The Marlowe Problem
At last at last I got to see Only Lovers Left Alive. It was straight-out wonderful, feeding a lot of my aesthetic needs: languorous pacing (but nicely judged), sumptuously decaying locations, proper married-people romantic interaction between Adam (Tom Hiddleston's delicious character) and Eve (Tilda Swinton's awesome character), witty and metaphor-rich dialogue with a nod or two towards camp.
But it also got me thinking about my Christopher Marlowe problem.
Only Lovers Left Alive is another one of the battalion of modern texts in which W Shakespeare is slagged off and Christopher Marlowe exalted, and I am as ever baffled why. Or rather, I know why, but cannot imagine myself into that reader-position at all.
Marlowe in these texts is a beautiful overreacher, more Miltonic Lucifer than Faustus. (See Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel for an explicit example. I threw the book across the room several times and, while I finished it, never picked up its sequel.) Super-Marlowe is wise and foolish and sexy (even when old, if played by John Hurt); He Knows What True Poetry Is. There's a conceit of aestheticism and danger around this vision of Marlowe, and thus he is valorized over a Shakespeare who (as in OLLA) gets epithets like 'bourgeois philistine'.
As a bourgeois philistine myself, I roll my eyes at this. But I also notice that Shakespeare's ability to write political figures, his pitch-perfect characterization of middle-class and working-class figures, his mastery of fantasy and romance, and -- it has to be said -- his ability to write parts for women are never mentioned in connection with Super-Marlowe. And maybe that's why I will sigh a little, even in a film that otherwise is exactly to my taste, when Christopher Marlowe is exalted.
I should probably amend my subject-line. It's not THE Christopher Marlowe Problem, it's MY Christopher Marlowe Problem.
In conclusion: Only Lovers Left Alive is languid, talky, visually arresting great fun, and I loved it to pieces, despite my CMP.
Is there a popular conception of a writer or genre that makes your jaw clench in annoyance? Or am I alone? ;)
Cheers, and may you have feasts and dancing to take you into your next week.
But it also got me thinking about my Christopher Marlowe problem.
Only Lovers Left Alive is another one of the battalion of modern texts in which W Shakespeare is slagged off and Christopher Marlowe exalted, and I am as ever baffled why. Or rather, I know why, but cannot imagine myself into that reader-position at all.
Marlowe in these texts is a beautiful overreacher, more Miltonic Lucifer than Faustus. (See Elizabeth Bear's Ink and Steel for an explicit example. I threw the book across the room several times and, while I finished it, never picked up its sequel.) Super-Marlowe is wise and foolish and sexy (even when old, if played by John Hurt); He Knows What True Poetry Is. There's a conceit of aestheticism and danger around this vision of Marlowe, and thus he is valorized over a Shakespeare who (as in OLLA) gets epithets like 'bourgeois philistine'.
As a bourgeois philistine myself, I roll my eyes at this. But I also notice that Shakespeare's ability to write political figures, his pitch-perfect characterization of middle-class and working-class figures, his mastery of fantasy and romance, and -- it has to be said -- his ability to write parts for women are never mentioned in connection with Super-Marlowe. And maybe that's why I will sigh a little, even in a film that otherwise is exactly to my taste, when Christopher Marlowe is exalted.
I should probably amend my subject-line. It's not THE Christopher Marlowe Problem, it's MY Christopher Marlowe Problem.
In conclusion: Only Lovers Left Alive is languid, talky, visually arresting great fun, and I loved it to pieces, despite my CMP.
Is there a popular conception of a writer or genre that makes your jaw clench in annoyance? Or am I alone? ;)
Cheers, and may you have feasts and dancing to take you into your next week.