Daniel Bell
REDS: A FABLE
That was long, long ago; and
bes ides, it was not true anyway.
-old Ru ssia n saying
R eds
is a film that runs 3 hours and 22 minutes, with an
inte rmi ss ion. It seems like two films, a nd it is; the one about Loui se
Bryant , the other about J ohn R eed.
The first film derives from a novel. Mos t such films seek to
ada pt a novel literall y, ye t invariabl y fa il because the rhythm and
texture of words on a page , controll ed by the stop-a nd- go re fl ections
of the reader , cannot be repeated on the different picture plane in the
different se nsuousness of images imposed by the cutting and
montage of the direc tor. Some few films, howeve r , often uninten–
ti onall y, transpose a novel onto film no t by the litera l repe titi on of
text and content , but by a me tamorphos is into a diffe rent se tting
which captures the esse nce of the book. Dos toevsky's
The Possessed
was conveyed no t in a ny filmed renditi on of the book, but in
God ard's
L a Chinoise,
where the French students, mouthing the revo–
lutiona ry rhetori c a nd the innocent catechi sm of des tructio n which
hera lds the Cultura l R evolution befo re it a rri ves, give one vividl y
the sense of Dostoevsky's meanings and in tentions . In a similar
sense,
R eds,
Pa rt I , is
M adame Bovary,
in whi ch the cha rades of
Emma/Loui se, played out in the widening gy re of the feminist
ambition to break out of the encorse ted self, provide a ful gid
depicti on of the phenomenon known as
bovaryisme.
By the turn of the century,
bovaryisme
was a cultural ma lady that
had colored the sentimental imagina tion. In Spa nish a nd Portu–
guese novels, love-sick girls, having read
Madame Bovary,
wait
anxiously for life to realize a rt (through the double medium of their
own fevered novelistic longings); for some lovers to come and rescue
them from the ir own pa llid exi stence. In Portl and , Oregon , Loui e
Bryant , ma rried to a dull upper-middle-class dentist , sends her
pass iona te poe try a nd sketches to
Blast ,
an ana rchi st weekl y edited
by Al exander Berkma n ; lists he rself in the city directory as a n editor
and a rti st ; and pa nts to j oin The R ebellion , the te rm whi ch the
Young Intell ec tua ls a nd the Free Spirits in Greenwich Vill age were
fl aunting to describe their emancipa tion from Purita n repression .
