The Magic World of Orson Welles (51 page)

In looking through the archive, one is repeatedly confronted with the epistemological problem raised by Foucault: which of these things shall we define as the “works” of Orson Welles? The problem is especially vexing because most of the material is either incomplete or dependent upon something absent. For instance, we could make a good-size volume from the manuscripts of Welles's public speeches, but even though the volume would contain some incisive political commentary, it would have relatively little literary value and would do very little to explain why Welles was one of this country's most effective platform speakers. What is missing is his voice, which, with its slightly drawling transatlantic accent and its rich timbre, could make the city directory sound Shakespearian. As an actor, Welles often played men who mesmerized audiences on formal public occasions: he was Charles Foster Kane delivering an election speech; Father Mapple giving a sermon; Clarence Darrow summing up a case; and he was almost Kurtz, the antihero of
Heart of Darkness
—a man whose voice, as Joseph Conrad tells us, “rang deep to the very last.” Welles's script for the unfilmed
Heart of Darkness
project is in fact one of the most interesting documents in the Mercury archive, and it ought to be transformed into that unique twentieth-century genre, the published screenplay. Nevertheless, readers would be haunted by a desire to see the images it describes, and they would surely want to hear Welles speaking those famous last words, “The horror! The horror!”

A similar feeling of absence hovers over the play scripts and set designs of Welles's theatrical productions, such as his adaptations of
Julius Caesar
and
Native Son
. Theatrical literature, as Bertolt Brecht once noted, is always “provisional,” taking its specific form not only from movement, voice, and lighting but also from the interaction of performers and audience on a specific occasion. Once the occasion passes, the performance survives only in memory or in fragmentary records. Hence Welles's work for the stage, like that of all great theatrical personalities, has passed into the realm of mere legend. His actual productions, such as
Around the World
, are hardly less
present to us than the shows he
nearly
directed. For example,
Moby Dick Rehearsed
, the greatly admired play he staged in London in 1955, has roughly the same evidentiary status as the “oratorio” based on the same novel, which he attempted without success to produce in New York in 1947. The London play was quasi-Brechtian, but the proposed New York production, based on a script by Brainerd Duffield and a score by Bernard Herrmann, would have been Wagnerian and explicitly Freudian. According to the notes preceding its text, it was intended to pay tribute to an American author who, “driven by neurosis to create works of libidinal intensity,” had “enunciated Freudian truths in an era which made prudery a fetish.” Welles's stage presentation would “lay bare the basic poetic stuffs of the novel itself. . . . Melody, symphonic and choral, movement, dance-gesture, light and color—all would blend in patterns to kindle the spectator's latent responses.”

We can only speculate about what such an event might have been like, armed with the more permanent record of Welles's films. But the evidence of the films is also partial. As this book indicates, anyone who tries to analyze Welles's career in movies must inevitably confront questions of textual authenticity. How can we arrive at an accurate account of his intentions for
The Magnificent Ambersons
? How should the surviving footage of
It's All True
be assembled? Which is the “purer” form of
Touch of Evil
—the short version released in 1958 or the longer versions, containing a few shots by another director? Of the many versions of
Arkadin
, one of them titled
Confidential Report
, which comes closest to the design Welles had in mind?

Some of these questions have answers, but I doubt that anyone will ever respond confidently to all of them, or to the many others that are raised by Welles's unreleased or mostly incomplete pictures, such as
Don Quixote, The Deep, The Other Side of the Wind
, and
The Merchant of Venice
. Perhaps significantly, one of the obsessive images of his cinema is a room crammed with objects and figures, its crowded space distorted by a wide-angle photography that recedes into some vague horizon. In similar fashion, his career was cluttered and just beyond our grasp. Certainly he left behind a substantial body of material that ought to be restored, preserved, and exhibited. Nevertheless, his reputation will always depend to some degree on fragments and traces. Like Coleridge's unfinished poem “Kubla Khan,” his life's work denies us scholarly closure; a romantic artifact, its oneiric quality is heightened by a sense of unfulfilled possibility.

Coleridge tells us that while writing “Kubla Khan” he was interrupted by an unnamed “person from Porlock,” who knocked on the door at an inopportune moment and broke the mood of composition. Welles was beset by
a variety of less quaintly literary frustrations, most of which I have discussed in the preceding chapters. For the sake of clarity, however, I should probably emphasize that none of these frustrations had anything to do with what Charles Higham has called a “fear of completion”—an idea born of vulgar auteurism and pop psychology. The absence to which I refer is more pervasive and overdetermined, resulting partly from the evanescence of theatre itself and partly from the material and ideological conflicts of Welles's career. Let me also emphasize that I do not intend to close this book with a chapter on the death of authorship. Literary theory in the 1970s, some of it written by Foucault, taught that it does not matter who is speaking, since everyone is spoken
by
a language contract, which in turn is mediated by a social contract. Clearly, however, we do not need to adopt a textual utopianism or a romantic notion of creativity in order to insist upon what Edward Said calls the “worldliness” of discourse. Indeed we should recognize that films—like books and critical commentary—are forms of language through which real historical subjects carry on struggles for power. This idea was never lost on Welles, who attained worldwide celebrity as a result of the Mars panic and who, as we have seen, devoted many of his subsequent projects to the theme of demagoguery. From Charles Foster Kane, who declares that people will think “what I tell them to think,” to Henry V, who intends to “busy giddy minds with foreign wars,” the leading characters in Welles's films often use language as a hoax, attempting to become colonizers of consciousness. Given the possibility of such ambition, it matters very much for us to know who is speaking and toward what ends.

Welles the auteur was himself driven by a kind of will to power, signified not only in the dynamic excess of his style but also in his embattled relation with the movies and the stage. He had taken his theatrical identity from a turn-of-the-century tradition of flamboyant directors, and throughout his career he struggled to maintain that identity in the face of a changing, increasingly corporate, culture. In an important early essay titled “The Director in the Theatre Today,” published by the Theatre Education League in 1939, he wryly commented on his art, pointing out that the profession of director was relatively new to theatrical history. Even as late as the nineteenth century, he noted, drama had been virtually directorless, centered on the emotional expressiveness of a lead player:

For thousands of years the director was a stage manager. . . . When Mr. Sullivan, for instance, arrived in a town like Galway to play “Macbeth,” . . . he would arrive at the theatre at seven o'clock for a consultation with this stage manager.

“I always come in at the center for ‘They have tied me to the stake,'” Mr. Sullivan would declare. . . .” Please have Lady Macbeth when she takes the daggers away take them by the blades.”

“All right. Is there anything else?”

“No. Just have everyone else stand six feet away and do their damnedest.”

Welles recognized that the “six feet away” school, laughable as it might sound to contemporary audiences, had produced the most impressively emotional actors in Western theater. But he also recognized that in the period between the 1880s and the 1920s a new fashion had evolved, devoted to carefully designed spectacles such as the ones managed by David Belasco or Hardin Craig, or to director-centered ensembles like the ones founded by Constantin Stanislavski or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Welles remarked, “We are so proud of the fact that we don't allow these old-time stars on the stage today, we forget that their influence from the fifth row center can be much more insidious.”

For Welles, the special business of the new director was “to make his playhouse a kind of magic trick in which something quite impossible comes to be.” This credo was obviously intended to point up his interest in magicians, but it also reminds us that stage magic had evolved in the same way as theater as a whole. Turn-of-the-century performers like Howard Thurston and Georges Méliès were in fact actor/directors, their presence in the spotlight signifying their power over the entire physics of the playhouse. The Mercury Theatre was clearly indebted to this type of spectacle, becoming a mixture of magical effect, Shakespearian acting, and thirties-style political drama—everywhere designed to manifest Welles's skill as orchestrator. It mattered little whether he actually wrote the words or built the sets. “The great field of the director,” according to Welles, was “conception,” or the ability to control meaning. “The script of a play in most cases,” he claimed, “is a wandering and loosely knit affair embracing many plays. If a director is good enough he can use all these plays. . . . If he has a special point to make, he will select only one or two.” The stage setting would in turn be governed by the director's central conception. “One director, for instance, presenting a Molière comedy may decide that the whole play shows the fundamental hardness of the world . . . and so his conception of the visual element in his production leads him to erect on stage a setting of stainless steel, which he decorates with rose leaves to show a kind of hopeless beauty. . . . Such a director has a feeling about texture.” As an illustration of his own practice, Welles commented on the Mercury production of
Julius Caesar
: “I wanted to present ‘Julius Caesar' against a texture of brick, not of stone, and I wanted a color that had certain
vibrations of blue. In front of this red brick wall I wanted levels and places to act; that was my conception of the production.”

For a time Welles was able to maintain the working conditions he described in his essay on direction. According to Robert Lewis, one of the founders of the Group Theatre and the Actor's Studio, Welles's importance to American theater lay precisely in the fact that he was one of the first exponents of what we now know as “conceptual drama.” He built an image of himself as a sort of youthful Prospero, becoming the star of an acting company that somehow partook of the collectivist politics of the era while at the same presenting his own ideas of spectacle. Like Stanislavski or Meyerhold, but in his own terms, he imposed a style upon an ensemble and appropriated a body of literature to his ends. Remarkably, he even transported his company to the movies, where for three or four years it was relatively free of the studio system. In 1939, speaking before a symposium on Hollywood composed chiefly of New York academics and intellectuals, Welles announced his opposition to the film industry as it was then organized. “What I don't like about Hollywood films,” he said, “is the ‘gang' movie—and I don't mean the Dead End Kids. I mean the assembly line method of manufacturing entertainment developed in the last fifteen years or so, and I share this prejudice with practically everybody whose craft is the actual making of a movie and not just . . . the business of selling it. When too many cooks get together they find, usually, the least common denominator of dramatic interest.”

This was the typical complaint of directors against studios, but in Welles's case it was an especially insistent demand. The entire apparatus of representation in the Mercury Theatre was keyed to his idiolect, allowing his manner to become so recognizable and impressive that later in his career it could occasionally assert itself in movies where he was ostensibly nothing more than an actor. Even as late as the 1970s, when the Mercury was long since dissolved and Welles was reduced to doing magic tricks on the Johnny Carson show, the signs of his theater could still be seen in the way he presented the illusion. The movement of an assistant from point
A
to point
B
, the disposition of magical paraphernalia on the stage, the pace and tempo of the act—all of these things bore the traces of his earlier work, as if they were motivated by the same structural logic.

To borrow a witticism from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's
No Man's Land
, we might say that Welles's art was less about
jouissance
than about
puissance
. In retrospect, however, his surviving films are interesting because of the way they dramatize the futility or fakery behind most assertions of authority. In this sense his art is deeply paradoxical, born of a belated romanticism
that tends toward modern and postmodern irony. One of the signatures of his visual style is an extreme low-level shot, looking up through a wide-angle lens at a male figure who towers over us as if to assert phallic power, but at the same time the narrative context makes the character seem pathetic, ludicrous, or fascistic. Similar effects can be seen at other levels of his pictures.
Citizen Kane
, for example, perpetuates the notion of the “great man” even while it deconstructs the biographical enterprise; and
F for Fake
, which is based on material from documentaries signed by François Reichenbach, functions both as an expression of Welles's personality and as a subtle comment on the “theft” or appropriation of one person's language by another.