As It Lays
(Robert Frank, U.S. 285, New Mexico)
Went to see Frank Perry’s 1972 adaptation of Play It As It Lays the other night at the Castro, curious whether the negative space of Didion’s novel translated to the screen. A good crowd for a Monday, but half of it was gone within ten minutes due to a warbly soundtrack. Every other reel suffered this submerged rattle, though as my friend Kathryn pointed out, it seemed oddly fitting for Maria’s (Tuesday Weld) disembodied voice. One imagines Didion might have been pleased with an audience so attuned to the little dots indicating a new reel—the words reel change certainly wouldn’t be out of place in a novel of minimal stage directions and the fearful whiteness (thoughts of Melville) on the page.
The biggest change from book to screen comes by virtue of having live actors in the leading roles (one isn’t so sure in the book). Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, both excellent, burnish Mariah and BZ with the pathos which is so conspicuously absent from the novel. The characters are still blanks, but when the camera lingers on these fine actors, the desolation glows as an ember: they will not be extinguished. The concluding death scene is a final void in the book. Here it plays like a Townes Van Zandt song (or perhaps better to say Gram Parsons, given the desert motel setting).
Perhaps sensing Didion’s gauntness thrown off by the lushness of movie stars (they still had faces, it turns out), director Frank Perry compensates with shock cuts and zooms, the kind that ostentatiously declare Fragmentation. Setting the film’s frame amidst geometric hedges and runway-like lawns does nothing to improve the musty odor of Marienbads past. Many critics hold these effects in contempt, but it is worth asking why some clichés stick in the maw more than others. I suspect in many cases (my own, certainly) it has to do with the faint embarrassment over adolescent enthusiasm for loud aesthetics, aesthetics of violence and violation. Certainly, there is a kind of bankruptcy to the profligacy with these effects were at the time dialed up for subjects earmarked as “countercultural,” i.e. cashing in on experimentalism without the risks. Music effects have a much faster life cycle in this regard, so that we’re constantly seeing innovative sounds trivialized as commercial shorthand (interesting things happen when that sound gets dissembled and reconstructed, as has played out many times with psychedelic guitar distortion).
So Perry’s adaptation has plenty of these cuts which are there to be there. The film, like many of its era, gets caught between coolly dismissing the Hollywood counterculture and reaching into its bag of tricks with a smug excuse in reflexivity. (A telling exception to this trend is Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind. Its parodies of Antonioni and the Maysles simultaneously obscure the central Huston figure and illuminate his time, much like Kane and the News on the March. It was Welles who described Los Angeles as “a bright, guilty place,” a good forecast of Didion’s lost city).
In some places, however, I found Perry’s use of shock cuts and zooms compelling and, not a word one often lends these techniques, necessary. I’m thinking of the freeway segments, which figure so prominently into the book’s peculiar entropy. The key here is that one actually does undergo an appreciable alteration of consciousness when driving (especially on the freeway), and so here the shock cuts are not so much accoutrement as apparatus. The oft-used tracking shot of passing buildings from the passenger side (one of those clichés people don’t typically complain about) is a holdover of the view from a train, an echo of film’s early correspondence with locomotive technology and phenomenology. The rapid decoupage of signage in Play It As It Lays, by contrast, represents driving’s jagged addition of vision (strange fact: Roy Lichtenstein is credited as “visual advisor” on the film), as well as raising its specter of elision—i.e. Where does the driver look when not looking? The film’s fusillade of panoptic aerial shots, frenetic horizons, dials, abstract yellow beams, sun, the eye itself—all of them are the objects of the driver’s imagination.
The form moves faster than we can think—and this is the same oblivion Didion is after:
“She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pulls of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie ¼ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fwy 1.”
Driving in Los Angeles tends to play out in one of two ways in fictions: as the expression of freedom in speed and methamphetaminic control, the kind celebrated by car commercials, action movies, rock music and Reynar Banham, or else as the everyday dystopia of traffic. But the Didion is something else again: it’s the very lack of resistance, the surplus of freedom, which blots Maria out. Listen to Banham, in love with on his autotopia:
“The actual experience of driving on the freeways prints itself deeply on the conscious mind and unthinking reflexes. As you acquire the special skills involved, the Los Angeles freeways become a special way of being alive…The extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical”; “There is no alternative to complete surrender of will to the instructions on the signs”; “For the Freeway, quite as much as the Beach, is where the Angeleno is most himself, most integrally identified with his great city.”
He is intoxicated where Didion simply has a migraine. “The marginal gains in efficiency through automation might be offset by the psychological deprivations caused by destroying the residual illusions of free decision and driving skill surviving in the present situation,” Banham writes, to which Didion and Perry might respond, As if we had a choice. In Perry’s adaptation, the mechanization of driving fuses with that of watching: we’re not getting Maria’s POV (there’s no there there), but rather her dilated mode of apprehension.
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