It is not often that a film turns out to be worse than I
have imagined it was going to be. But such was the case with The Beach, which is
an absolutely dreadful motion picture. Nevertheless, let me begin by saying that
I do not lay the blame on Leonardo DiCaprio. I am personally indifferent to the
Leo question. I cannot say I think him a bad actor because I've never seen him
act in a movie. However, I would have to say he's far better cast in this movie,
playing Richard, a hip young American dude on the loose in East Asia, than he was in
Titanic as a Jack Londonish painter who learned everything he knew about life
and art from the
school of hard knocks. The real problems with this movie lie in the direction by
Danny Boyle and the screenplay by John Hodge, both equally miserable. While
traveling through Thailand, Richard encounters Daffy, the crazed resident of a cheap hotel where
Richard has momentarily put
up, who gives him a map showing how to reach a fabled island paradise uncharted
by cartographers. After Daffy conveniently exits the scene by his own hand,
Richard,
accompanied by a young French couple also staying at the hotel, sets off in
search of this tropical Utopia. What they find upon their arrival is a hippie
commune in extremis governed by the matriarchial Sal (Tilda Swinton), which makes Colonel Kurtz's
compound in Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now look like summer camp. From this
point on, The Beach resembles nothing so much as the ill-begotten offspring of a
union between William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies and Roger Corman's LSD
cult movie The Trip. Since I have not read the novel by Alex Garland upon which
The Beach is
based, I am not in position to judge how many of the movie's shortcomings are
owing to problems in the source material, but I have little doubt that whatever
these problems might have been, the movie has succeeded in magnifying them a
hundredfold.
During the first half or so of its interminable 120
minutes, The Beach blindly staggers along from episode to episode without rhyme
nor reason, before descending into an abyss of melodrama with the unexpected and
unwanted appearance of some stoned surfers whom Richard had ill-advisedly allowed to
copy Daffy's map. One disaster leads to another, culminating in the violent
dissolution of the commune by some Thai peasants engaged in raising marijuana on
the other side of the island who had allowed the hippies to maintain their camp
as long as the latter kept the island's existence a secret. At the end, nothing
remains except for Richard, now once more comfortably ensconced in his life as a
student in the USA, to oracularly deliver the moral of this saga in a voice-over
commentary. To wit: Paradise is just the best moment in your life which you have
to continue to hold in your memory after it has vanished in fact. Cool! And to
think it was only necessary to shell out five dollars and waste a perfectly good
afternoon to hear these words of wisdom. Even if Leonardo DiCaprio were the
least talented performer in the history of the American cinema (which he
certainly is not) he could not have done anything to make The Beach any worse
than it is--any more than actors of the caliber of Marlon Brando, Warren
Beatty, or Robert DiNiro in their prime could have done anything to rescue it.
Generally, speaking I take no pleasure in trashing a
movie. Life is too short to waste it spending time proving that a piece of junk
is a piece of junk. My main reason for writing about The Beach at all has less
to do with the movie itself than with the now nearly extinct genre, that of the
exotic, to which it belongs. From this point of view, seeing an
expensively produced specimen of the exotic genre like The Beach at the present
day is like catching site of a dodo or an archaeopteryx strolling down the
streets of Burbank. The genre had flourished from the late 1920's to about the
mid-1930's, and included some of the most important pictures of the era, among
them Friedrich Murnau's Tabu, Josef von Sternberg's Morocco and Shanghai
Express, W.S. Van Dyke's Trader Horn, Frank Capra's The Bitter Tea of General
Yen, John Ford's The Lost Patrol, and last but not least Ernest B. Schoedsack
and Merian Cooper's King Kong, as well as a number of lesser known but by no
means uninteresting productions such as Erle C. Kenton's The Isle of Lost
Souls.
After 1934, the genre went into eclipse, in no small part owing the strict
enforcement of the Production Code, since the typical exotic picture was
virtually a repository of all the Code's "Thou shalt not's," including
the ones prohibiting the depiction on screen of nudity, of illicit or perverse
sexual behavior, of promiscuity, of drug addiction, and of suicide, to mention a
few. Although some important contributions to the genre appeared in the later
1930's--Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, John Ford's The Hurricane, and Howard Hawks'
s Only Angels Have Wings--the genre carried on only a marginal life in
Universal's campy Technicolor® spectacles starring Maria Montez.
But a more fatal blow was to be dealt the exotic with the
advent of television in the United States following the end of World War II. The
great examples of the genre from its early period had depended for their effect
upon a certain magic distance between the audience and an exotic locale--even
when, as happened most often, that locale had been (re)created in a studio in
this country. A famous old cliche says that familiarity breeds contempt and few
inventions could illustrate it so well as television. When any Joe Blow with
enough money to buy a tv set could have the "real" Morocco right in
his living room, at the tips of his fingers, what magic could there be in
sitting in a theater watching one fabricated by Josef von Sternberg on
celluloid? I have already discussed these changes in some detail in the article
And Something Completely Different: Shanghai Lil aboard the USS San Pablo and
there is no reason to repeat here what I have said there. Suffice it to note
that after the death of the genre, all that remained was to bury it by
demythologizing it as Barbet Schroeder did in The Valley Obscured by Clouds,
which tells of a group of European travelers who get lost and ultimately perish
while searching for a fabled paradisiac valley on an island in the South Seas.
(There are more than superficial similarities between Schroeder's film and The
Beach and it may well have influenced the latter.) Yet even Schroeder could not
bid the genre farewell without a poignant gesture: in the final shot, as the
characters lie scattered lifeless on the ground, the camera pans up to show the
no longer obscured valley--just beyond their reach. The
Beach, however, does not
demytholgize the exotic, unless urinating on its grave can be called
demythologization.
Beneath the surface of The
Beach it's possible to detect vestigial features of the genre in the themes
of fatality and betrayal, which clearly appear in one of its first important
works, White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), directed by W.S. Van
Dyke II. Shot entirely on location, began as a collaboration between Robert
Flaherty and Van Dyke for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer using a combination of
professional actors and non-professional locals. When Flaherty who "didn't
care much for working with stars and had frequent disagreements with his
collaborator over content and approach"--to quote Ephraim Katz's The
Film Encyclopedia--left the movie, Van Dyke, hitherto a director of
undistinguished action pictures, finished the picture and embarked upon making a
series of successful films with exotic settings. Although burdened with a rather
melodramatic story line--which would certainly have appalled Flaherty--about a
derelict doctor who finds and then loses paradise on an isolated island in the
South Pacific, White Shadows in the South Seas is an effectively made
picture which marks a real turning point in the development of the genre; more
than any other film, it is the lineal ancestor of the masterpieces which were to
follow in the next seven years. (Already the film's initial plot situation,
indebted to several literary sources including the Frederick O'Brien novel of
the same name, dealing with an individual stranded on a strange island who must
overcome various challenges--in White Shadows in the South Seas the hero
heals a sick boy and becomes a godlike being in the eyes of the
inhabitants--reappears in a number of later films including White Zombie
(Vincent Halperin; 1932), The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and
Ernest Schoedsack; 1932),as well as in Island of Lost Souls, and King
Kong.) Like the doctor, Richard too is fated to betray the paradise that he
has blundered upon. Yet The Beach no more knows how to develop
the theme of betrayal than it does that of the fatality which always accompanies the discovery of
paradise and dooms it to be lost once more. Neither theme is at home in the
commercial American cinema today, and their loss marks a diminution of the
moviegoing sensibility.
Although
the exotic genre flourished during some of the worst days of the Great
Depression, no one should imagine the films to be examples of American movie
"escapism." To the contrary, it would be difficult to think of a
single major work belonging to the genre whose conclusion is not overshadowed by
tragedy--usually by death although by madness in the final shots of Morocco.
(Few films, however, go as far as King Vidor's Bird of Paradise
(1932) whose heroine played by Dolores Del Rio throws herself into a volcano at the conclusion to appease the gods whom she has
offended.) It is not merely an etiolated longing to return to the state of
nature that motivates the scenario of a typical exotic production but an
unconditional utopian demand for happiness. In its most passionate
manifestations, the exotic movie is always an epic of desire, and just as
in Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind this desire cannot be satisfied by some material
object. The exotic locale is never itself the object of desire, only the
surrogate for what is radically exotiōkos. The exotic in the usual sense of the
word only marks the point where the quotidian ceases rather than the portal to
paradise itself, the point of discontinuity between the ordinary world and what can
hardly be called a world at all, since it lies wholly outside anyone's
experience--and The Beach wholly degrades the genre by already
throwing in juicy National Geographic pictures of the island when Richard
first hears about it from Daffy. Moreover, as the prototypic example
of Tabu strikingly attests, even approaching this point as if it were the
doorway to a promised utopia is fraught with peril. But
The Beach doesn't
culminate in tragedy as do Tabu,
Morocco, or The Lost
Patrol--just
in a bad trip, for both Richard and the audience.