Harvey or Why the Bunny isn't Funny

Harvey
or
Why the Bunny isn’t Funny

Recently I was strong armed into watching Harvey, the rabbit movie with Jimmy Stewart. As a rule I generally avoid old movies. I think that a lot of old movies, like a lot of old music, are over-hyped; whatever technical or narrative device that revolutionized the way that we see movies (see Citizen Kane) has usually been so thoroughly incorporated into the films that I cut my teeth on that it’s impossible for me to understand its revolutionary aspects. The one exception to that rule may be The Wizard of Oz whose revolution is embedded in the film, and whose effect still blows me away.

Old movies require me to construct a context that I’m generally too lazy to develop unless I have a personal investment in the movie. That personal investment rarely extends past the late 1950s, which is when I believe the roots of contemporary movie-making vocabulary solidified. I find movies from before that era either redundant, mystifying or both.

Hitchcock’s 39 Steps is a good example: there is an extended flashback scene reciting a good portion of the murder that takes place at the beginning of the scene that seemed overly long to me. Hithcock’s not a bad filmmaker, so I have to believe that the flashback is so long is because the movie is so old that flashbacks hadn’t yet become an accepted trope in film yet, and was still new and novel. On the other hand, I often had a hard time understanding what the actors were saying because they spoke so quickly, which is something I can only chalk up to people talking faster back then.

You can see why I was reluctant to watch Harvey. I didn’t know anything about the movie other than its premise, its lead actor and that it was old. Despite all of that, I watched it, and what I saw was a great play trapped inside a mediocre movie. Harvey just screamed “theatrical production” to me. Its characters’ archetypes, the pace of the action and the staging all would have, if performed crisply, been an excellent study in what makes theatre tick.

But the play didn’t translate well to film. The shots were claustrophobic, especially inside the Dowd house, and really limited the tragic-comic aspects of Elwood P. Dowd’s sister and niece reactions to his “affliction.” The real strength of film as medium of expression over theatre is its ability to capitalize on nuance and detail. The theatre must be gross in its approach to conveying anything because its proportion is, for the most part, one to one; the people that I see on stage are exactly the proportion they would be if I was seeing them from the same distance outside the theatre. The movies know no such limitations, and can make a face 30 feet tall, making it much easier to translate the subtle gradations of emotions moving across a face. How this explains the popularity of Adam Sandler movies, I don’t know, but it does go a long way in explaining why zany stage productions in the vein of Harvey often flounder on screen: because the energy of the play has an incredibly difficult time being translated to the screen, where precision, not enthusiasm, is more important.

That being said, I think the movie could have been better, and there are two reasons for that: the rabbit and the man. As to the first, I haven’t seen or read the play, so I can’t say how it’s staged, but since the playwright was also the screen scribe, my suspicion is it was written the way she wanted it. In the movie there is no doubt as to the reality of the pooka Harvey. He opens doors and gates. For me, making the rabbit real and not leaving the decision up to the audience robs the entire story of its mystery and its conflict, and makes it impossible for the audience to empathize with Dowd. If the rabbit is assuredly real, then the character of Dowd is much less compelling, because we know that the story is no longer the study of a man affected by tragedy, but the comic mishaps of a man and his magic rabbit. It becomes a fantasy rather than a drama, and I think that Dowd’s character is much more compelling in the ambiguity of sanity.

Secondly, I feel the character of Dowd lacks dimension, and I blame either Jimmy Stewart or the director Henry Koster for that. The character of Elwood P. Dowd is certainly disturbed in one way or another. It’s more than hinted at throughout the movie that some great change was wrought in Elwood when his mother, to whom he was devoted, died. Elwood attributes the change to the appearance of a six foot three tall white rabbit named Harvey, while his family attributes it to his mother’s death. In either case, Elwood is no longer the man he once was and people treat him differently because of it, he drinks because of it and his family is embarrassed because of it.

What I found uninteresting about Stewart’s portrayal was the lack of regret in Elwood for the man he used to be, the lack of longing to be a part of something again. Stewart makes it apparent that the pooka, Harvey, brings something beautiful into life in the form of helping people who come into the bar unburden their sadness, but we never see Dowd acknowledge the conflict it seemed he suffered from, the conflict between who he is and who he was.

There is a scene near the end of the film when Dowd is in the alley behind the bar dancing alone, and when he is joined by the doctor and the nurse who have been chasing him all over town Dowd tells them about all the dances he used to know, and for a moment the audience is treated to a rare glimpse of the original Elwood P. Dowd, good looking, gregarious popular, and we see that Dowd misses that life as well, but also that he is incredibly lost and has no way of knowing how to return to it. Unfortunately for the film, that the moment was brushed past in order to get to the “more important” scene where Dowd recounts the beauty that came with Harvey, and the magical moments that they share over drinks when people, upon finally being able to see Harvey, suddenly realize that their problems aren’t so large after all. That for me is the flaw in the way that Stewart plays Dowd; there is too much “gee golly, sure” and not enough doubt in a man whose character is largely shaped by loss.

I think the textual evidence for Dowd’s conflict is his alcoholism. While it may be argued that it’s necessary for Harvey and Elwood to meet sad people they have to hang out in bars, I think the locale of the bar is convenient for Elwood’s alcoholism. You can find, sit and talk with sad people anywhere, the park, the zoo, the bus. And Dowd doesn’t just use the bar for his mission of beauty with the pooka. He suggests the bar for any occasion at all. The fact that Dowd is constantly drinking seems glossed over in the film, outshined by Dowd’s niceness and genuine care for the people around him. Dowd’s dark side is written into the script, but never admitted to by the film, and I think the film has less impact because of it. The beauty that Dowd sees in the world is never contrasted with the pain he feels, because we the audience are never allowed to experience it with him. It is symbolized in the bar, but never spoken of, and the film misses a chance to describe the beauty of Elwood P. Dowd’s tragedy, and that in itself is a shame.

Ware, Darrow & Loser Sheik

There was a time when it was very cool to be a loser. It is true that there are circles in every city all over America where it is always cool to be a loser, but the period from the release of American Splendor to the moment that the hype around Sideways died (it's dead, right?) was the height of what I affectionately call 'loser sheik'.

It all started with Giamatti's throat-wrenching, but heart-warming portrayal of Harvey Pekar, the genius that nobody had ever heard of, pushed the value of Giamatti's stock as an actor, and sold more books than Pekar had ever dreamed of. And clinging to those skyrocketing coattails was artist R. Crumb, who some people had heard of, but mostly not very nice things. And who should come tumbling after those two, but all the contemporary guys who'd been inspired by both of them who had, until then, been peripheral but persistant self-pitying moans in the impromptu orchestra of the comic book jungle, became the dominant melodic theme: Dan Clowes, local favorite Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware were lauded and lobbied in the windows of independent bookstores and comic book shops everywhere. Owners and counter jockeys sighed with relief: finally the hard working boys of the indie comic scene were getting their due, much in the same way that pinot noir drinkers celebrated merlot's comeuppance upon the release of Sideways.

The captain of this ship of foolish losers is Dan Clowes, whose visionary opus of loser-dom Ghost World anticipated the loser sheik trend years before it reached it's wine-dreg-guzzling peak. It starred Steve Buscemi (the Paul Giamatti of the '90s) and Thora Birch. Perhaps its only stumble was casting Scarlett Johansson who would ditch all her loser cred to become not only a sex-pot, but a successful actress as well. But, as with all things ahead of their time, Ghost World failed to pierce the modern consciousness the way that American Splendor and Sideways later would, and was forced to settle for being a cult classic.

And the whole thing really bothered me. Here was a chance for comics to prove their merit as real storytelling vehicles, but the only stories they were telling were utterly depressing. Pekar's work, while authentic, seemed to be a tale of never ending drudgery, culminating in the book, Our Cancer Year. Crumb's work is at best amusing, but at its worst a clear and shocking look into the mind of the guy who stares at breasts on the city bus, in other words, not a place you necessarily want to be. Clowes is the most aggressively pessimistic of the bunch, actively attacking people he obviously doesn't like. His work reads to me like a pictorial editorial where he maliciously picks apart the flaws of people and pet peeves he doesn't like. His book, Eightball reads like a caricature, constantly portraying people and the world around them as without merit or redeeming value. Chris Ware's picture books are less malicious than Clowes, but perhaps more sadistic. His obsessive control of the creative space and his obsession with diagrammatical minutiae and convolutions of the narrative process often make absorbing his vision difficult to the point of impossibility.

What bothers me most about the work of all these people is its functional hypocrisy: that these men constantly portray themselves as failures, but who are, in reality, not that at all. Their work sleights the work of cartooning, buying into the idea, and therefore reinforcing it, that cartoonists are lay-abouts, depressives and losers, when in actuality their portrayal requires a draughtsmanship and characterization that requires hard work and persistence that is rarely glimpsed in the books themselves.

Because all of their work sails under the flag autobiographical, albeit in varying degrees from fully to semi-, they have given their work a weight that implies "this is the world is", but might be more rightly described, "these are feelings I really felt." Ultimately the stories in these books, that are often portrayed as more "real" than their superhero counterparts, are just as fictive, merely in a more mundane and depressing way. While their emotional quotient is more quotidian, dealing with the difficulty of everyday life, their composition, such as it is, requires the necessary negation of success, or the portrayal of success in a negative light, in order to maintain its "loser" or "real" credentials.

It's possible that my interpretation of the nature of the interrelation of an author's life and its work is needlessly negative. It could as easily be said that the hypocrisy is a hopeful one, since the fact that the work, in whatever form, did in fact get published and that these men therefore can't hide the fact that they are hardworking and successful artists, and because of the unavoidable reality that the reader is holding and reading their work that they then have license to portray themselves in whatever way they like within the confines of their work, since its so obvious that they have been successful despite their shortcomings. I disagree because of the association that seems to have been implicitly attached to their work; that it has been labeled "real" in contrast to the more fantastic superhero books, giving their equally fictional content more weight in the minds of readers.

•••

There was a time when I believed that because of the hypocrisy of the books that they were without merit. In fact, I believed this until Friday. Or at least mostly believed it. I had been wooed in some ways by Tony Millionaire's "Maakies" which is to loser sheik like Bukowski was to the Beats: present, but often unaccounted for. "Maakies" takes the same unsympathetic view toward the frustrations of everyday life that the others' books do, but there is something more charming about it to me than the rest of the work, perhaps because it falls on the far side the duchy of autobiography, and is therefore more accessible to me because it does not purport to be "real".

So perhaps my resolve had already been weakened by then. Or perhaps it was at the "Masters of American Comics" exhibition at MOCA and the Hammer Museums in LA last year where I got to see the breadth of Chris Ware's work in person, from his mechanical productions to original pages of Rusty Brown, where his draughtsmanship, rather than his obsession, came through. Either way, on Friday, I pulled a copy of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth from the comic book shelves of Pendragon books on College and didn't put it back immediately. A good friend of mine from college swore by the book, and friends whose opinions I value regarding picture books had often spoken highly of Ware's opus and so I stacked it on top of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and took it home.

What I discovered is a melancholy world meticulously portrayed through clean lines, solid colors, and an obsessive rendition of architecture, from the skyline of contemporary Chicago, to its predecessor at the 1837 Columbian exhibition to the uninspired interior of Jimmy's father's cheap apartment. And it's not that I don't like detail; I love Geoff Darrow. I bought the King Size version of Big Guy and Rusty the Robot so I could examine his drawings in detail without having to squint or hold it up close. Ware and Darrow are nothing if not compatriots in attention to details, but they are opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to how it happens. Ware has a strangle hold on his narrative, allowing it to slip from his fingers one panel at a time at an often times excruciating pace. He lingers over every moment, appreciating it in all of its beautiful stillness.

Darrow's work runs riot over the page, its details lending the expansive and lively narration a weight that is lacking in any similarly themed book, and what makes Darrows work unique is not the themes (robots, dinosaurs and heaps and heaps of violence), but the level of exquisite detail in which those themes are rendered. No pebble goes unvariegated, no face goes unpocked, no skin goes unwrinkled. But readers are encouraged to pour over the material at whatever pace and in whatever order they like. His most recent book, Shaolin Cowboy, is marked by its lack of panels. The narrative is often told in spreads that take up the entire two pages of the open comic book. In issue six four of the last six pages of the book are actually a panel that is four pages large; two by two. Darrow's work does the exact opposite of Ware's: it expands past the page, turning the full page into merely a panel of larger work, where Ware divides the page into hundreds of tiny panels.

Despite Ware's tyrannical control of narrative pacing, there is a beautiful and haunting story of abandonment within Jimmy Corrigon. It is a complex and textured narrative that, as has been noted by John Carlin in his essay "Masters of American Comics", never lets you forget you're reading a comic book. The self-conscious narrative is at times tedious, but also allows Ware to indulge in acts of design that would not otherwise be allowed, and should they have been abandoned for a more 'natural' form of narrative the story and the book would suffer for it. It is both the haunting sense of emptiness and abandonment and this anxious sense of self-awareness that in no uncertain terms make Ware the poster-boy for Postmodern picture books as well as solidify his credentials as a member in good standing of loser sheik, which, as I happily discovered this weekend, does not mean that his work isn't worth reading.