Chekhov's Mistress
Bukowski: Born Into This
I can’t claim to be a major fan, like Bono, Tom Waits or Sean Penn – all interviewed in this film and drop-ins of sort in Bukowski’s life – but I have been subject to the Bukowski allure – something like being drawn to the scene of a car crash.
and, I said, you take your rich aunts and uncles
and grandfathers and fathers
and all their lousy oil
and their seven lakes
and their wild turkey
and buffalo
and the whole state of Texas,
meaning, you crow-blasts
and your Saturday night boardwalks,
and your 2-bit library
and your crooked councilmen
and your pansy artists-
you can take all these
and your weekly newspaper
and your famous tornadoes,
and you filthy floods
and all you yowling cats
and your subscription to Time,
and shove them, baby,
shove them.
-excerpted from “The Day I Kicked Away a Bankroll.”
But you know, if you told Bukowski that you didn’t think his poetry was all that very poetic, maybe more like rap lyrics or a riff from a Spike Lee movie than anything, he wouldn’t give a damn. He was only successful later in life, after all, and until then – before he ever had much of an audience – he wrote “waist-high” prolifically, sometimes at the cost of eating when he chose to write instead of doing something to make more money.
The most memorable story in the film (which is mostly archival footage – he died in ‘94 and this movie just came out in 2003) is more of a motif than a singular event. Bukowski tells of the regular beatings he got as a child, from about the age of 6 to 11. He said that after so many beatings he felt like he could say anything to anyone. He said that the beatings only stopped when he finally stopped reacting, when he couldn’t cry any longer. He found his outlet in writing and because he was stripped of all self-consciousness, he could write anything.
That I think is why Bukowski is a folk hero: He says “…and landlords full of maggots, / pounding for the rent…” when you want to. When you want to scream and say “we are…
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes…”
Bukowski says it for you. It ain’t complicated, but he says it with an authoritative rhythm. In fact, I noticed that Bukowski speaks and reads his poetry with the same type of cadence, like he was a walking smoking drinking cursing poetry machine and there was only a thin line between life and poetry.
But there wasn’t much poetry in the movie, nine or ten poems, but not all with the same focus. There was the excellent poem from the title, “Dinosauria, we,” and Bukowski reading and a few fans reading (with Bono doing a particularly bad self-conscious reading of “Roll The Dice” in the dvd extras), but there wasn’t much poetry in the sense that it didn’t really seem like the movie was about a poet. Of course, even though I think of him as a poet, he started with and also wrote a lot of prose and in some ways he became something of an anti-poet. Maybe that’s why the film didn’t seem particularly literary oriented and maybe that’s how Bukowski would have wanted it. There’s no sign of any books or talk of reading or literary influences and Bukowski’s fame goes well beyond the literati. There are mentions of Dante, Beowulf and such in his poetry, but the picture this movie paints is that of a Whitmanesque writer whose words grew organically from – instead of the leaves of grass of Brooklyn – the weeds in the sidewalks of L.A.
So if you want to break down or build up (you choose) your impression of Charles Bukowski, then this is a film worth watching. If, like me, you’ve known little of the man besides his poetry and the Mickey Rourke, Faye Dunaway movie Barfly, which Bukowski autobiographically wrote, then you will also enjoy watching “Born Into This.”
Dinosauria, we
Born like this
Into this
As the chalk faces smile
As Mrs. Death laughs
As the elevators break
As political landscapes dissolve
As the supermarket bag boy holds a college degree
As the oily fish spit out their oily prey
As the sun is masked
We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
Born into this
Walking and living through this
Dying because of this
Muted because of this
Castrated
Debauched
Disinherited
Because of this
Fooled by this
Used by this
Pissed on by this
Made crazy and sick by this
Made violent
Made inhuman
By this
The heart is blackened
The fingers reach for the throat
The gun
The knife
The bomb
The fingers reach toward an unresponsive god
The fingers reach for the bottle
The pill
The powder
We are born into this sorrowful deadliness
We are born into a government 60 years in debt
That soon will be unable to even pay the interest on that debt
And the banks will burn
Money will be useless
There will be open and unpunished murder in the streets
It will be guns and roving mobs
Land will be useless
Food will become a diminishing return
Nuclear power will be taken over by the many
Explosions will continually shake the earth
Radiated robot men will stalk each other
The rich and the chosen will watch from space platforms
Dante’s Inferno will be made to look like a children’s playground
The sun will not be seen and it will always be night
Trees will die
All vegetation will die
Radiated men will eat the flesh of radiated men
The sea will be poisoned
The lakes and rivers will vanish
Rain will be the new gold
The rotting bodies of men and animals will stink in the dark wind
The last few survivors will be overtaken by new and hideous diseases
And the space platforms will be destroyed by attrition
The petering out of supplies
The natural effect of general decay
And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard
Born out of that.
The sun still hidden there
Awaiting the next chapter.
comments
Bukowski is rock n roll. I “discovered” him about a year and a half ago and was pissed it took me 26 years to find him. His writing is quick, to the point, honest, and most of the time, in some way, funny as hell. I didn’t know there was a documentary about him, thanks for the heads up!
Bri-
– Beerspitnight (06/12 at 08:44 PM)
Thanks for the recommendation. I saw Barfly years ago and summer is the time to start thinking about Bukowski.
Anomie-Atlanta
http://falseconciousness.blogspot.com/
– Anomie-Atlanta (06/27 at 01:20 PM)
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