We are ugly but we have the music...

... croons Leonard Cohen in The Chelsea Hotel No. 2.

You told me yourself you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception...

Which reminds me of when I fell in love with a big, big person with pale, freckle-speckled skin, who had carrot hair and limpid blue eyes and a face stuck halfway between grubby primary school kid and weathered man. A bit like an ogre, I suppose. Or a sort of orange King Kong. He was one of the most beautiful people I have ever encountered. Something about his ugliness was wildly fascinating and desperately beautiful. I obsessively wrote about the look of him.

Wise Blood is not without a similar appeal. Really, this is often a hideous novel about hideous people in a hideous town. Hazel Motes is the possessor of "a nose like a shrike's bill" (p.4) and his scull appears to protrude from his skin through hair that "looked as if it had been permanently flattened under the heavy hat" (p.4). When Hazel visits the seediest prostitute in town, he finds "a big woman with very yellow hair and white skin that glistened with a greasy perspiration". Her teeth are "small and pointed and speckled with green and there was a wide space between each one." Haze finds his senses "stirred to the limit" (p. 21), and they have sex in the dirty room when she is done clipping her toenails. Ugly, perverse, grotesque, and utterly compulsive reading.

My interest in this entry is primarily the cinematic ugly in relation to the aesthetic of Wise Blood as well as the presiding aesthetic of Australian film. I am use the word "ugly" in direct contrast to the supreme gloss of the classic Hollywood film, which cannot bear to cast someone less than conventionally beautiful in its leading roles. For example, the Howard Roark of Rand's novel was supposed to have a face that was somehow repellant, if not ugly to the average person. Gary Cooper, how ever, is far from ugly - in fact he is quite gorgeous.

Wise Blood is a cinematic novel for its unabashed and singular interest in surface. O'Conner does not delve beneath the epidermal veneer of anything, even though the novel form itself encourages this kind of deeper analysis. She prefers to depict people and settings as if through a camera lens, as events without explanation, people who are impenetrable and are only knowable through what is visible about them. As such, this book is necessarily read cinematically: shots, lighting, soundtrack, film quality and image texture are the ways in which we see the story develop.

My internal movie screen (which has reappeared again and I wish I had named it something better to start with, but it seems the name has stuck) plays Wise Blood: The Movie in the aesthetic style that it unconsciously decided suited the text, probably from the novel's very first line. It installs a lens, decides on contrast levels, picks a musical score. Our minds really are installed with a little cinematographer. I imagine mine looks rather like Vertov. He stand with his eye to my retina, analyses the data for me, and decides on which cinematic elements are appropriate for screening. O'Conner has done well in recognising this and capitalising on this in Wise Blood.

The resulting film?

Well - in terms of style, lighting, filter, exposure, acting - like the stock-standard, Dendy-endorsed, quirky-sad-ugly-beautiful Australian film. It won't sell, but it will certainly inspire a small group of cult followers.

Everyone will have noticed the marked aesthetic difference between the American Hollywood drama and the Australian Film Institute drama. Having little technical knowledge of film, I have always struggled expressing this interesting difference, save from saying rather crudely that American films are glossy as opposed to a the certain very raw drabness of Australian films. I asked a friend if he knew what I meant by this different aesthetic. He said yes, of course. I pressed him to describe it. "A sort of washed-out quality," he said. "The colours in Australian films aren't as saturated." He suggested that an Australian film is matte to the American glossy. Not technical, but in its way, accurate.

I don't know whether it is an agreed-upon style, or whether it has to do with a kind of mood in our landscape and cities, or the fact that the budget is low, or that our cameras used are not as good (surely not), or that our tastes are different. What I do know is that for its modesty, its honesty, its muted colours that are closer to the real colours of things, I like this aesthetic better. It is more soulful. It makes for a different, darker, arguably more meaningful cinematic experience. And it was this kind of dark but thought-provoking cinematic experience I had reading O'Conner.

I was taught by the highly entertaining Marc Brennan last semester, and we had a class discussion about why the Australian film industry is failing to win box office profits. Brennan launched into one of his articulate assaults at backward-looking, non-proponents of pop culture, which usually I quite enjoy. However this time, his assault was aimed at the kind of film, that traditional Dendy-style Australian film, which happen to be my favourite. Most loathsome at all in his eyes was Somersault - which I loved. I said as much, and he looked at me incredulously. Why? he said. They're all so deathly depressing. And dreary. And ugly. Bring on the blockbuster any day. Those guys at Dendy are so bloody narrow-minded and set in their ways. If Australia did more genre films, and less of all that moody, so-called culturally important stuff, our film industry would boom, said he.

Oh, but Marc, what would Howard Roark say to that! What about integrity?

I like the gritty visuals. They aid the telling in the story without the need for a single word. They suit the stories being told: Australian stories just as much as Wise Blood is a story specific to the Deep South. Flannery O'Conner shrouds her whole novel in this kind of cinematic texture: dark interior spaces, pale, white-washed exterior spaces. She doesn't write it explicitly, but you know that's how it looks where Hazel Motes is.

I think we live in a country whose natural and urban features are conducive to this kind of filmic representation also. There is nothing glossy about Australia outside of Sydney. Instead there are muted blues, greens and purples, dusty earth, pale blue skies with strong, white light. To me, it is formidably beautiful. I love it in Somersault the way everything in the freezing Snowy Mountains air seems to have a blueish hue - and am reminded of Rose Hobart. I love the drama and tension between what is beautiful and what is coarse, or ugly.

Similar examples of this aesthetic can be found in Australian films such as Two Hands, Look Both Ways, Little Fish, Wolf Creek. Brilliant, each one. I'm a citizen in favour of the Australian film, dark and moody and quirky and honest.

And so I say: long live the domain of the ugly, disfigured, damaged, perverse, gritty, drab, Mrs. Watts, bad teeth, a weird hat, an ugly child with two plaits, a scarred non-preacher, a mummified shrunken "jesus", a rat-coloured car and a strange dark boy in a car yard who says nothing but swear words.

You make the cinema beautiful.

Works cited:

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood, London: Faber and Faber, 1985.