Elegy Postmortem

Andrew Strycharski { No, don't take notes, because honestly, it's not worth it. Don't don't give it a thought. } This movie was called Elegy so, let's go right to the big questions, shall we. Does Elegy become, a different movie, because we watch it, well, yes. Why? Because we bring something to the movie. We bring ourselves. What's more, you watch this movie again in ten years it will change because you've changed. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What you have brought to the movie may lead you to see this as a touching love story, a remarkable meditation on life and death. Filled with the passion and energy of your youth, filled with your idealism, you may find here the triumph of love, or a tale of exquisit and painful salvation. How might this movie change for you over the years? How might it become different if you should yourself become, say, a bald English professor with a taste for sport coats and carefully-groomed facial hair? I'm going to try to imagine how such a one might see this movie. You might be surprised to hear. The idea of how this movie might appear to ME in ten years came up rather starkly because watching this it felt like it took ten years before the closing credits finally rolled. I'm not saying the movie's pace is slow, but I hear Unforgiven called and sued for trademark infringement. I've often wondered with what slow torture the hours, the quarter hours, the minutes, each ticking second must pass for an alocoholic who shows up after the wedding and discovers he's at a dry reception. I now think I know. Ah, but Dr. Strycharski, you're an English professor. Don't you love films, and books, that are so filled with life and meaning and that kind of stuff? My dears, my life is lonely, boring and painful, and when I go to the movies, I'd really don't want to see my own desperate meaninglessness reflected back to me. I want to see shit blow up. Yes, that hypothetical bald Eglish professor would probably do what our tribe does when watching movies about us, which is start some small-minded nitpicking about how distorted the image of English professors always is in movies. He might even begin by noting the Dr. Kepesh says he's teaching a course in Practical Criticism [a term made popular by I.A. Richards's book right here] and then embraces a theoretical position that is diametrically opposed to the fundamental principles of Practical Criticism. [Dr. Kepesh, you're a bullshit professor.] And why do movie English professors always seem to pull down rock start salaries? Who can afford a spacious two-story condo in Manhattan? [At least we didn't have to observe the esual lushly furnished oak-filled office with 14-foot ceilings and a row of stained-glass windows. Yeah, that's what my office is like.] Clearly Dr. Kepesh doesn't pay alimony and probably avoided child support payments, too. Perhaps that's the real reason Kenneth is so angry.

In a more generous mood, though, our dead sexy bald English professor might focus some attention on this film's title, Elegy, and a change from Roth's title for his novel The Dying Animal. The dark parody of Roth's title faces adversely the attitude of Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium whence that line itself is drawn. If the speaker of Yeat's poem seeks escape from this mortal coil (the mere flesh that ages, weakens, and dies) seeks escape from this to fully live the energy of its spirit, a focus on the dying animal instead would insist that the beauty of what is simple and human can only be grasped on the hither side of a journey through the utter abjection of a full and disillusioned understanding of our mere and unredeemable, and dying, animal-ness. A dying animal is robbed of any grandeur, heroism, even the stately pall of tragedy and is merely whimpering and pathetic. Only through fully confronting this fact of ourselves, Roth's title would seem to suggest, might we come to an unclouded appreciation for is beautiful and worthwhile and perhaps noble in our lives and deaths and love. Through the alchemy of Elegy, however, the pathetic is itself transmuted not to something tragic, but lyrical; neither modern nor postmodern, but classical; and, just as important, I think, not simply a realistic representation, but a self-conscious work of arta song. In classical prosody, the elegiac meter is a verse formslightly less elevated than the hexameters of epic and tragedy, but higher certainly than forms used for seduction or satire. Classical elegiac poetry was a serious, sustained meditation on some serious themetypically love, war and death. In the Renaissance, elegy became nearly synonymous with a poem lamenting the death of a companion, friend or love, and has continued so to this day. In elegy the truly big questionsnot whether literature changes because we read itbut what does it all mean, in the face of death and dying what do our lives, what does our existence finally mean? When death comes and covers all in a universal blank what will our ambitions and our striving and our toil and our fame and glory and conquests matter? What boots it with in cessant care, asks the speaker of Milton's pastoral elegy Lycidas, to strinctly meditate the thankless muse? for always, when we think to burst out into sudden blaze,/ Comes the blind fury with th'abhorrid shears,/ And slits the thin-spun life. If Milton can find comfort that our rewards are in heaven, not on earth, such comforts are unavailable to a David Kepesh or Consuela Castillo. What comfort is there in this elegy, then? For we begin with David Kepeshemancipated but lonely, a man who can no longer avoid that duty dance with his own death that he has spent his life ignoring. His seeming confidence, it is revealed in a series of excruciating scenes, only masks a deep fear that a life of selfish hedonism and pleasure seeking has not prepared him to face. And given the chance, the miraculous chance to love, to expose his soul to another who will accept it, he retreats into his own safe, numb existence. Yet the movie turns on that incredible moment when the woman who had offered him this chance unexpectedly must face her own mortalityand she similarly retreats, fearful of exposing her soul stripped (to her mind, at least) of the physical beauty that she does not know what to do with. These are indeed two of a kind, their love is right, and we end with David now showing the courage that Consuela had finally taught him, even in the moment when it failed her, the two laying on her hospital bed, mortal, sharing care, intimacy, completely, at last, exposed to each other. The answer? An answer, and a moving one worthy of a lyrically filmed, actedand yes, pacedelegy.