Gamboling with 9/11
OF ALL THE responses to 9/11 finally filtering into movie culture, the strangest is Bruce Weber's A Letter to True. As the fanciful title suggests, he's expressing his most sincere and fragile feelings-about New York, terrorism, AIDS, the Iraq war, death, celebrity and men. But unfortunately, that title is also addressed to his pet dog. Weber's narration sounds genuinely naive-a master's voice only a puppy would obey. But when fey statements are combined with Weber's signature luxe photographic style, the film's social assessment feels wacky.
Since emerging in the 80s as a fashion photographer, Weber produced some of the most cunning yet trivial pop imagery of the past quarter century; still, his insistent chic infiltrated modern subconscious. It became the erotic, capitalist eye of the New World Order, linking sex to trade and redefining masculinity in terms of narcissistic perception. (Even Alexander Sokurov's Father and Son bears traces of Weber's vision.) However, Weber's side career as a documentary-maker can only be described as insipid. A Letter to True reflects on post-9/11 living as you might imagine Marie Antoinette inscribing heavy thoughts in her Trianon journal. Weber intercuts shots of a devastated Manhattan with shots of his dogs frolicking on the beach in Montauk. In voice-over he wonders about "this upside-down world of ours." This memoir-like, scrapbook movie exposes Weber as both coy and shallow.
Using a digressive, free-associating style, Weber roams from 9/11 to home-movie footage of the late British actor Dirk Bogarde; from Haitian refugees to Julie Christie reciting poetry and Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his own eulogy; plus lots more scampering-dog footage. A Letter to True becomes Weber's retreat from harsh reality. He lures viewers into the cocoon of his comfortable exurban world and his private sinecure of picture-taking (campily symbolized by b&w images of a glamorous female model gathering a sheet around her naked body and clicking a camera). All the while, vintage novelty pop music fills the soundtrack. "People are queer," Doris Day sings in "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries," the film's introductory anthem.
Radical gay film artist Derek Jarman avoided such frivolity in his 1989 War Requiem; dramatic montages accompanied the reading of Wilfred Owens' poem commemorating World War I. Jarman imagined the war experience, an unconventional yet poignant method by which he conveyed the legacy of national regret, while also identifying with Owens' private lament. Weber's self-sentimentalizing is merely a variation on the stridently politicized post-9/11 documentaries we've seen lately. The film is certainly sincere, but unlike Jarman's series of lyrical imagistic etudes, this self-infatuation trivializes our current sensitivity. So far the only poetry inspired by 9/11 has been the moving expressions of Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate and Steven Spielberg's The Terminal.
Weber's own predilections get in the way like dogs at his feet. But surely this is how he wants it. Rather than pretend 9/11's temporary camaraderie, Weber shares (and unwittingly reveals) the petulance of many middle-class New Yorkers who regard this period of terror alerts as little more than an interruption of their regular Manhattan privileges. (Watching the acupuncture treatment for one of Weber's pets contrasts poorly to the implied human suffering of 9/11.) A Letter to True divulges that part of social trauma that is unmistakably personal and given to capricious vexation. But Weber's wide-ranging view never gains substance. His gloss on the deaths of Bogarde and others conveys some tragic sense of loss, but this is also undisciplined self-indulgence-an artiness that says more about Weber's detachment than anything else.
His detachment points to his preoccupation. And it is this movie-more than the atrocious Let's Get Lost (where he exploited Chet Baker) and Chop Suey-that finally gets us close to understanding something about Bruce Weber's art.
In a startling admission, Weber tells how in youth he was impressed by his parents' Life magazine subscription "with Larry Burrows' photos tucked [inside]." Burrows was Life's Vietnam photojournalist whose stark images of warfare brought that life-and-death reality to newsstands and the home mail boxes of Americans not yet jaded by a corrupt tv medium. When Weber says, "These photographs made me question everything," you wonder: What happened? How did combat photography push Weber to pursue a career creating runway fantasies with a promiscuously homoerotic undercurrent?
Well, A Letter to True, like the mute, suggestive narratives of Weber's ad campaigns and Bear Pond photo book, is only superficially confessional. The film's on-screen evidence shows a highly personal escapism-not simply from the facts of 9/11 but from the miseries of war, illness, death and Weber's own class realities. Unlike Burrows, who is quoted saying, "I want to show suffering but not in a harsh way," Weber's career has concentrated on the opposite of suffering. Working for the fashion industry can also be seen as a refutation of Burrows' other career quote: "If I can contribute a little to the understanding of what others are going through then it's justified." Besides his dogs, there are only two others in Weber's worldview-celebs (in the Dirk Bogarde sequence, Visconti can be spotted floating along a canal in Venice) and rough trade.
The most questionable scenes in A Letter to True come from Weber filming a family of poor white farmers-a single mother and her rowdy brood of blond boys. They wrestle, frisky with each other and the farm animals (a recurring motif is a beast carried across one's shoulder). These shots intentionally recall the way Weber's own canines gambol; his eye goes toward his subject's feral intensity regardless of the species or the social context. The mother's slatternly amusement about being kicked out of Wal-Mart when she and her Confederate flag-bearing boys vandalized the merchandise seems presented to idealize low-class brutishness.
Weber's lust is always well lighted, but it's often wayward-as when a glimpse of World War II b&w snapshots emphasizes the now long-gone soldiers' curling lips. This prurient highlight disregards the war itself, thus unraveling the film's conceit of rhyming 9/11 themes with a requiem for life during wartime. The truest part of Weber's Letter seems to be when he goes on a tangent to photograph Australian Nat Young (author of The History of Surfing) and feature shots of Young's "joyboys." What's out of joint is a story about Jonathan Demme advising Weber to document the mistreatment of Haitian boat people. Weber, instead, goes to Miami's Little Haiti to pity-photograph some women and children. Then-enough of Haitians-the film gets back on course, reuniting with the Confederate carousers.
When Weber tries to make a social statement, A Letter to True is infuriatingly daft. (MLK seems thrown in just for effect.) But before it's over, Weber's wandering sentimentality finds its model (and almost its justification) in two lengthy clips from the 1946 Courage of Lassie. In the first, the Wizard of Oz's Frank Morgan explains to young Elizabeth Taylor that just as humans worship God, her dog Lassie worships her. And Taylor, Hollywood's most ravishing tyke, flashes her violet eyes and muses in her squeaky-sincere voice, "It's a very weird feeling to be someone's god." Weber doesn't fully connect this moment to his later Kenneth Anger-style anecdote about AIDS warrior Liz, but the simple profundity of that young girl's meditation (learning about faith through her pet) is surprisingly powerful.
It's clear that Weber wishes for that same guilelessness to resolve his own 9/11 distress. So he settles for coincidence: The second clip shows Morgan in court, defending Lassie as a courier-soldier for the Allies during a maneuver that took place on September 11. Yes. It's a breathtaking find-a perfect sociological connection such as scholar Thom Andersen never found for his overwrought epic Los Angeles Plays Itself. Weber gnaws the sentimental bone of the Lassie film, extracting the spiritual and historical essence. At the same time, Weber stays true to himself. Casually interested in coming to terms with 9/11, he's always after the voluptuousness and mystery personified by young Liz (the latest male model he unveils even resembles her son). Weber's obsessions are revealing, but this movie is a letter too trite. o