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Welldigger

THE LEGACY OF THE BEATS AND THE CATHOLIC VISION
 
Author:
Philip R. Fagan
 
Copyright Date:
2005
 
In the beginning was the word. Unless complete abstractions of flickering light and color, even the most experimental and poetic films begin with the notion of narrative, or storytelling. In the case of the narrative feature film, the creator=s influences, literary and artistic passions, and scholarly interests will inevitably, if subconsciously, contribute to the themes and structure of the story and the production itself becomes the challenge of how to best convey these disparate elements and tie them together into a cohesive whole. The finished film will stand as testament to whether the filmmaker has succeeded or failed. The film Welldigger is an unabashedly biblio-centric work, defined and haunted by the ghosts of literature. The artistic legacy of the Beat Generation, and the still resounding counter-cultural concussions ushered in by their works and lifestyles, is a primary subtext in the film. The Catholic sensibility in visual art, literature, and film is another. In these two sometimes interrelated traditions, one can trace a trajectory from the defining narratives of Western Civilization through to the avant-garde movement of the 1950s that remains remarkably contemporary in the new Millennium. Welldigger is in part an exercise in exploring these themes, and presented the unique challenge of incorporating both a Catholic and Beat sensibility into a feature film, while at the same time offering a critique of these ideologies and addressing their limitations. Welldigger is the continuing story of Fiko, a failed artist of minor cult status seemingly displaced by Hurricane Katrina and now homeless and struggling through his first Winter in Chicago. He is an Aex@ in every way: Ex-carny, ex-writer, ex-military, estranged husband and ex-bon vivant, whose free-wheeling romantic vision of life has seemingly fled with all other good things, leaving him bitter and depressed. Ravaged by hard living and rapidly approaching middle-age, he begins to acknowledge his mental, physical and spiritual illness, his many failures and regrets, his loneliness and the well he has dug for himself in this life. His friendship with experienced street person Matthew is necessary for survival but patently unhealthy, and his wife Cassandra has moved on since their last split in New Orleans, unaware that he is even in the same city as he stalks her. The world of Welldigger is a one of books; books as rich symbols as well as mystical, prophetic agents representing both future hopes and the irretrievable past, renewal and damnation. As the film purposely rejects an expository Hollywood narrative approach, the books featured so prominently throughout the film help convey the story. For example, Fiko reads Nelson Algren=s A Walk on the Wild Side throughout the film, a meta-commentary on many levels. Algren is a writer very much associated with the streets and dive bars of Chicago, while the novel itself traces the depression-era hobo trek of simpleton Buck Linkhorn from Texas to New Orleans, reflecting Fiko=s own geographical trajectory. The novel has also become intimately linked to Lou Reed=s controversial 1972 hit song of the same name which deals with the dirty streets of New York (the setting of Fiko=s former glory days as a marginally successful artist), reinforcing the Aman of the streets@ theme of the film. Reed was an avid admirer of Algren and the Beat writers of the same era and often claimed he was trying to bring the sensibilities of such literature into the realm of rock and roll. Near the end of the film, Fiko attempts to quickly groom himself in the glass of a framed Reed concert poster, apparently trying to see in the combined faces the artist he once imagined himself to be. The Chicago literary heritage also represents Fiko=s continued romanticization of his broken life. Now that he finds himself in the unforgiving metropolis, he fancies himself a part of the tradition. Near the end of the film he surprises Cassandra at her apartment and in a pathetic attempt to cultivate an air of intrigue, convince her that his life as a street person is just what he wants, and explain away his despondence, he quotes Sherwood Anderson: AHaving listened to talk, and having myself talked overmuch, I grow weary of talk and walk in the streets@ (Dunne, R., 2005, p. 13). She asks if the quote is one of his own and he responds that it is Anderson=s, Aone of those Chicago boys you seem to be so fond of@ (Fagan, 2006). He is alluding to her new romance with a Chicago Tribune critic, but Fiko hides his jealousy by insinuating that the remark was prompted by a Studs Terkel book he finds on her coffee table, ironically titled Working. During this scene, he also seems more interested in his former library of books which line the walls (with a vintage copy of streetwise Chicago writer James Farrell=s Studs Lonigan on blatant display) and his circus paraphernalia than in reconciling with his wife. The world of books is intensely holy to Fiko. As he whiles away the day reading at the public library, triumphant, almost hallowed music fills the soundtrack, undercut only by the sound of an approaching thunderstorm. His book of choice in this case is The Hollywood Social Problem Film (Roffman & Purdy, 1981), a rather blatantly reflexive meta-commentary on Welldigger itself. Fiko is shown to be reading a section on the representations of unemployment in the social problem film: This unreal, fairytale quality...stands in marked contrast to the gritty realism of Wild Boys of the Road....Documentarylike shooting, his reliance on outdoor location- the freight yards and sewer pipe city- and a straightforward camera technique, intensify the sense of realism. The hard-edged, naturalistic lighting allows no romanticization and forces the audience to take note of the squalor in which the characters live (pp. 96-97). Although Matthew and Fiko are penniless, they seem to prefer spending the little money they have on being literary hipsters, rather than on much-needed nourishment. They spend empty hours in bookstores, where Fiko apparently maintains his hardcore book addiction, or popular writer-friendly coffeehouses drinking large amounts of coffee but seemingly never eating. Petty thief Matthew, who has literary pretensions but is never observed reading or writing, steals books rather than food. In one such scene, as he goes about his petty thievery, Fiko searches in his long-abandoned diary for a poem to read at that evening=s contest. Sprawled on the table are a number of religious texts, such as The Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs, Kazantzakis= Saint Francis and the writings of Bonaventure. These objects hint at Fiko=s latent Catholicism and foreshadow his religious conversion/ next stage of madness/ newest money-making scheme (open to the viewer=s interpretation), the catalyst of which is a nightmare of his past which includes religious and demonic imagery. He awakes disoriented and immediately seeks comfort by reading the Daily Roman Missal he pulls from his backpack. In the next scene, he waves the book and preaches a Southern-style fire-and-brimstone rant at the passerby downtown. It is not clear whether this is a panhandling scheme on Fiko=s part, but it turns into such upon Matthew=s arrival. The books mentioned above also provide a possible explanation for the painful seizures he experiences throughout the film, if interpreted as the religious Aecstasies@ and battles with Satan the great Saints often endured. On a related religious note, as Fiko stalks Cassandra through the city, she reads Catholic novelist Graham Greene on the El, foreshadowing her spiritual and physical destination of confession at St.Mary=s of the Angels, and Fiko=s own religious experience therein, as he is confronted with his Catholic upbringing and first encounters the intense young Priest. The stalking scene also features a disguised Fiko hiding himself behind a study of The Films of Lon Chaney, the AMan of a Thousand Faces@ himself. The book also serves to foreshadow Fiko=s later Ajuggling cripple@ routine, a blatant homage to the many cripples and armless, legless sideshow grotesques Chaney portrayed in the silent-era Browning films. Similarly, Fiko=s reading of Flannery O=Connor while washing his clothes at an artist friend=s loft carries multiple meanings. This is the first time we see Fiko=s unexplained back brace with Christian and punk sloganeering written on it. Catholic novelist O=Connor made a career of portraying crippled, freakish characters in the rural South from which she lived and rarely strayed.. Fiko, also a native Southerner (a Texan, at any rate), has fled to Chicago from New Orleans, that most Southern and most Catholic of cities, a strikingly distinct and incongruous combination in America. The page the audience is privy to is from the story AA Good Man is Hard to Find@ featuring a serial killer called the Misfit, alluding to Fiko=s self-image and social status and also referencing one of classic punk=s most popular and enduring bands. When he meets the beautiful Scenester, hiply slumming in the dive bar where Fiko cashes his unemployment checks, he surveys the books she is reading (or more likely displaying for status), which comment on his plight. Like the title of novelist, philosopher, and extreme journalist William Vollmann=s collection, Fiko has been AExpelled from Eden@ and cast into the cold, lonely purgatorial world of the urban alien. If he can only AWait Until Spring (, Bandini)@ as John Fante=s novel beseeches him, perhaps he can create a new life. Fante was another writer who embraced the low-life, and also adapted Algren=s A Walk on the Wild Side to the screen. In addition to the points discussed earlier, Algren=s novel and the film scripted by Fante also reference the freight-hopping, hobo-subculture elements of Welldigger, as well as the crippled kneeling villain of the works that, along with Chaney, inspires Fiko=s bizarre panhandling scheme. One of Fiko=s few moments of redemption in the film is his winning of the poetry contest, obviously the result of his friend Duncan=s influence, or perhaps Fiko=s cult celebrity, rather than the literary merit of his sentimental poem. After his Atriumph@, Fiko tries to convince the Scenester, now enamored with the moment=s Ait@ boy, to allow the creepy Matthew to crash at her place as well as himself by telling her that Matthew is also a somewhat successful writer, Aa real Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski man of the streets@(Fagan, 2006). The tradition of the poetry reading /spoken word medium and literary coffeehouse environment that still informs the counter cultural urban art scenes today was largely created by Beat artists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and David Amram (who appears in Welldigger) in the 1950s. Undoubtedly the art movement and literature most influential on members of Fiko and Matthew=s post-punk generation was spawned by the writers of the Beat Generation. Such works have a do-it-yourself, streetwise edge that contains a sensibility similar to punk and its romanticized notions of homelessness, city-hopping, and being Abeat@, or broke. For the Beats, the act of being a struggling and starving artist and suffering the alienation of the big city was the very inspiration for creation and was even the art itself in a sense. This tradition can be traced back to Ernest Hemingway=s Lost Generation of the 1920s, through Fante, Farrell and Miller in the 30s, and into the latter day writings of Bukowski and Vollmann. It continues today through the punk-centric independent press and>zine publishing trade, which began in the 1980s and is still often spearheaded by the Beat-inspired and pseudo-homeless punk squatter community. Small press >zine compilations like Carnival of Chaos, which documents the cross-country tramping exploits of a young San Francisco-based DIY anarchist performance troupe; and Stories Care Forgot, by a collective of New Orleans bicycle-punk squatters, had as much an influence on Welldigger as any amount of Arespectable@ literature or scholarship. A similar thread exists in subculture confessionals such as Hobo, the memoirs of young freight-hopping Eddy Joe Cotton, a modern-day amalgam of San Francisco street punk, circus performer, and Beat Generation rambler. Additionally, the influence of the Beats and their ilk on the New American, independent and underground cinema from the 1960s on cannot be overstated Indeed, it is hard to imagine the world of literature, visual art, and independent film today without the groundwork laid by the Beat writers and their progeny. The Beat Generation Aofficially@ began with an intense friendship forged in New York City between writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs in the years following World War II. Though they would come to represent a single tradition, the AHoly Trinity of Hip@ were vastly different people. Kerouac was a Catholic athlete with All-American good looks from New England who longed to write the Great American novel; Ginsberg was the effete, homosexual son of Jewish anarchist poets in New Jersey who wanted to channel the spirit of Blake, Rimbaud and Whitman into his own work; and Burroughs, also gay but disguised by his conservative appearance and cryptic nature, was an older intellectual junkie and petty criminal from the Midwest obsessed with underground drug culture, conspiracies and hidden agents of control. What united them was their avant-garde tendencies, common passions for literature, jazz music, and the visual arts; a shared wanderlust; their collective rejection of traditional American values; an obsession with the various world religions (particularly Zen Buddhism); and an openness to new experiences and drug experimentation. The Beats came of age in a time of unparalleled affluence in America, but also a time of stifling and threatening conservatism; the era of McCarthyism, censorship, the Cold War, arms race and the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the continuing racism and social inequality of the era. Art curator Lisa Phillips states that the ABeats saw an enormous gap between America=s promise and reality. Their response was...celebrating life at the margins...the underprivileged, dispossessed, outcast, and outlaw subcultures of the African-American, the jazz musician, the junkie@ (1995, p. 26). The Beat style fused the poetic imagination with a stark realism to produce a distinctly personal form of expression, and this became a goal in Welldigger as well. Another defining feature of this first great American counter culture was their fluid view of the artist=s role. They eschewed the common notion that an artist must choose his form of expression and stick by it, and artists of the new sensibility in the scenes that sprung up around the Beats in New York and San Francisco did not restrict themselves creatively; living was an artistic statement and the process was celebrated as much as the end result. Each of the three progenitors of the movement and their ever-expanding group of peers not only wrote, but dabbled in many forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, multimedia, collage, found-object art, music, theater and performance art, cinema and many experimental combinations thereof. The world of Welldigger reflects this diversity with its collective scene of poets, filmmakers, musicians, puppeteers, and painters. Fiko himself is referred to and featured as both poet and filmmaker. The new Beat culture embraced the avant-garde and sought new possibilities in cinema as elsewhere. Jonas Mekas, an artist, film historian and part of the New York Beat orbit, established Film Culture Magazine in 1955 and launched the first Independent Film Awards four years later. The winner was a film that simultaneously brought the Beat sensibility to the screen and launched the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s and 70s: John Cassavetes= Shadows. Wrote Mekas, Cassavetes...was able to break out of conventional molds and traps and retain original freshness. The improvisation, spontaneity, and free inspiration that are entirely lost on most films from an excess of professionalism are fully used in this film. The situations and atmosphere of New York nightlife are vividly, cinematically, and truly caught in Shadows. It breathes an immediacy that the cinema of today vitally needs if it is to be a living and contemporary art (Hanhardt, p. 219). The narrative was pure Kerouac, dealing with race relations among the hip set in the Greenwich Village jazz scene. Although scripted, the Anarratives- frequently improvised and recorded on location in apartments, streets, and alleyways with hand-held cameras- achieved a sense of spontaneity, as if the story had been captured on film just as it happened@ (Hanhardt, p. 222). Mekas went on to praise the cinema-verite documentary Primary in the same breath as Cassavetes= debut: A[The filmmakers] have caught scenes of real life with unprecedented authenticity, immediacy, and truth....We are entering a long-awaited era, when the budget for a sound film is the same as that of a book of poems, and when a film-maker can shoot his film with sound, alone and by himself and unobtrusively, almost the same way as a poet observing a scene...There is a feeling in the air that cinema is only beginning.@ (Hanhardt, p.222). Cassavetes worked from the belief that ALife is stranger than it is in the movies. In life, something is happening all the time.@ At first viewing, Shadows might appear Acheap@ or amateurish and yield frustration, but a concentrated study of the film reveals Cassavetes= achievements. The actors appear unnatural and unrehearsed only by Hollywood standards; they are awkward, halting, and inarticulate like real people. They are actors performing the parts of people performing their parts. The director would often give lines to one of the actors in a scene days earlier, and to their partner only moments before the shoot to ensure the leading aspect and spontaneity of a natural conversation. The camera often seems to grow weary of the central characters and wander to other peripheral events surrounding them at a party and the like. AAs viewers,@ Sargeant writes, Awe frequently find ourselves in almost the exact optical and imaginative stance as one of Cassavetes= supporting characters@ (1997, p.5). In addition to a general cooption of the director=s unorthodox methods, the street preaching scene in Welldigger was directly inspired by Gena Rowlands= brilliantly insane ranting in Cassavetes= later film, A Woman Under the Influence. Inspired by the naturalistic approach of Shadows and Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie=s Pull My Daisy, Mekas went on to form the New American Cinema Group in 1960, a collective of artists whose mission was to create a system of film production, distribution, and exhibition with ties to the artistic community rather than the film industry per se. The nine-point manifesto included the following: AWe believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression. We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen...The New American Cinema is abolishing the budget myth....The low budget is not a purely commercial consideration. It goes with our ethical and aesthetic beliefs@ (Hanhardt, p.223). Can you dig it? Like Shadows and Mekas= own Beat film Lost Lost Lost, Welldigger seeks to Aremain true to the sequential nature of lived experience@ by creating Aa film that attempts to be true to the time it takes to live a life@(Carney, 1995, p. 198), conveyed in the long, repetitious empty days of killing time Fiko endures. Carney and Sargeant also identify the influence of Chaplin and silent-era slapstick clowning in Beat films, particularly in the many performances of Taylor Mead, star of the Mekas film, who embodies the playful, carnivalesque side of the Beats. Sargeant writes of Mead=s characterizations, AThey are eternal children, divine fools, purehearted simpletons detached from the world@ (1997, p.72). In Welldigger, Fiko=s often hilarious misadventures, accompanied by violence and pratfalls, are an homage to this long-standing cinematic trajectory. Mekas= second annual Independent Film Award went to Pull My Daisy, the only film collaboration of the Beat era to feature its central luminaries Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and David Amram. Only Burroughs and Kerouac=s muse Neal Cassady are conspicuously absent in this experimental absurdist short. The poets essentially play themselves, with the exception of Kerouac, who wrote the script and provides narration and voices for all, and Larry Rivers, who portrays Cassady. In the Beat tradition, the zany plot is based on actual events and centers around a weekend at the Cassadys= home in which the rowdy, stoned poets engage in a free-form theological debate with a liberal Catholic priest, a friend and mentor to the Cassadys. In the films= most frenetically goofy moment, and arguably the climax of the piece, Kerouac=s narration intones the AHoly, holy, holy@ repetitions that close Ginsberg=s Howl, the poem often credited with ushering in the Beat Generation. If Shadows was the first film to vividly convey a Beat aesthetic, sensibility and subject matter, Pull My Daisy was the first and last Aofficial@ Beat Generation film, featuring the stars of the scene. However, Ginsberg and Burroughs would continue to embrace the documentary form, audio recordings, and experimental media until their deaths in the 1990s. Other acclaimed avant-garde and underground filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger also came to prominence during Mekas= reimagining of the film industry and cinema as art. The themes and sensibilities of the Beats, Shadows and the Cinema-Verite style continues to exert a profound influence on all levels of independent film-making even today. The Beat did indeed go on after the stifling atmosphere of the 1950s. Mark Doty writes of the repressive cultural era that produced Ginsberg=s Howl, Kerouac=s On the Road and Burroughs= Naked Lunch, AWhat is not of the mainstream seems illicit or sick, as if (the Beats=) longing for firsthand experience of the divine is itself criminal, a subversive defiance...We have a tradition of sacred erotic literature...Eros has been spiritualized in the West ever since the Song of Songs@ (Shinder, 2006, p.15, 17). In addition to scandalizing the nation, the Beats were also a spiritually-focused Ageneration searching for some kind of ecstasy, some marvelous vision of God@ (Phillips, p.30). Kerouac stated that his was Abasically a religious generation...Beat means beatitude, not beat-up@ (p.30). Phillips continues thus: AThe mystical side of the Beats goes hand in hand with their gritty realism and rebellion. These two sides- the ecstatic and horrific, the beatific and the beaten, define the poles of Beat experience. The extremes of mystical wonderment and squalid realism, the lofty and the seedy could be combined and expressed in the arts...@(p. 33). The same sentiment could readily be applied to O=Connor=s stories and the streetwise films of Abel Ferrara and Martin Scorsese. The Beat attraction to Zen in particular stemmed in great part from the religion=s earthiness: AIts saints were not other worldly, but all too worldly- Many of them itinerant vagabonds who resembled Beat drifters and rail hoppers@ (Carney, 1995, p. 195). Carney fails here to realize that his description could just as aptly describe the rugged, wandering Apostles of the New Testament and Kerouac=s beloved Catholic saints. This heavy religious element of the Beats is often passed over, probably due to lacking the excitement of sex, fast cars, drugs and jazz clubbing. Luc Sante describes the mystical, messianic vibe that surrounded Ginsberg: He was as modern as any figure of the 1960s, and at the same time he was mythic, biblical, a sage from the ancient world- you could imagine him parading along the timeline of history, through Alexandria and Damascus and Jerusalem in his beard and robe, and even his eyeglasses, which were simply a part of his face. He was an ideal father figure, comforting and reliable and permissive and inspirational...literally Christ-like: Wandering the world healing the lame and the halt, distributing loaves and fishes, being alternately hailed and jeered (Shinder, pp. 220-222). Throughout his life, Ginsberg Athe authentic made-in-America Holy Fool@ (Shinder, 2006, p. 10) made several attempts to describe the ABeat@ of the movement he had helped define. A>Beat= is a carnival, >subterranean= (subcultural) term... meaning without money, without a place to stay...So the original street usage meant exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise. Or...finished, completed, in the dark night of the soul@ (Phillips,, p.30). Although Kerouac, perhaps jokingly, once claimed that the term Abeat@was coined by the trio=s street hustler friend Herbert Huncke, who borrowed it from a Amidwestern carnival or junk cafeteria@ (Sargeant, 1997, p. 9.), his writings contain an intense spiritual longing and he often played the part of guru in interviews, claiming Christ and the Buddha as his heroes. Ginsberg articulated his friend=s Beat religiosity thus: AKerouac was trying to indicate the correct sense of the word by pointing out its connection to words like beatitude and beatific- the necessary beatness or darkness that precedes opening up to light, egolessness, giving room for religious illumination@(Ginsberg,, 1995, p. 18). Though united by friendship, the three titular Beats had little in common stylistically. Jack Sargeant has noted that each actually thrived as a cultural icon in different decades: Kerouac in the fast cars and Bebop jazz-scene of the 50s, Ginsberg as king of the hippies in the 60s, and Burroughs with the punk scene of the 70s. In the case of Ginsberg and Burroughs, their prophetic visions and intellectual gifts remained consistent until the times finally caught up to them. As Jason Shinder has observed, APunk=s radical oppositional stance in opposition to the status quo is a direct descendant of (Ginsberg=s poem) Howl@ (Shinder, 2006, p. xviii). Although, the angry punk generation, which included the notoriously gritty Cinema of Transgression movement, rejected the peace and love preoccupations of the Beat-driven hippie and flower power scene of the 1960s, they related to and embraced the Beats themselves. The were no more part of the punk scene than were The edgy poetry readings at St.Mark=s Church were no less part of the New York punk scene than the rock shows at CBGB=s and Max=s Kansas City. Burroughs became the grand old man of the New York underground scene (the availability of heroin was surely to his liking), celebrated and entertained by Lou Reed, Lydia Lunch, Jim Carroll, Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith, and would go on to collaborate with John Cale, Sonic Youth, U2 and Tom Waits in the 1990s; Ginsberg would form his own punk band and also record with The Clash. The punk and post-punk generations that rediscovered the Beat legacy also largely gained the movement its first evaluation as serious American literature, moving it into the canon and into high school and university classrooms. Kerouac, however, eventually dismissed countercultural revolution altogether in the 1960s and faded back into the Eisenhower era. Before his untimely death in 1969, he insisted that throughout his dabblings in Zen Buddhism, cross-country tramping, and drug experimentation, he had remained a devout Catholic at heart. In the last years of his life, while deteriorating from alcoholism and depression, the granddaddy of the hippies morphed ironically into an arch-conservative Republican, refusing to see old pals like Ginsberg, disavowing his past as the folly of a misspent youth, and insisting he had always remained the football hero and Catholic boy from Lowell, Massachusetts. Kerouac=s real-life washed-up despair and anguish, meticulously documented in the later novel Big Sur, is as much a part of Welldigger as the Beat literary and film tradition. Youthful idealism rarely outlives youth, and the romance of the road eventually comes to an end. In Fiko=s case, if not poor Kerouac=s, there is at least the possibility of emotional maturity, redemption and salvation. While it is seemingly impossible to relive the Beat experience in today=s America (although writers like Cotton, Vollmann and the new generation of punks and >ziners are attempting to make a AGo!@ of it), there are certain parallels in the two cultural eras. We once again are living in an intensely conservative political climate, at war and supposedly spreading democracy on the other side of the world. The Beat-era Korean battlefield is now our nemesis in a new cold war and the latest threat of nuclear annihilation. The differences in the two eras are not much sunnier. In Kerouac=s day, a young man out of the service could easily support himself on a veteran=s benefit. Cross-country travel was free (Hitchhiking and train-hopping were comparatively safe) or relatively inexpensive. The new social welfare system was making impressive progress, and the economy was so strong that many DIY art scenesters could afford the leisure time to devote themselves to the new religion. Fiko=s prospects are grimmer indeed. A veteran of two foreign wars, he must be enrolled in, and pay for college classes to receive GI benefits that won=t amount to enough to live on. Travel is so expensive that he has no legitimate way to leave Chicago, and even if he did, the days of finding work while drifting from town to town are over. Suffering from injuries and mental and physical illness, he is shuffled through an overtaxed welfare system without a thought. The steady acceleration of the urban isolation that assaulted the souls of the Beats has now rendered the chances of a homeless Bohemian finding sex or intellectual communion almost nil. Fiko has tried to live the Beat fantasy and found it empty. He has had an exciting life of traveling around, making the scene, struggling as a writer, and imitating his literary heroes. At 40, he is in a strange town in the coldest of Winters without a job or home or wife; at the mercy of the kindness of fast friends; and can no longer find comfort even in the escapism of his precious books and films. Literature acts as both a reminder of his failures and a tool for forgetting them, his damnation and salvation. He has despaired of ever becoming a legitimate artist and no longer bothers to even record his tough-guy adventures on the streets. This is the dark side of the fantasy that is art, the limitations of art as religion; the fine line between capitulation and Aselling out.@ When is it no longer possible to change the direction of one=s life, or when does one become unwilling to change, despite horrible consequences? At what fateful moment does joyful youth give way to responsible, and often bitter, adulthood? Welldigger looks lovingly to the Beat tradition while exploring the inherent limits of its glamour and ideology. Fiko=s only companion is Matthew who is a decade younger, a Chicago native, and who finds their beat punk rock couch surfing lifestyle altogether fulfilling. It is a sycophantic relationship: Fiko needs the street-smart and surly Matthew in order to survive the Winter and is also trying to save him somehow, while Matthew reaps the benefits of Fiko=s minor celebrity and kindness to others. Matthew still buys the Beat/ Punk dream and sleeps soundly each night; Fiko can never sleep or awake from the nightmare. To him, Cassandra represents all the good that=s left in him and a path to salvation; the cold and alien Chicago cityscape is a cacophonous, purgatorial plateau he cannot escape; and Matthew is at once his own former carefree self and the Devil he made a deal with another life ago. Static, he stumbles repeatedly through the only cycle he knows: Walking the streets, eschewing emotional attachments, making the scene, and reliving the joyful freedom of youth that at middle-age has become a monotonous soul-destroying nightmare. Like the specters of the Beats, another tradition, alluded to periodically above, also informs and haunts the spiritual realm of Welldigger. Some of the most celebrated of authors and filmmakers embody a tradition one might call cultural Catholicism. Widely embraced by a secular audience, their works nonetheless reflect a deep background and entrenchment in, or obsession with, Christian themes and the Roman faith. From Graham Greene=s morality tales, to O=Connor=s southern Gothic sideshow grotesques and Walker Percy=s tales of existential disconnection in New Orleans, to the Catholic visions of directors like Roberto Rossellini; Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Scorsese, and Ferrara, this sensibility has echoed, at times almost invisibly, in some of the greatest art of the 20th century. Pasolini and Scorsese would each make highly controversial life of Christ films, and Scorsese considers himself a lapsed cultural Catholic, while Pasolini was a self-avowed homosexual, communist, mystic, atheist, and, strangely, Catholic. Even Beat daddy Kerouac, remembered for his debauchery and wanderlust as a Dharma Bum, wrote two unabashedly Catholic novels, Visions of Gerard and Doctor Sax, and New York punk singer and Beat-inspired poet Jim Carroll=s most famous and critically acclaimed album (Catholic Boy) and book (The Basketball Diaries, and also the subsequent film adaptation) both document his Catholic boyhood and his heroin addiction which began at age 12. Theologian, priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew Greeley locates a distinctly Catholic imagination that informs art throughout the ages: Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads, and holy pictures. But these Catholic peraphrenalia are mere hints of of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace...The Catholic imagination in all its many manifestations...tends to emphasize the metaphorical nature of creation. The objects, events, and persons of ordinary existence hint at the nature of God and indeed make God in some sense present to us. God is sufficiently like creation that creation not only tells us something about God, but by doing so, also makes God present among us (2000, pp.1; 6). The admittedly liberal and controversial Greeley goes on to assert the importance of metaphors in Catholic tradition and its embracing of the sensible and sensual, the carnal and erotic even, without fear of spiritual contamination. He also notes that seeing God through Catholic eyes does not necessarily denote being a good Catholic. This sensibility continues into the new millennium in often disturbing and shocking ways, as evidenced by Mel Gibson=s The Passion and the apocalyptic sideshow visions of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and punk carny artist Joe Coleman, who also played a major role in the Transgression cinema movement. This seemingly radical and incongruous conflation of the grotesque and the Catholic in the works of O=Connor, Gibson, Coleman and Ferrara, are on par with the assessment of the grotesque by Robert Dunne: From the renaissance into the nineteenth century, the grotesque often converged the mysteries of the spiritual realm with allegorical representations of human depravity ... Rather consistently...the grotesque subject was objectified as a thing or person deviant from the social norm. It was a freak in normal world. But by the late nineteenth century, this conception would undergo a change: Artists began to perceive the Anormal world@ as either itself grotesque, or a significant cause of a person=s becoming grotesque (2005, p. 1). Colin Wilson, one of the British Beat-equivalent AKitchen Sink@ writers, defines the AReligious Rebel@ in a similar manner: The more I considered the Outsider, the more I felt him to be a symptom of our time and age. Essentially, he seemed to be a rebel; and what he was in rebellion against was the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous society. The first nine books of Saint Augustine=s Confessions are an Outsider document, and Saint Augustine lived in a disintegrating Roman society. It did not seem a bold step to conclude that the Outsider is a symptom of civilization=s decline... An individual tends to be what his environment makes him. If a civilization is spiritually sick, the individual suffers from the same sickness. If he is healthy enough to put up a fight, he becomes an Outsider (1957, p. 1). Greeley and Wilson would seem to agree that religion posits its believer on a tenuous tightrope between the sacred afterlife and a profane world. Whereas Greeley sees the latter as a symbol of the glory to come, Wilson sees its purgatorial alienation, ugliness and psychic suffering. But both concur that the two inform one another and imbue the world with a certain mystical quality that is reflected in various works of art. In addition to the many elements discussed in the sections on books as symbols and the Beat legacy, there are many other Catholic elements in Welldigger. Some are admittedly blatant. The title cards that open the film are from the Gospel of Luke and an ancient Hebrew poem. Both deal with tramping and homelessness: Take nothing for the journey: Neither staff, nor haversack, nor bread, nor money, and let none of you take a spare tunic. Whatever house you enter, stay there, and when you leave, let it be from there. As for those who do not welcome you, when you leave their town shake the dust from your feet as a sign to them (Luke 9:3-5) (Socias, J., 1998, p.1275). AWalking along on foot together, like beggars, fondly and in friendship@ (Ancient Hebrew Poem). The emphasis Christ continually places on Awandering as a beggar through the countryside@ (Trese, 2003, p. 71) cannot be overstated. Poverty, and homelessness are posited as a key to salvation throughout the New Testament. It is one of the consistent tenets of the faith that he repeats in varying forms several times in each of the Gospel books, and is echoed in the lives of Saints like Francis and Clare of Assisi, as well as Kerouac=s Beat = Beatitude notion. Such ideas of martyrdom, sainthood, and penance are ones which Fiko, a Holy Fool, apparently buys into and cultivates. Likewise, the Priest also reads to him from Luke at the end of the film; this time the scripture contains an edge of caution: When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says: AI will go back to the home I came from.@ But on arrival, finding it swept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, so that the man ends up by being worse than he was before.(Luke 11:24-26)(Socias, p. 1319). Fiko, in his own mind at least, is under siege by such dark forces, and it is this reading and the Priest=s second attempt at getting him to confess his sins, that seemingly gives him the courage to finally return to the Ahome@ Cassandra represents to try to reconcile with her. In the final scene of the film, Fiko performs the act of Confession (also known, tellingly, as Reconciliation), and perhaps has forgiven himself, overcome his paralyzing shame and guilt, and can move on with a new life that may or may not include his estranged wife. This ending ties together the interlocking Catholic themes of despair and redemption, fantasy versus reality, and capitulation and free will. Fiko walks the fine Catholic line between sacrament and grace, at the Arisk of slipping into superstition, folk religion and paganism@ (Greeley, p.79). He clearly sees himself in a sort of living hell, or purgatory, which he must endure until released. The film opens with home movies of his happier days in New Orleans with Cassandra, followed by a tour of the famous cemetery and the sounds of an approaching storm. The roar of a freight train intrudes, seen shrieking through a red-skied, snowy urban landscape like a boat on the River Styx. The sound of the train gradually morphs into a death metal song, as the camera cuts to quick shots of the frightening bric-a-brac of Keith=s loft, where Fiko and Matthew are flopping. Fiko is literally haunted by devils from the very beginning of the film. The first and last image of the loft montage is of a devil puppet swaying on its strings, and Keith and Matthew mischievously startle Fiko out of his sleep with another such puppet, apparently aware of the frightening effects of such images on their friend. The puppet show in Wicker Park near the end of the film acts as a sort of chorus, echoing the themes of poverty, life=s meaningless repetitions, and alcoholism, but more importantly reinforces the Catholic sensibility with its cautionary, medieval morality play aspects. In addition to the physical and spiritual warmth he finds in the church, Fiko, a former filmmaker himself, also seeks a similar shelter and vicarious human contact in the dark, hallowed, communal environment of the movie theater. In the secular age, the cinema house has largely replaced attendance at the Sunday service or Mass, and Fiko is still fighting to maintain the notion that art as religion will sustain him. The theater as place of worship may be a somewhat conscious form of ritualistic mimicry as critics like Greeley and John C. Lyden have observed: AThe oratorios developed out of the polyphonic mass, gradually moved into the theaters, and eventually became operas. Very few Western artistic traditions were not shaped first in the churches@ (Greeley, p. 35). This is underscored by the Catholic Coffee Talk radio program that plays as Fiko walks to the Music Box Theater and at other points in the film. One of the strongest influences on Welldigger is Martin Scorsese=s Mean Streets. The opening structure of Welldigger exactly mimics Scorsese=s film. The opening title cards of scriptural quotes in Welldigger stand in for the voice-over about finding redemption on the streets that opens Scorsese=s film. In both films, the viewer is then abruptly thrown into the world of the central protagonists and the jarring urban symphony of traffic, sirens, trains and alarms, which intrude on the supposedly private spheres of bedroom (Mean streets) and public toilet (Welldigger). Harvey Keitel=s Charlie and Fiko both look at themselves in the mirror (although, as in mirror shots throughout the film, Fiko=s reflection is obscured, in this case by graffiti), as though trying to determine their identities. This is followed by a home movie-style montage in both films, depicting the characters in happier times than will soon be depicted. There are many such homages to Scorsese throughout the film, such as the handheld techniques used to follow Fiko through the Chicago streets and the fight scene in Wicker Park. The relationship between Fiko and Matthew is partly inspired by that of Charlie (Keitel) and Johnny-Boy (Robert DeNiro). All four are streetwise yet naive at the same time. Charlie and Fiko each possess a spiritual dimension, notions of sainthood and martyrdom, and sense of honor which they try to embrace despite being men of the streets, while Johnny-Boy and Matthew are simpler, scheming, duplicitous toughs with little potential for personal growth. Like Charlie, Fiko is reluctant to sever his relationship with his friend out of a sense of Christian duty; or as he puts it, AMaybe God sent me to watch over your dumb ass@ (Fagan, 2006). Welldigger=s scenes in Chicago=s St.Mary=s of the Angels were attempts to emulate the beauty and majesty of Scorsese=s representations of St. Patrick=s Cathedral in New York City. Andrew Greeley sees Mean Streets as the most Catholic of films: The quest for holiness occurs, and forgiveness is earned, on the mean streets themselves. Or so says the film. Forgiveness is a gift that cannot be earned. If he were more sophisticated theologically, Charlie would say that what is worked out on the streets is love responding to love...Charlie is a kind of Christ figure, sacrificing himself for his friends...Although he could not abandon them, they may all abandon him...Thus, the churches, statues, and religious images which recur constantly in the film are not just part of its atmosphere. They are central to the story of a young man determined to be grace, to reflect God=s love in his care for other humans, however inept and doomed his attempts are. The best way to watch the film...is to revel in the half millennium of Italian and Italian American iconography as it is filtered through the haunted (and at times blood-obsessed) imagination of Martin Scorsese (Greeley, pp. 115-11). The films of Abel Ferrara are also steeped in these elements. Despite Ferrara=s hardcore grittiness and bizarre juxtaposition of art cinema (he claims Jean-Luc Godard as his primary influence) and punk/ exploitation film sensibilities, the Catholic tendencies in his themes and narratives cannot be denied. In addition to an obvious affinity for the films of Scorsese (most evidently on display in Bad Lieutenant, a virtual homage to Mean Streets with some of the same cast members, including Keitel in the lead, as well as music), Ferrara outdoes his predecessor in terms of Catholic elements. He films churches just as lovingly (Driller Killer, Bad Lieutenant); his steadfast screenwriter Nicholas St. John is widely rumored to be a pseudonymously-disguised priest; and Father Robert Castle essentially plays himself as the priest in The Funeral and The Addiction . The casting of a real priest in Welldigger may be seen as another nod to Ferrara. While many of his films have blatantly Catholic themes and imagery (Driller Killer; Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral; The Addiction), his entire oeuvre seems to be an attempt to reconcile the sacred and profane, the streets and the hereafter, despair and redemption, damnation and salvation.. The metaphors, traditions, and works that inform the narrative of Welldigger are explicit at times; sub-textual at others. The title itself is a loaded metaphor for the points addressed in the discussion above. The rarely possible to survive scenario of falling into a well is ingrained in the subconsciousness of human experience; one might say a universally prevailing phobia. Fiko is not only trying to stay afloat til hopefully rescued, but is trapped in a well of his own making. The title also conjures the spirit of the Beat Generation as in ACan you dig it?@ Perhaps less obvious is the colloquialism AColder than a welldigger=s ass@ which his environment surely is. Finally, on a more upbeat note, the title conjures images of water, the rich religious symbol and life-sustaining agent of cleansing, revitalization, and baptism. The counter cultural and Catholic (often the same) American literary and cinematic traditions contribute greatly to the themes, style and narrative of the film Welldigger. The elements combine and intersect throughout, and comprise a film that can be read in a literal, historical or metaphorical light. The film may be read as an expression of the conflict between these ideologies, a conflation and celebration of them, or a critique of their shared limitations. However it may be interpreted, a central problem the film addresses is the simultaneous expression of a Beat and Catholic sensibility.
 
 
 
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