Said Ethan Hawke, quoted in "Ethan Hawke on Richard Linklater Transcendentalism Project, Politicization of Pandemic in U.S." (Variety). Robin = Robin Williams.
I clicked on that because I was interested in Richard Linklater's "transcendentalism project." It seems that Linklater is writing a screenplay about Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their friends. As Hawke puts it: "They were the first leaders of the abolition movement; they were vegetarians; they fought for women’s rights. Rick is obsessed with how their ideas are still very radical. This could be a super cool movie and Rick is writing it right now." But Variety adds that Linklater "has been working on a movie about Transcendentalism since 1999, according to an interview in The New Yorker in 2014."
Since 1999, he’s been working on a movie about the American Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, the whole group. As a child, Linklater attended Unitarian services with his father, and he thinks it’s strange that there’s never been a truly great cinematic history of a movement so foundational to modern American identity. He has a fantasy of bringing academics and actors together around a table, reworking the script, line by line. Yet, despite fifteen years of research, he hasn’t found a way to make something that isn’t a “bonnet movie” period piece—high collars, grave dinner parties, mid-Atlantic dialogue.
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"They were the first leaders of the abolition movement; they were vegetarians; they fought for women’s rights. Rick is obsessed with how their ideas are still very radical.
Abolitionism, vegetarianism, women's rights are still very radical? This is how you convince yourself you're edgy without the hard work of actually being edgy--you lie to yourself and everyone around you about where the edge is. That's why hating conservatives is so important--believing conservatives don't oppose slavery, don't favour equality, and care about what you eat is key to being a good person without the hard work of making the world a better place.
Linklater is featured this month on The Criterion Channel, which is featuring Linklater's list of his favorite movies, or at least movies that influenced him. And they show a 5 minute or so interview interspersed with clips from the movies being discussed. There are 11 of these discussions and I watched every one, looking at the movies he liked. What I found was that he had pretty basic progressive ideas about good and bad (evil capitalists and good communists or socialists) but also had some very interesting insights into the movie makers and the actors/actresses in those movies. (I had never heard of Mishima and now, after reading about him I have to watch his movie).
Linklater is a man who does his homework on his subject. Of that I have no doubt. His take on transcendentalism sounds like his life's quest. And he's been very busy over the years that he has been 'working' on it. My favorite of his is still "Waking Life" which was 'rotoscoped'- animation drawn over film- using real actors. (the film also has a great soundtrack from the Tosca Tango Orchestra). Of his other films, none of them really blew me away. "Boyhood" was great in its ambition, but was mostly forgettable.
I haven't seen that many of his films because I have a rule: Don't watch movies that pair up Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The incessant dialog will make you want to shove a pencil deeply into your ear. And don't watch any movie with Jack Black since 2000.
Are young people just humorless, or are they just thin-skinned?
Two things that jumped out at me from that interview...
it was Williams who got him his first agent. “He called, saying, ‘Robin Williams says you are going to do really well.’
I also got a kick out of this...
“This dog had a massive amount of integrity. If I were to teach acting at Juilliard or one of these fancy schools, I would do a class with an animal. They don’t know they are acting, which is kind of the whole thing that Brando was going after. If you talk to the dog and you secretly talk to the camera, the dog will look at the camera. You have to be with them,” he said.
I can see Robin Williams doing that bit. That's like an ode to Williams. "Be the dog. Be with the dog. Pay attention to the dog. Are you with the dog? Bow wow. Bow wow. Wow! Bow wow."
'At 18, I found that incredibly irritating.'
Welcome to the club. I liked Williams as an actor more than a comedian, but that's not saying much. Good for him that he could turn a personality disorder into $$$.
I can't sort out what Hawke is saying. Robin was WHAT for him? Maybe I need more cofveve.
Has there ever been a "truly great cinematic history of a movement"? I'm at a loss to think even of a great one, much less a "truly great" one. (I do miss a lot of movies though.)
I've always thought a movie bio or miniseries on Nietzsche, that great admirer of Emerson's, would be interesting.
A little Robin Williams went a long way with me, and I can't stand the inspiring schoolteacher genre so have never seen DPS.
And this from Mencken popped into my head: A reputation for arrogance can be a great advantage to an ambitious young man.
I know we aren't supposed to do amateur psychoanalysis, but was hard to avoid seeing Robin Williams and thinking that he was bipolar, or manic-depressive as they said at the time.
PBS did a good job with 19th century American literature with its documentaries about Louisa May Alcott, Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain. A few years further back, they probably did Emerson and Thoreau as well.
Merchant Ivory looked at the Transcendentalists' precursors and successors in their dramatizations of Henry James's The Europeans and The Bostonians. The low-budget Europeans probably qualified as a "bonnet drama."
I wouldn't put the genre down, though. Try for anything more "updated" or "modern" and you end up with monstrous travesties like the recent "comedy" series about Emily Dickinson.
Ironic that Linklater can't picture the Transcendentalists as the slackers of their time.
There's a terrific - I suppose it's a "young adult" novel, entitled The Diamond In the Window, which deals with transcendentalism via fantasy. Ok, the transcendentalism, though central to the plot, isn't precisely central to the theme... but it could be an interesting approach to explore if he's trying to avoid making a period drama.
Collaborate with Michael Bay to make Transcendental Transformers.
Trans kids say the darnedest things.
He hasn’t found a way to make something that isn’t a “bonnet movie” period piece—high collars, grave dinner parties, mid-Atlantic dialogue.
My suggestion would be to add car chases and think of casting The Rock, rather than Ethan Hawke.
I didn't think of Thoreau and Emerson as being early enough to be original leaders of the abolition movement. I looked it up. They weren't. They came on mostly in the 1850s - which is fine, but not groundbreaking. Lafayette was an early opponent of slavery back in the 18th C, and of course, slavery was already illegal in England since 1833 and slowly becoming illegal in other places. It at least came up during the debates on the Constitution.
I wonder if he will include the part about Thoreau setting a forest fire as a young man so he could watch his neighbors have to deal with it? Probably not.
Were they the first leaders of the abolitionist movement? Quakers might disagree. Wilberforce? Lots of conservative Christians were early leaders. Seems they were the first secular leaders, but maybe I'm mistaken about that.
Transcendentalism is best summarized, not by a description of their beliefs, but by the mimickry of their their attitude since transcendentalism is more a posture than a belief system.
"Like totally, dude!" is a pretty good summary of their attitude.
What more is there to the following passage from Emerson but the expression of this attitude overlain with a lot of flowery verbiage?
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
@Gerda Sprinchorn makes a good point.
Transcendentalism as shared by Emerson's song from the woods might reflect a mode or modes of understanding nature that seeped into elite consciousness from native American spiritual attitudes, as the Transcenders imagined and appropriated them. It's pretty wooly stuff, and lacks only a reference to Manitou.
John Barth coined the term 'cosmophilist' for the nature-freakery of a character in The Sotweed Factor.
Or maybe Emerson was just high that afternoon.
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