Amadeus, Reflections, Shadows (Patreon)

What I found to be the best idea in Milos Forman's Mozart biopic is the film's suggestion that his secret rival, Antonio Salieri, had finished Mozart's Requiem as a final period to the sentence of their relationship and careers -- a frustrated, self-conceived mediocrity paying attendance to his hated friend, writing down his final notations before Mozart succumbs to death-sleep, and in the final draught of that night, Salieri completes the work he originally planned to steal and perform under his own name, and has it then taken away from him by the arrival of Mozart's wife come morning.

There is an intense anxiety in this picture about the place of the 'mediocre artist' in the world -- destined to always be in the shadow of the singular Greats, yet simultaneously fulfilling a spectrum of what it means to be Great -- could there be a Mozart without a Salieri, without a man whose comparatively lesser talents foreground the size and scope of what Mozart sets out to achieve?

I know very little about classical music, but I think this question, when applied to the cinema, can yield tasty fruit. Let's take auteur theory -- the policy of viewing film through the lens of a single authorship, or authorships which either compete or compliment for control of the work of art. The creation of a 'canon' to cinema, which primarily occurred with force during the 40s, 50s and 60s, in books like Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema, the criticism of Richard Roud, and the journals of Chahiers du Cinema, this was a time in which hard decisions were made of who is or isn't an artist worth considering: Howard Hawks and Roberto Rossellini were 'in', and John Farrow or Michael Curtiz were 'out', the wagons were circling in order to define cinema as an unassailable Seventh Artform with a Canon of Great Masters -- enough history had accumulated in this space where one could pick and choose which artists held greater consistency, potency and relevancy. In effect, the cinema was finally able to emerge out of the shadows of theatre and literature to speak with its own force -- no longer aesthetically owned by producers or writers, movies now had their Mozarts and Bachs and Wagners.

But they necessarily also now had their Salieris, as well. To take a look at The American Cinema, which I am always happy to do, there is an underlying pattern to the way Andrew Sarris articulates his canon, which with a few exceptions has more or less become the standard canon of Hollywood. This pattern is the tracing of a shadow -- from his entry on Henry Hathaway:

"The professional detractors of Ford and Hawks almost invariably attempt to palm off Hathaway as a reasonable facsimile, but such a comparison is patently absurd. Hathaway has directed manly likable films . . . Unfortunately, Hathaway has directed, however amiably, too many clinkers. On balance, Hathaway has had a creditable career on Hollywood's roulette wheel, but nothing approaching the high plateau of Ford and Hawks."

And his entry on Tod Browning:

"On a purely technical level, Browning seems less talented than Whale, not to mention Murnau and Dreyer on the sublime level of obsessional horror."

Very frequently in the book are gaggles of 'minor' directors in the back end of 'Lightly Likeable' or 'Miscellany' who are associated by contrast with a superior double, either a Pantheon Auteur or someone in The Far Side of Paradise, places where Sarris heaves his greatest laudatory remarks. And don't we always do this, compare one director to another? It's basic, but what I find interesting is when you have one talent who has a parasitic relationship to another -- see John Stahl's relationship to Douglas Sirk, Robert Siodmak to Fritz Lang, William Wellman to Howard Hawks. Time and again, these 'singular' auteurs of Sarris and other canons are dutifully accompanied by their toady shadows, whose lumbering or scattered stylistic quirks serve to illustrate even further the greatness of Ford, Welles, etc., in the same exact way that Salieri is the 'shadow' of Mozart, spurning him on to complete his final masterwork from a psychotic combination of love and hatred -- whether or not Hathaway existed in this way with Hawks and Ford is immaterial, he is positioned as-such, and it makes a degree of emotional and even logistical sense (Hathaway directed films like 14 Hours which Hawks was going to make but rejected -- the shadow does the work that the master won't touch...)

The phrase "No man is a hero to his valet" can serve our ends here -- usually taken to mean that the servitor 'sees the master for who he really is' instead of a hero, it can also indicate a sense of twisted equality between the 'hero' and the 'valet', substituted in our terms for the 'auteur' and the 'journeyman' directors. This logic of subservience tells us that, in a suspiciously occluded way, there is a necessity for one's 'shadow' -- "Oh, I'm not like him, he's a bad imitator", the copy-cats, the trend-chasers, or the old creaky standby who won't get with the times, the company man, the steady-hand, simply plugging away at making films as a job, never exceeding his role or any expectations -- this is the person whom is hated when we need to prop-up our favorites, the 'hack' who symbiotically falters whenever the auteur succeeds.

But imagine a canon without any of this figures -- would John Ford, by himself, seem as special? Or would we not even be able to define him strongly? You'd hope the work could speak for itself, but I have half a mind that it might be a bit harder if we didn't have this legacy of criticism which tells us who to pay attention to and why. Howard Hawks, who worked in every genre and did his best to efface an 'invisible' style, might then become this 'journeyman', if we didn't have Henry Hathaway or William Wellman -- the light cast back into the shadow, not by any lack of its merits, but by a lack of context.

I say all this not with a contrarian's eye to then come here and tell you the counter-myth, that Hathaway handily beats back Hawks, that Salieri surpasses Mozart -- one can believe or not believe such things, and this pendulum-swinging doesn't interest me, where we have to 'pick a side' in an effort to prove our taste. For my money, there are many excellent Henry Hathaway films, but he is harder to pin down than Hawks, less has been said about him, he didn't give so many interviews, and so by proxy we then have to find the light in that shadow, we are torch-bearers and trail-blazers uncovering both buried treasure and cheap junk.

What I do want to say is that I think we would do well to pay more attention to these 'journeymen' than we are usually inclined to do -- in our rush to crown the next great artist, we often end up passing-by the pleasures obtained by their shadows. Henry Hathaway's 'Shepard of The Hills' is a gorgeous and poignant film, one of his best works and the product of an artist who clearly cared about what they did, but because it is Fordian without being directed by John Ford himself, we then say it's a 'minor' work, because it is made without an accompanying reputation -- I wish it was otherwise.

I round out these thoughts with a reflection on one of my literary fixations -- H.P. Lovecraft, the man who more than anyone created a 'canon' of supernatural literature and horror in his famous essay and remarks, had many positive things to say about his contemporaries such as Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard. But none of them were the most popular writers of Weird Tales, the magazine they all orbited around -- no, that man went by the name of Seabury Quinn. Here's what Lovecraft had to say regarding him:

"Seabury Quinn—whose longer tales I simply cannot wade through—is the perfect popular ideal—those who differ from him have just so much less chance of suiting cheap editors."

Throughout Lovecraft's correspondence, there is a clear and repeated distaste for Quinn and Quinn's writing, who succeeded penning pulp adventures while Howard wasn't able to publish his more ambitious novelettes -- but today, Quinn and his occult detective stories are almost forgotten, while Lovecraft is the grey eminence of the literary fields he would go on to help create in science fiction, horror and fantasy. One man stepped out of the shadow, and the other delved back into it.

When Lovecraft died from stomach cancer in 1937, there was a number of obituaries written for him in the June 7th issue of Weird Tales. Among them was the voice of Seabury Quinn:

"Lovecraft, who I had the pleasure of knowing personally, was both a scholar and a gentleman, and his writings disclosed both his scholarship and his gentility, as well as a genius which has not been observable since the death of Poe and Hawthorne. We who knew him well shall miss his quiet humor and his always-interesting conversation; thousands of those who had never met the man will join us in deploring the loss of his contributions to a field of literature which he had made peculiarly his own. God rest his soul."

https://archive.org/details/WeirdTalesV29N06193706/page/764/mode/2up

The 'popular ideal' who Lovecraft couldn't stand was one of the first to pay his respects to him -- for a single moment, the shadow and the light seemed to meet in an evening twilight. And one wonders whether Howard would have scorned Quinn as much as he did had he known that Quinn held him in such high esteem -- and similar what-ifs haunt Salieri and Mozart in Forman's film, and in the history of cinema there are plenty of these relationships, two individuals who seem both diametrically opposed to one another while remaining inseparable. Seabury Quinn's popular success allowed Weird Tales to flourish so that Lovecraft was able to publish anything at all -- we might not know Howard's name if not for this 'shadow'. It seems to me this is so with almost every great artist -- lurking behind them is another person, a hollow shell who had the necessary misfortune to be witness to greatness and not to embody it themselves, as Salieri condemns God for giving him a love of music but not the genius to convey that love through works of devotion.

It is easy to admire the genius, but to seek out his doppelganger is stranger territory still, and it seems we are inclined to forget these people rather than acknowledge their contribution to a more pluralistic history of the arts. But without them, our understanding will forever remain incomplete -- we must respect the mediocrity who worships greatness, because no man is a hero without his valet.