4 hours ago
3
I want to believe in reincarnation because I want to come back as Paul Mescal. What it must be like to be irresistible. I’m sure it gets wearing, but I’d still like to give it a try, just for research purposes. Not so much for the carnal stuff, but for the way every word he utters is taken to be as beautiful as he is. Intoxicated by their admiration, his admirers leap headfirst into the still waters of his pronouncements apparently certain of hidden depths thereunder.
So it has been with the reaction to how he comforted his director when she confessed, in so many words, that she couldn’t always grasp what Shakespeare was on about. We’ve all been there. At least I have. There there, quoth Mescal: “Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body, the language is written like that.”
You know what that is, don’t you? That’s balls, that’s what that is. Of course you need to understand what’s being said and what’s going on. At least I do. I’ve often been told not to trouble myself with such trifling details. Just let the artistry wash over you, I’m told, and consider how it makes me feel. Well, I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me feel confused, rather inadequate, frustrated, even angry, ultimately disengaged and therefore bored. Just plain bored.
It’s different with visual art, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I know nowt about it. Here it is liberating to be able to just stand there and take in a picture or sculpture or installation of some kind and see how it makes me, yes, feel. But with plays, films and TV shows, I need more. If I can’t understand the words I’m unlikely to understand the plot, and if I can’t understand the plot I’ll have no interest in the words anyway. Somerset Maugham wrote that the plot is “a lifeline which the author throws to the reader in order to hold his interest”. And there I sit, for want of that lifeline, not waving but drowning in a sea of confusion.
I’ve been told I’m being too literal to appreciate what I’m watching. But that, ironically, is too literal an interpretation of what I’m saying. I don’t need to understand every word, every sentence, the relevance of every plot twist, to piece together what’s happening and give me a reason to stick with it. There ought to be something available like the directors’ commentaries you occasionally got as an extra on DVDs, just a kind, non-judgmental voice explaining things, talking you through it, holding your hand, perhaps via an earpiece so as not to disturb whoever you have beside you on the sofa.
Going back to Mescal, to be fair to the lad we’re only going by Hamnet director Chloé Zhao’s recollection of what he said. But if her memory is not playing tricks I suspect “You feel it in the body” was the intellectual clincher. Once he had said that, he could have got away with just about any proposition he offered. Because if Mescal feels the truth of something in his beautiful bones – the coming of a storm, what Ulysses is talking about in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, all seven winners at Haydock on Saturday, whatever – then so it shall surely be.
I wonder if the truth was that the actor himself couldn’t make head or tail of the script, either. In which case you can imagine the poor chap’s panic when the director said she wasn’t clear on some of the language. “Shite! Oh no, she’s going to ask me to explain it. Aaargh. What am I gonna do? Ah, there’s nothing for it, I’ll have to play the feel-it-in-my-body card. Never failed me yet.” Got to respect that. If you’ve got it mate, flaunt it, that’s what I say.
