The
Providence Phoenix
Johnette Rodriguez
5/24/02
Life Lines
Loaded Gun digs into Dickinson
You know the filmmakers have truly gotten inside their subject -- in this case, Emily Dickinson -- when they use her punctuation in the title of their film: Loaded Gun: Life, and Death, and Dickinson --.That end-dash says it all, hanging in the air, posing an unanswerable question or two, as any discussion of life and death is apt to do. Rhymes?! Now she has me doing it.
But questions about Emily Dickinson wrap around her personality and her poetry every bit as much as the topics she addressed. Who among us hasn't puzzled over why she spent the second half of her life completely house-bound in her family's Amherst mansion? Unrequited love? Who? And what did she mean by the "loaded gun" poem?
My life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
in Corners -- till a Day
The Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --
. . . Though I than He -- may longer live
He longer must -- than I --
or I have but the power to kill,
Without --the power to die--
These questions nagged filmmaker Jim Wolpaw, whose 1985 Keats and His Nightingale: A Blind Date garnered an Oscar nomination. Wolpaw, a Brown grad, is also known for the '92 Lupo's-based film Complex World and a '79 film about Bo Diddley, Cobra Snake for a Necktie, which aired on Showtime. He once spent a lot of time in Amherst, where "her presence is very real."
"I got intrigued by the mystery of it all, and I liked
her poems," explained Newport resident Wolpaw, who teaches film production
and screenwriting at Emerson College.
Wolpaw teamed up with RISD grad Steve Gentile, with whom he'd worked on
Complex World, and together they filmed Loaded Gun over the past six years.
They'd shoot, screen, edit, fund-raise, then shoot, screen, and edit some
more, all the while keeping up with their day jobs. Gentile is a Boston-based
freelance filmmaker whose animated films The Ant Who Loved a Girl and
The Soldier have won awards at more than 30 film festivals worldwide.
He recently scripted three one-hour teleplays for Roger Corman's Sci-Fi
Channel series Black Scorpion.
Over the course of making the film, they interviewed Julie Harris, who has portrayed Dickinson for the past 25 years in The Belle of Amherst; Billy Collins, current US poet laureate, because of his poem "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes"; four psychological experts; two professors; one "sensitive"; one visual artist; one historian; one biographer; and 30 actors who were auditioning to play Emily.
As the documentary develops, writer and director Wolpaw lets us in on the process he is going through to try to answer the questions he has posed. He does some of the narration, including the quite unusual before-the-credits scene. Taken from a dream Wolpaw had, Emily is playing second base -- we just see the button-up boots, the bottom of her white dress, and the baseball glove. And then, after Emily steps back adroitly from the base and tags the runner, Wolpaw wonders, "How did she learn about the outside world, when most of her life she was shut up in that house?"
And we're plunged into the quest. The one-hour film is bulging with 50 Dickinson poems (not all of them in their entirety), but we never feel it's too much. Especially when you have someone as steeped in Dickinson as Julie Harris reciting "if bees are few, the reverie alone will do." And the narrator/filmmaker is telling us that he wanted more than nature shots to illustrate her poems. So Gentile does close-ups of her handwriting for a couple of poems, and close-ups of the typescript and her unusual punctuation for some others, always with those capital letters and dashes -- lots of dashes.
Billy Collins has a poetic response to the question about her reclusivity: "She was gathering the language around her." As does Harris: "She chose to sing because she was afraid."
But Wolpaw digs further. "What about a little Dickinson rock and roll?" he asks. And a band of local musicians -- Sarah McGurkin, Jonathan Stark, Matt Stark, and Mark Ruter -- swings into a hard-driven version of the "loaded gun" poem.
Next he interviews visual artist Leslie Dill, who wraps Emily's words onto fabric or writes them on people's bodies and photographs them; and Ellen Todd, a "sensitive" who thinks Emily was a Buddhist monk in a past life. He fantasizes a movie in which Charlton Heston would play Emily's "attentive but distant" dad; Jean Stapleton her mom; Tracey Ullman her "acid-tongued but protective" sister Lavinia; and Kevin Spacey her lawyer brother Austin who, we're reminded, had his wild side. This tongue-in-cheek approach on the part of the filmmakers is humorous and refreshing, but never disrespectful of the film's subject.
When Wolpaw can't think of anyone who would portray Emily in his Hollywood fantasy, he posts an audition notice, to which he receives 1000 responses (100 of them men) and chooses 30 to interview. Both Wolpaw and Gentile know they are walking a fine line with some of their documentary techniques in Loaded Gun, especially when they begin to set questions to their auditioning Emilys, but they (and by now, we) are willing to try anything that might bring completely new perspectives to the time-pondered issues about Dickinson. The filmmakers costume each Emily in black, with a dark blue ribbon around her neck, hair pulled back whenever possible, to match the haunting daguerrotype taken when Dickinson was 16, her dark soulful eyes staring out at us.
And then they ask the Emilys: Why did you stay in your house all the time? Are you in love with death? Do you have a problem with God? Describe what would be, for you, a truly wild night. How come you find decapitation so amusing?
"We were aware that the humor would only work if we
were getting the job done as well," Wolpaw emphasized. "It needed
to function as a serious look at her life and her work."
And despite the dueling professors (Alan Powers and Lisa Perkins) who
debate this "auditioner" technique and the Documentary Police
whom Gentile worries may come down on the filmmakers about what's real
and what's not real, many of the women's answers do, in fact, illuminate
the questions. The auditioners' responses were completely improvised,
with no prior knowledge of the questions, and when Lily Fink replies to
the query about why she, as Emily, stayed in the house all the time--
"I like the furniture" -- the viewer can't help but laugh out
loud.
"As funny as that furniture line is," Gentile stressed, "it lingers. It could be as simple as that she was so comfortable in her surroundings that she knew that allowed her to write. It's not very often that someone who has the talent of Dickinson takes advantage of their situation to do the work. Coming from privilege worked for her."
And, in the course of the other four questions, the filmmakers do weave in the biographical information that we need: that Dickinson was raised a Congregationalist but never went to church, that she was devastated by the typhoid death of her beloved nephew Gilbert, that she overwhelmed publisher Thomas Higginson, when he visited her in 1870: "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much."
By the close of the film (with as humorous a twist on the "loaded gun" motif as on playing second base), the audience has absorbed more information and more poetry than might have seemed possible with all the extra viewpoints thrown in by Wolpaw and Gentile. And viewers have thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process.
"Ultimately I think that I knew all along that we weren't going to find the answers," admitted Wolpaw. "If there is a solution, it's in her poetry."
"The film is intended to pose questions in a way that will lead people back to the poetry," Gentile agreed. "It's almost designed to fail at what we set out to do. We wanted to show that you can make a film about a historical figure and it doesn't have to be torturous or deathly boring."
Far from it. Loaded Gun is captivating, stimulating, witty, and profound. Indeed, it has sent this viewer scurrying back to the poems, still marveling at Dickinson's piercing wisdoms about life's most universal struggles and triumphs, still envying her writer's solitude, and her decision to preserve it.
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