Film: "HOWL" (2009)

There's a scene, in HOWL, the film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman that dramatizes both Allen Ginsberg's creation of his poem Howl and the trial for obscenity his publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti had to face because of it, that has stayed with me beyond, I believe, the intention of the writers and directors.

During the trial, both the DA and the defence lawyer, played respectively - and to perfection - by an insecure, bewildered David Straithman and a suave but arrogant Jon Hamm - call to the stand various expert witnesses, that is to say literary experts, to prove and disprove the literary worth of Ginsberg's book (and thus establish whether the presence of "obscene" vocabulary in the text is justified or not). It's an absurd situation for all involved, but naturally the witnesses who purport the value of the poem are represented in a sympathetic light, while the literary experts for the DA are pompous asses who fall miserably under the lighest pressure of logical cross-examination. So far so good, although a little predictable.

However, one of the witnesses for the DA, called to the stand to testify the unworthiness of Ginsberg's poetry, is a woman - a Catholic college teacher who in her spare time enjoys re-writing Faust and other Western canon masterpieces - played with the appropriate contempt by Mary Louise Parker. She's the only speaking female character in the film. She makes - for a contemporary liberal audience - a fool of herself on the stand, but when the judge calls for the defence (Jon Hamm) to cross-question her, he simply dismisses her. Without a second glance in her direction he simply says, distaste all evident in his voice, "Step down". She's not worthy of his time.

Now, this would be funny, if he applied the same treatment to all the other idiotically conservative literary experts, but he doesn't. He talks to the others with at least some formal respect, challenges their narrow ideas, engages their opinions on what makes literature worthy, what words are acceptable to write and publish, what is obscene, even as they state their position in exactly the same terms as she had done. But you see, all the other witnesses, pro or against Ginsberg, are men.

I love Ginsberg's poem and hearing/seeing it interpreted with vulnerable earnestness by an extraordinary James Franco (he truly carries the film on the strength of his commitment), made me love it even more. But the bitterness of that dismissal (when I'm sure I was supposed to sympathise with Ferlinghetti's lawyer's contempt for the silly woman), reminded me of how much the writings of the Beat generation, and what was said about and/or against them, are embedded in the homosocial discourse of the 1950-60s literary world. In great part, it still is.

What we see Franco-as-Ginsberg do in this film is make that homosocial subtext explicit, force the latent homosexuality of the new writers out of the closet, claim it, make it lasting poetry. We see young Ginsberg fall in love with Jack Kerouac and suck heterosexual Neal Cassady's cock, but also refusing to take a back seat to their masculinity, by proclaiming - in front of his adored straight idols who eventually become part of his adoring audience - his own homo-sexuality: a masculinity of his own (finding also the love of his life in the process, Peter Orlovsky, interpreted - with not nearly enough screen time - by Aaron Tveit).

Writing "cock", rather than simply sucking it behind a closed door and a wife's back, becomes therefore paramount: those "obscene" words are the key to everything.

The poem is much more than that, though, and Franco's performance of it fully renders its originality and vitality, the groundbraking inventiveness of daring juxtaposition and colloquial language, auto-biography and socialist, pacifist ideals that spoke for Ginsberg's generation and many more. And although I could have done with less fist-pumping and cheering from the extras who were directed to play the audience as if they were attending a contemporary performance of American Idiot, the black-and-white re-enactment of the original reading in a smoke-filled room full of young people who imagined a new world and a new poetry would have been enough. Franco, his voice, his enthusiatic youth are that good.



The animation that "illustrates" his reading of Howl is therefore the weakest point of the entire film, in my opinion, because it makes the poetry banal, as if the film-makers were not really believing in the power of Ginsberg's words. This is not a small flaw in a film that is about the effect of poetry not only on personal lives, but on society at large.

In a particularly poignant moment, Straithman's DA cross-examines one of the literary experts called by Ferlinghetti's defense, and asks him to explain (as in paraphrase) a few verses that are obscure to him. "You cannot paraphrase poetry with prose", the critic rightly replies. So why paraphrase it with animation, especially when it's not a particularly creative one? Why show the elongated shape of a man playing the saxophone amid skyscrapers whenever Franco-Ginsberg reads the word "jazz" in the poem? Or show the clumsy shape of a vagina when he says the word "snatch"? I don't care if the animation was based on artwork originally approved by Ginsberg, its use in the film reduces the poetry to visual prose, as if the film-makers didn't trust their audience to make their own imaginative leaps.

Ultimately, what comes across very strongly from this film - and it's still relevant today - is that more than the alleged "obscenity" of Howl, what really bothered a section of the more conservative public opinion was the sheer power of poetry and its refusal to be pinned down: not only morally, but also intellectually. In this sense Straithman is a little heartbreaking as he plays the DA as the puzzled Everyman (the "average man" he claims to represent in his closing statement) who just can't get modern poetry, experimental language, innovative contents, and who reacts to his own inadequacy by demanding that art justifies its value by trial. "What does this paragraph mean?" he keeps asking, "Why does Ginsberg use this word, this metaphor, this image, which I can not understand?"

Because he's a poet.