Be Thou My Vision

 

No idea what's going on with Van Morrison anymore.  Like most people my age I loved his early work ("Tupelo Honey," "Brown-Eyed Girl," "Into the Mystic," I could go on.)  That album cover above is my favorite of his albums.  His rendition of "Be Thou My Vision" is masterful (performed with the Chieftans, IIRC), as far as I'm concerned.

YMMV, of course.  I'm not a music critic establishing a standard Morrison's work can be measured by.  I just like what I like; it's personal taste, nothing more.

Now come reports of anti-semitism and even misogyny; in Morrison's lyrics? in his public statements?  I don't know, and I'm not all that interested.  Morrison started out as a light and happy singer of pop songs and aficionado of American jazz (this is especially clear on the album above, in his lyrics if not his music).  His music never led me to inquire into his private life, but it became clear with later albums ("Back On Top" and "What's Wrong With This Picture?" are the most recent I have, and neither of those are "recent," really) that public life (or his private one?) were leading him into darker and darker places.  Now there are allegations of misogyny, of anti-semitism, all manner of ugly things.  I can't substantiate them; I can't refute them.  If anything, I think it's the problem of living too much in the public spotlight; but I'm probably wrong about that, too, and only making excuses by saying it.

I was bored the other day, and found an '80's movie starring Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett, and Harvey Keitel on a streaming service.  It was a "Lord Grade" production (which startled me), made after Lew Grade was elevated for his contributions to....cinema?  Yeah, not really.  Not 40 years later, anyway.  I actually settled in, expecting something half-decent, as Martin Amis was credited as the screenplay writer.

Nope.  Stuck firmly in the '80's it was.  Kirk Douglas was not, by that time, a young man (he wasn't really young when he made "Paths of Glory," and this was a quarter century or so after that).  Farrah Fawcett was noticeably younger than Mr. Douglas, and part of the plot was their May/December relationship.  The setting was an undergound scientific base on a moon of Saturn (why there?  That's never explained, except they are supposedly growing plants for Earth, or trying to. And for the plot, the characters needed to be isolated.).  Anyway, comes Harvey Keitel as the new person/third wheel with a robot to take over operations and make them efficient and, more importantly, productive.  It's as threadbare a premise as it sounds, and the story immediately veers off into who gets to fuck Farrah Fawcett.

No; I'm not kidding.  But that's not the worst part of this misogynistic mess.  The worst part is Keitel's character tells Fawcett "You have a beautiful body.  May I have it?"  And he means it; as bluntly and flatly as that.  When she tells him she's "with" Kirk Douglas, Keitel reacts as if she'd just shit in the punchbowl. He tells her that on earth such a rejection is "penally antisocial".  Free love, right?

Except, of course, "free love" means the men are free to have whomever they want, whenever they want.  Yeah, it's that crude. And kept thinking of it as the incel’s paradise.

I'm sure this was considered enlightened and even "progressive" in the '80's (or a reasonable projection of what the future would offer what we now call "incels"), but I quit watching when it became clear the plot was about the robot (linked to Keitel's brain by technology because, of course) gets the hots for Fawcett, too; and who was going to get her, and who wasn't.  Keitel's character makes it clear to Fawcett's that her refusal of his constant demand for sex is unthinkable and unacceptable.  I'm not sure what Amis was going for here, but Jiminy Christmas is it bad.  I have a feeling I'd have found it slightly less offensive in the '80's than I do forty years later, but that's the point:  how much definitions of words like "misogyny" have changed.

To Keitel's character, Fawcett's refusals are grossly antisocial.  (It must have been something in the air; Woody Allen's "Sleeper" included a device couples used indiscriminately for sex, because it was supposed to be that freely available in the future.)  Today his character's expectations are simply gross, and it's not because we're all prudes compared to the libertine '80's (or '70's; the boundaries between decades aren't very chronological).  It's bluntly because the expectation that every woman should "service" any man who asks, as a social obligation, is the worst kind of misogyny (again, the "incels" spring to mind).  So was Martin Amis a misogynist then?  Or is he now?

Kinda depends on what Mr. Amis thinks of that script 40 years on, doesn't it?  I don't hold it against him, but I couldn't finish the movie because of it (it wasn't a great movie, but at some point I just couldn't stand the storyline anymore*).  

So:  has Van Morrison always been a disgusting character?  Maybe; we tend to become who we are.  Or has he become that person because of life, which injures different people in different ways?  I can't say.  I'm not trying to develop a clever argument to blunt whatever offensive things he's reportedly said.  I am willing, however, to separate his early work (which I admire) from his later work (which, as I say, I quit paying attention to 18 years ago).  Some writers, like Yeats, like Eliot, get better with age; some, like Pound, just get worse.  I still think Pound, on reflection, never got that bad; then again, he was never all that good, either; not as a poet in his own right.

Since I brought him into this, I don't have anything for or against Mr. Amis' works.  I read a few many decades gone, didn't think all that much of them.  He's certainly accomplished, and I was surprised to see his name on a science-fiction movie.  But even if his handling of female characters was less offensive than John Updike's, that film did not age well.  Maybe Van Morrison hasn't aged well, either.

It's part of the problem with demanding our "celebrities" live in the spotlight, even when all we want from them is a performance of one kind or another.

*probably the worst part is, the robot was not, as they say, anatomically correct.  It was only vaguely humanoid, in fact.  What it was going to do with the character Ms. Fawcett played is anyone's guess, and the guesses are not pretty.  If ever there was a justification for "rape culture," the plot of this film was it.