Providence
Journal
Michael Janusonis
Journal Arts Writer
05/17/2002
Searching for Emily Dickinson's secrets
Academy Award-nominated local filmmaker Jim Wolpaw spent six years looking for reclusive 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson, and turned his search into the fascinating and puckish documentary Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson --, which will have its Rhode Island premiere Sunday at the Cable Car Cinema.
The title comes from Dickinson's poem My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun, which apparently has confounded generations of literary scholars for its true meaning. It's one of the prime subplots that Wolpaw focuses on in his film, which is as cryptic and sassily amusing as some of Dickinson's poetry.
Wolpaw himself narrates much of Loaded Gun and says the
idea came to him in a dream when he conjured up the image of Dickinson
playing second base at a baseball game.
It's an unusual image for a woman who rarely strayed from her Amherst,
Mass., home but wrote 1,789 poems, which clearly and concisely captured
the world in which she lived. Likewise, Wolpaw's film is not your usual,
straightforwardly dry documentary.
There are so many opinions about who Dickinson was and what she was really up to, that near the end Wolpaw depicts her as two Emilys -- one dressed in the real Emily's traditional white garb, the other in a black dress -- wearing cowboy hats and taking aim at each other in an Old West gunfight.
He interviews people whose lives have been somehow entwined with Dickinson's, from actress Julie Harris, who played Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst for years and years and years, to historians and biographers and academics, even psychiatrists who try to fathom why the poet was the original "I want to be alone" girl.
Most amusing are Wolpaw's attempts to cast an actress to play Dickinson in a Hollywood-style production of her life. He holds auditions with a string of young actresses who arrive in costume and asks them provocative questions, which they attempt to answer as they think she might -- Do you have a problem with God?; Are you in love with death? This provides more insight into their own perceptions of reality than with what Dickinson might have thought.
Occasionally someone, often Harris, will read one of Dickinson's poems. Fragments of the poems, perhaps only a couple of words or part of a line, flash in bold letters on the screen. At first it's disconcerting. One peers at the corners, hoping to see the entire poem to make it easier to follow along and digest. Nevertheless, it's a dramatic effect and Wolpaw's unique style eventually takes hold.
I'm not sure that Wolpaw, who was nominated for an Oscar for his very funny 1985 poetry-based documentary Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date, ever really gets to the bottom of Emily Dickinson's secrets. But he does tell you a lot about her strange life and how it has provoked and confused and intrigued scholars for more than a century. It's fascinating. And he does it in an amusing and clever way, which are pluses.
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