Other Voices, Other Rooms
With Lothaire Bluteau, Anna Thomson, David Speck, April Turner, and Frank Taylor.
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This is appropriate, because Capote’s strength in Other Voices, Other Rooms is above all stylistic and atmospheric–a capacity to evoke a fever dream in exploring a fanciful and allegorical version of his own past. A third-person southern gothic narrative about a 13-year-old boy, Joel, sent from New Orleans after the death of his mother to a crumbling, isolated plantation house to live with his father, whom he’s never met, the novel was described by Capote as “a poetic explosion in highly suppressed emotion.” Its full autobiographical significance dawned on him only after he was more than twice as old as he was when he wrote it. A dark and highly ambivalent account of Capote’s turn toward homosexuality, it was sufficiently cloaked in phantasmagoric trappings that it evoked only a fraction of the homophobic response that greeted Gore Vidal’s more overt The City and the Pillar around the same time (one probable source of the lifelong feud between these writers). Yet it’s a politically incorrect treatment of homosexuality by contemporary standards and could hardly be adapted faithfully today without ruffling some feathers. Needless to say, the filmmakers haven’t even attempted to honor this aspect of the book, and the pivotal ending gets reversed as a consequence.
The failure of the recent adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita–directed by Adrian Lyne and scripted by Stephen Schiff–to find an American distributor has been attributed to its politically incorrect erotic agenda and to American puritanism, though there’s reason to believe that the studio’s asking price has played a more significant role in this “suppression.” (The gauging of American morals has proved difficult, despite the absolute confidence of many journalists expounding on the subject; witness the surety with which they warned of Bill Clinton’s imminent impeachment.) Having seen Lolita three weeks ago in Paris, I can report that in spite of Lyne’s clodhopper direction–which predictably runs the gamut from soft-core porn in the manner of David Hamilton to hectoring rhetorical uses of close-ups and wide-angle lenses–this is a genuinely disturbing (if far from literary) adaptation of the novel. And it shines in the area where Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation is deficient: the actress playing Lolita looks like she’s 14, making this much more a story about corrupted innocence, and it unfolds in American locations in the late 40s. In every other respect, however, Kubrick’s version is superior and will clearly endure as the better movie.
Capote’s backward glance at the book–“A Voice From a Cloud” (1969), included in his collection The Dog Barks–contends that Other Voices, Other Rooms was “an attempt to exorcise demons: an unconscious, altogether intuitive attempt, for I was not aware, except for a few incidents and descriptions, of its being in any serious degree autobiographical. Rereading it now, I find such self-deception unpardonable.” Eager to grant pardon, the movie adaptation aims at ersatz “conscious” autobiography–a different thing entirely, and all the more dubious when it implicitly cancels out the impulses that made the original book possible. As Capote’s best biographer, Gerald Clarke, has pointed out, “In its lack of realism and its reliance on symbolism, Other Voices is less a novel than a romance. A novel is, or should be, inhabited by realistic characters with a past and a future, as well as a present; a romance, by contrast, contains unrealistic, stylized figures who stand as psychological archetypes. ‘That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of subjective intensity that the novel lacks,’ explains the critic Northrop Frye, ‘and why a suggestion of allegory is constantly creeping in around the fringes.’” (Elsewhere in “A Voice From a Cloud,” Capote plausibly speculates that Poe exerted a strong influence on the novel.)
