Huston's Under the Volcano - Incompatibility on a Grand Scale

John Huston [1906-1987] belongs among the top 10 American movie directors of all time. Aside from his cinematic instincts--which often seemed infallible--he had a deep interest in literary narrative, and sought to adapt a number of what he regarded as classic texts to the screen, especially towards the end of his career, when he had the authority and cred to pull them off.  

One of his late successes was the adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano [1947]. Set in Mexico, it's a profoundly autobiographical account of a severe alcoholic Englishman. Lowry makes him a minor British diplomat, but that's simply a convenience: His real interest is the graphic contrast he gets by placing Geoffrey Firmin (played by Albert Finney) in a "primitive" culture in which suffering and death are celebrated and embraced, rather than avoided and ignored. In a verbal narrative, Firmin's mental torments can be described from the inside out, in the usual way. In cinema, these psychological aspects have either to be fantasized or obliquely dramatized. Firmin's alcoholic delusions and acting-out serve as an ironic vehicle for Lowry's metaphysical ruminations, which then sets up melodramatic and comic asides. 

The central issue is whether Firmin's wife Yvonne (played by Jacqueline Bisset), with whom he has a steadily deteriorating relationship, can seduce him back to a rational, and sober, life. Complicating this is the presence of Firmin's half-brother, Hugh (played by Anthony Andrews), who has had a brief affair with Yvonne at some point in the past. Hugh is recently returned from serving as a journalist (and Royalist supporter) covering the Spanish Civil War.   

Firmin's alcoholic dependence is typically driven by self-pity and depression, his increasing awareness of his mortality, and his existence consists of a series of quixotic confrontations, eventually leading to his death--and Yvonne's--by a handful of hoodlums in a semi-rural whorehouse-tavern. The symbolic framework of the film--the "volcano" smoldering in the background, the death masks and rattles during the Mexican Day of the Dead, the white horse which rears, killing Yvonne--function on another metaphorical level, somewhat obscured, of necessity, in the movie. Firmin's struggles with the demon drink are ultimately tragic, but the means by which that unfolds is a belittling and pointless descent into primitivistic forces, at odds with his dignified and intellectual bearing. His fatalistic determination to wrestle with alcohol is simultaneously "heroic" and absurd: Toying with death in a degraded, corrupt world is no less risky than engaging in real conflict.

The central "incompatibility" which exists between Firmin's papier mache world of chimeras and masks, and the actual Dante-esque Hell of Mexico, is replicated in the incompatibility between the prose narrative and the cinematic representation of it as staged by Huston. Can dream-narratives, like The Naked Lunch, or Ulysses, be represented graphically, without mangling their central purpose and potential as literary-psychological tracts? Huston may have been just a little too optimistic about his own literary loves. On the one hand, we admire any moviemaker (or scriptwriter's) tendency to want to make movies more "literary" than they may seem to "want" to be. On the other hand, it is useful to remember than movies--two-dimensional visual sequences based on the mimicry of moving deliberately through perceived space and time, have severe limitations when it comes to describing complex psychological data, which words can probably evoke more effectively. The most successful "adaptations" are from straight drama, to the screen; but such "theatricality" doesn't necessarily make good cinema. Imagine trying to make literature out of Charlie Chaplin, or John Wayne. The qualities which animate our attention in a movie house rarely are translatable "backwards" to a text. 

Larry McMurtry, notably, has said that attempts to "literize" screenplays are doomed--or should be forbidden--because they can't qualify as separate documents. He argues--convincingly, since he is experienced in both straight writing as well as screenwriting--that a screenplay isn't a fixed document, but merely a scaffolding, an outline which any director can alter in any one of a number of ways. Hence, no "shooting" script is really a fixed literary draft, only an intermediary means to an end (the shot and edited movie). One wants to argue, however, that there are great movies, out of which a faithful rendering can be made, and which can stand, by themselves, the same way any successful dramatic writing can (visual and aural fireworks aside). And there were directors--Hitchcock comes immediately to mind--who insisted on rigidly precise shooting scripts, complete with mock-ups of visual relationships followed to the letter. 

What is "dramatic literature"? Is a poem read aloud a dramatic event? Of course. Or at least it can be, in the right hands. Can a great novel, a great psychological study, in which the outward events of the "action" are the mere pretexts for the philosophical or metaphysical explorations of the main character or characters, be faithfully rendered on screen? That is probably the main question this movie attempts to answer. I wish Huston were still around to answer it.