Where Have You Been? (33 page)

Everything thereafter is aleatory and somehow doesn't claim to be the whole story. Locke is living on the edge of his—or rather someone else's—life. His condition is exemplary rather than literal or exhaustive. He is like a crab or a snail who has moved into new premises. Not only does he not have the stamina or the curiosity to make a go of this over time—we don't see him poring over a copy of
Teach Yourself Gunrunning
—he also finds (it comes with the territory) that he has involuntarily acquired a fresh set of enemies. He has to keep on the move, but even that is no guarantee of anything. The film is an interval. It is only a longer version of one shot of the rearview mirror, looking down a long tree-lined avenue, waiting for the police car to come into view. Watching it, we feel an equal threat from Locke's wife and boss, hunting for him, as from the African government's heavies. There is no difference between hostile and benign. It is less like suspense than waiting. He has stepped into another life, from which, one way or another, he is certain to be expelled. The film is called
The Passenger—
which is strange in itself, as Locke is mostly at the wheel, and one can't seriously claim it's about Schneider, the passenger therefore already is a sort of metaphor and a metaphysical label—but anyway, it might as well have been called
The Lodger
(but there's another claimant for that one).

The film, then, is just something of a certain length. A piece of string. Scenes are knots along it. It is easy to imagine other ones, or different ones, much easier than it is with most films. Equally, finding fault with them doesn't seem to be the point. They aren't load bearing. Other cafés, other roads, other hotels. Other dialogues. It doesn't matter. What matters is the limited time, the threat against it, the foreign ambience, the brief
Aufleben
of two strangers. You make up your own film, with yourself, in your own time. It's not so much
The Passenger
as
Passaggerismo
, so to speak. Not a tiptoeing, but a whole field and set of atmospheres. It's rare to see a film that appears so touristic. Set abroad—for a long time, for some reason, I supposed it was Portugal, but it's largely Spain, Barcelona, and points south—no subtitles, hotels and cafés,
amours de voyage
. It's a limited structure—call it a lean-to—but all the more durable for that.

When Bruno Ganz “falls” and becomes human in
Wings of Desire
, he is subjected to intense scrutiny by Wim Wenders. He shows us it. He is passionately, rapturously human, a kind of grown-up child. He is thrilled by everything, he is transfigured, he shines. Nicholson and Antonioni don't do anything of the kind. There is nothing coming from the inside to the outside, or the outside to the inside, for that matter. I don't know what happened to Locke's journalist's gift of observation; he doesn't show many signs of it. Everything is external and oddly impercipient or affectless. There is no “Robertson moment,” where he shows us his new self and his pleasure or panic at finding himself in it. Nicholson and Schneider must be two of the more sour-looking actors around. They range from petulant cool to cool petulance. Antonioni doesn't investigate them or produce them in any striking way. Nor does Nicholson acquire any new optics. He is as deep as his pile of dollars, as wide as his
eau de nil
—or is it greenback?—car. He is neither competent nor incompetent. Nothing, then, attaches itself to the basic predicament, or detracts or distracts from it, the idea is just to be a globetrotter, and for a time. It remains a pure and almost unembodied idea. There is no particular intensity, no particularity.

Perhaps the best ways to characterize the film are negative. It is neutral, without anguish, without any voiced despair or hope, without any gravity or clinging. A tiny shot shows Nicholson and Schneider sitting at an outdoor table. Cars pass in front of them, from the left, from the right. The conversation isn't particularly scintillating or revealing. They talk throughout like strangers on a train, in a mixture of reckless banality, occasional posturing, and reckless confession. It's the tiny, shallow space—not especially well used—for the human in among the mechanical and the functional that speaks from the scene, and perhaps from the whole film. It's the macrocosm from the microcosm.

When we get to the celebrated last shot, that's another microcosm. It's another hotel room. Like the first, back in Africa, it's ground level (which in this film becomes associated with death). There has been another desultory, unimpressive conversation between the principals, this time about blindness. Nicholson is telling a story, very woodenly, the way people only ever tell stories in films—one feels sure it's about
him
, but it isn't even that—about a blind friend of his who regained his sight and who noticed ugliness everywhere. “What can you see?” Nicholson asks Schneider. A little boy and an old woman. A man scratching his shoulder. A kid throwing stones. Dust. “It's very dusty here.” It's true. He tells her to go. She leaves. The shot begins—I think—with his chinos. (There is a wonderful disregard for the integral or the important in this film.) He's suddenly lain facedown on the bed, to sleep. The camera then moves, terribly slowly toward the metal grille in front of the French windows, which are open. (It's an echo of the corridor of the African hotel, which is similarly open.) It pushes through, sliding and zooming. Someone is having a driving lesson on the plaza outside. A boy throws a stone at an old man, who shouts at him. There's a large closed structure, a bullring perhaps. Schneider appears, mooching and moody. A gaggle of children. A Vespa, or perhaps I've added that. Trumpet music, in Spanish semitones, gallant and fading. A car stops. A black Citroën. A black man gets out. The driver, meanwhile, gets into conversation with Schneider, moves her away toward the bullring, and then on to the old man. The camera all the time moving forward, perhaps beginning to pan right. Nicholson forgotten. A backfire from the Fiat, and another noise. The Citroën leaves. Another car, a police car, comes to a dusty stop. Policemen get out of it, Locke's flame-haired wife too. The camera, having already turned 180 degrees, shows them entering the hotel, tracks them past the open windows. Schneider, back in her adjacent room. Nicholson flat on his bed, dead. The camera noses back into the room. Hotel manager, policeman, Rachel Locke, and Schneider, standing in a line behind the body, facing forward, like last respects blocking at the end of
Hamlet
. “We have never lived so long, nor known so much.” “Did you know him?” The last word is Schneider's “Yes.” A cut, an hour or two later, and a still camera observes the hotel manager step outside, his wife sit down on the stoop with her knitting, the L-Fiat, driving off into the sunset, and the low hotel frontage beside the dying sun. Something of New Mexico, perhaps. New Spain. Credits roll.

This is
The Passenger
to me. Something happening, though—as in Auden's “Musée des Beaux Arts”—one wouldn't necessarily know it, much less what it was. A flowing together of private and public space, the hotel room and the plaza. A sense of resonant emptiness, as in De Chirico. The painstaking putting together of Mediterranean noise. You can smell these sounds. Dust and children and rattly cars. The South. Being a stranger in a place. Spanish without subtitles. Knowledge is in the air, but one doesn't have much of it oneself. The camera—the eye, not Nicholson's, but a kind of impersonal, ambient, übereye—unavailing. Getting everywhere too late. The outward look foiled and turning into an inward look back. (The people in such places see infinitely more of you than you do of them.) And hearing, the undirectional sense, knowing more than sight. In the shot, I suppose I am with Schneider, I am at large and clueless, distracted, moving, rapt. I am taking in more than I could ever want. I can feel myself being filled like a beaker. It is something to do with life lived in public, in the open, and the visitor getting only a scrambled, kaleidoscopic sense of it. It is waiting, while nothing and everything happens.

 

KURT SCHWITTERS

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) loved to play with expressive or artistic systems of every type, whether they were alphabets, numbers, colors, languages, or music. He composed sonatas out of sounds (including a sneeze), poems out of letters and numerals, paintings out of Dutch tram tickets, farmyard illustrations out of type fonts. His poems made shapes trailed across paper, while his paintings were words nailed onto card or board. “A play with serious problems,” he wrote later, in his manifestly imperfect English—drama critic wasn't among his avocations—“that is art.” The walls of the house he lived in with his parents in the deeply provincial German town of Hanover developed strange plaster extrusions and stalactites and angular outgrowths in room after room, and turned into a sort of Expressionistic Caligari grotto: somewhere in its windings was what he called the Cathedral of Erotic Misery, where a snail might scratch its back and appease an itch. That was the original “Merzbau.” “Merz”—itself a neologism chiseled out of the name of a bank: the Kommerz- und Privatbank—became synonymous with Schwitters. Sometimes he signed himself “Merz” or incorporated it into his name—even though, as the only son of well-heeled parents, he had five perfectly good ones of his own: Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius and then Schwitters. (When his own son came to be born, he named him, with a straight face, Ernst.) From 1919 on, Merz was everything he did. Merz sculptures, Merz towers, Merz drawings, Merz poems. It was, you might say, a Merz life. Schwitters is an instance of a primary creative type; had he taken a different turning, it is easy to imagine him an inventor, like Leonardo. He loved pseudonyms, heteronyms, caressive deformations, and nicknames. Was “Hanover” insufficiently exciting as an address? Well, try “Revon”! The painter and poet Hans Arp was only ever “pra” to him; wacky postcards were addressed not to “geliebter Arp” (beloved Arp—strange enough, one might think) but “beleibter pra” (portly pra). The wife of another friend, one Morf, was referred to as “die Morphinistin.” Edith Thomas, the English nurse of his last years, was “Wantee,” surely—though I've never seen it commented upon—an eccentric personal extension of the Anglo-French passive (like desiree or trainee or amputee). Running together the beginning of his first name and the end of his second, he called himself “Kuwitter”—cow weather, yes, but also cow whiff. When Kate Steinitz paid her first visit to the artist in 1918, it was Schwitters's parents who came to the door:

First they showed me round their own apartment with its comfortable velour furniture and lace doilies. They were especially proud of their winter garden, which even in wartime looked to be flourishing: well-tended herbs and vegetables, among ornamental rubber trees and ferns. Then Schwitters
père
escorted me to the staircase. A strange smell greeted me there, not quite sculptor's studio, not kitchen, not zoo. But the smell, or should I say, the characteristic whiff of Schwitters, was put together from all of these components: the boiled glue or starch that Schwitters used in his collages and other works. […] The sculpture smell came from the clay and plaster of Paris that he used in his subsequently celebrated Merz Column. Kitchen and baby smells were ubiquitous at the end of the war, when coal was in short supply, and people didn't like to air their rooms. And then there was the zoo smell. “Kurt keeps guinea pigs,” said his father, and rang the bell.

It is a beautifully literal and for once rather benign instance of the uneasy cohabitation of art and bourgeoisie. Not the poet in the attic (as in the famous Spitzweg caricature, the pinched scribbling figure sitting up in bed in a sort of kayak posture, under an open umbrella on account of the leaking roof) so much as the irrepressible genius all-rounder slumming it in the
belle étage.
Not the standard bohemian scruff but a tall, handsome figure, as conventionally turned out in stiff collar (
Vatermörder
!) and tie as any banker or diplomat, but whose relations with Mercury—commerce,
Merz
—were alas less well ordered; whose living was trying to sell people things they didn't want made from things they
really
didn't want—i.e., rubbish off the street!—and from shouting and burbling shamelessly at “poetry readings” and public “lectures”; ever so slightly smelly, and given to displays of unpredictable behavior like growling at pretty girls in the street.
Arr
, was his word for them, in the plural,
Arren
. Then again, the man collected stamps. Schwitters signed himself once in Steinitz's guest book as “bourgeois and idiot.”

In 1940, when, having fled from Germany to Norway with his now grown-up son, he scraped into Scotland on the last icebreaker that got through after the German invasion and found himself promptly interned as an “enemy alien” on the Isle of Man, it was said that Schwitters unsettled his fellows with his unstable and unpredictable blend of clown and sobersides and unabashed romantic. Probably it was ever thus. Early and often he was characterized as being of “melancholy” disposition. There was some epilepsy in the family. When he was fourteen, a nervous ailment laid him low for two years. (One thinks of something similar happening to the young Hardenberg—the future Novalis—in Penelope Fitzgerald's brilliant novel
The Blue Flower
and wonders if that wasn't genius making its presence felt in his life.) “My illness,” Schwitters relates, “changed my outlook. I became aware of my love of art. First I knocked off couplets in the style of music hall comedy. One autumn evening, I noticed the cold, clear moon. Instantly, my poetry turned lyrical-sentimental. Then it was music. I learned notation, and spent one entire afternoon composing. In 1906 in Isernhagen I saw a landscape bathed in moonlight, and started to paint. One hundred watercolors of moonlit scenes. Done by candlelight. I decided to be a painter.”