it wants us to see her as a catalyst of change, as a turning point for Kingsley. Her body exists in the film as a kind of object lesson, her sickness a gift for the brooding Kingsley.

This wouldn’t be offensive if it was in some sense the film’s subject. But the film is less interested in examining the role of the female body as object of the erotic and morbid male imagination, then it is in giving Kingsley something to cry over, something to rise above. Instead her cancer is deus ex machina for his transformation. In essence her cancer never has a thing to do with her, but everything to do with him. The death narrative is just a sign for a kind of emotional connection that it never really earns. And Cruz is never allowed to get beyond the object. She’s a sex symbol in Act I, and even less at the end.

“…and that the pages that are heavy with words shall be bent in and over him, so that he is engulfed in the sere Text…”

Titus is literally in the text, wrapped in an ancient tome for his christening. I too am in the text. In Mervyn Peake’s “Titus Groan.” And for the first time in sometime I am in a text that exists outside of other texts.

Engulfed as I have been in the 16th and 17th centuries, I’ve been in a world of referants. Quixote reads the books of chivalry, Pentagruel quotes the works of Erasmus, and Hamlet references the plays of Johnson. The world of Gormenghast is another matter: time-less, place-less, it brings its own library of works, it’s own literary legacy, and the author of all is Peake. Gormenghast seems to even have it’s own religion, though one based more on archaic secular tradition than any deity. So that even the word christening feels odd when broken into its component parts. For in this world, there was no Christ. No, this is a world without Shakespeare (poor and as unthinkable as that would be). And yet it isn’t. Pyke is not an author without Shakespeare, nor without the Bible.

This is not a profound revelation. And Pyke not the first author to invent his own library to forsake all others. But as a reader it’s a startling discovery to make.