on The Pillowman

After a week now, my primary disappointment with the Pillowman still centers on its concept. An excellent set-up led to an near-hollow perspective on creativity under totalitarianism, on art's imitation of life, on the interplay of human comedy and misery, and on the sustainability of a will to life given a surfeit of inductions to nihilism. In other words, it failed to generate a meaningful or feasible response to the demands of existence--instead, the play manufactured comedy where it is, I believe, least appropriate.

After further consideration of my comparison of the work to Cinema Paradiso and Big Fish, I want set those aside in order to examine The Pillowman's own logic on the role of storytelling. It will then be possible to return to those films whose arguments about the centrality of experiencing narrative are fundamentally more sound.

Here are the brass tacks: K's agonizing biography (albeit a dubiously factual account revealed by his own hand) is supposed to have generated the misery behind his creative instinct. Predictably, the anguish of youth, the misery of his slaughterhouse job, his critical scrutiny of authoritarianism, and his difficult domestic duties, cast a dismal pallor over his fiction. Enter (inappropriately) dark comedy. There is no inherent mirth in K's misery, nor is there any cause for laughter in his incarceration. And yet that is what was intended and that's what happens. The audience is tickled alternatively by morose scandal and cheap humoristic gags. These are not intrinsically objectionable devices, except that here they accumulated into a full-blown disaster. The reason is that these comedic darts completely miss any meaningful target. A commitment to narrative doesn't rescue K or his brother, it lubricates their slide into destruction. True, narrative is slightly palliative for the brother, but then he exploits it out of ignorance. For K, writing is possibly cathartic, but when based in a justifiable matricide/patricide, it seems self-defeating for that writing to become the vehicle of a modern audience's onanism and then the eternal legacy of a self-styled artist.

To compare the play with two works I so deeply respect now feels heretical, but I ought to clarify why I did so instinctively. Cinema Paradiso and Big Fish legitimate a most human recourse to narrative because they expose narrative as a basic survival mechanism. Big Fish evokes tender feelings in me because it argues with eminent agility that narrative preserves a sacred connection between actuality and ideal existence (elevation). It then goes on to demonstrate how difficult disillusionment can be, and then, if you can see the screen through your tears, it permits death to endorse the duty that the bereaved owe to the task of living.

Cinema Paradiso is the best treatment of nostalgia in the history of the world. Truly savage. I usually weep for a full hour after watching the film as my own mind dances into the terror-filled regions of consciousness that include the irrecuperability of childhood, the power of memory, the inescapable feelings of neglect felt by the elderly, the infelicitous restlessness of the young male with self-imposed expectation from life, the panic of modernization, and the devastation that attends maturation.

Finally, The Pillowman depends upon a damning socio-political irresponsibility. Today's political topography demands accountability in the arts--this is especially true in the case of an overtly political drama. There is a desperate need for intelligent popular critique of the kind of moral absolutism and dogmatic nationalism that has already started to infringe on civil liberties. I by no means desire the universal substitution of sobriety for levity; I'm arguing that we can't afford to pass up excellent opportunities for critical citizenship in the name of entertainment. There should always be room for frivolous comedy in the arts, that fact is incontestable. There persists, however, a non-salutary neglect of just how imperiled our legitimate democracy is. Comparisons to Weimar Germany make me want to vomit ever so slightly, but there is unimpeachable evidence that once again fear and chauvinism copulate and begin to beget the insidious enemies of liberalism (e.g., the collapse of the welfare state, the patriot act, public rise of puissant moral rhetoric). Our only solace comes from the fact that the current demagogues are apparently incompetent bunglers when it comes to state action ( c.f., the big easy)....or do they only appear so?

This is to mention nothing of the play's elaborate and enjoyable set, the often delightful turns of phrase, the lively short stories, and the charm of silver screensters in real time. To be frank, these elements did little to outweigh the spiritual emptiness and philosophical bankruptcy of the production as a whole. Crudup's histrionic oscillation between grief and cynicism was just plain annoying, as was Goldblum's incapacity to avoid his typecast-characteristic nebbishness. But how the dramaturgy stumbled would be an altogether different and largely uninteresting essay...

To conclude, The Pillowman was neither funny nor written to make an intelligent point about the importance of storytelling. Dahyenu. The work is also politically reprehensible and socially deplorable.

Rather than a refund, I'd love it if McDonagh would read this blog, for by most accounts The Pillowman amounts to an egotistical defense of his own art, and that's disgusting.