STAYING IN THE
PICTURE
Part 1:
The Kid Stays in the Picture is the name the 1994 autobiography by film
producer Robert Evans(1930- ). It is also the title of the 2002 film adaptation of the same book. Last night I watched
this film adaptation.1 By
1994 I had my eye on an early retirement; by 2002 I had taken a sea-change and
retired to a small town by the sea, about 5 kms from the Bass Strait, an
extension of the Great Southern Ocean. Robert Evans had been part of my life
since the 1950s, but he had always been far in the background beginning with
the 3 films: Man of a Thousand Faces, The Sun Also
Rises, and The
Best of Everything.
He has been so far in the background of my life that, until
last night, I had never even heard of him. This should tell readers more about
me than it does about Evans because Evans was at the centre of Hollywood life
for decades. He has been called 'the Godfather of Hollywood'. During his
60 years in film, from the 1950s to the turn of the 21st century, the cinema
was not that central to my life. I was no connoisseur of the celebrity circuit,
and watching either TV or films was always a relatively peripheral part of my
life. At least this was the case for the
half-century from about 1954 until the last ten years, 2004 to 2014.
By 2004 I had retired from all FT and PT paid
employment. I had retired by degrees from FT, PT and most volunteer work, as
well as the endless meetings involved. All of these occupations occupied me for
60 to 80 hours a week for more than half a century. My student-working life had
lasted from 1949 to 1999.
Going to "the pictures", as cinema is often called
Downunder, and watching TV were both only occasional activities, certainly not
definite parts of my daily diet. That has no longer been the case for the last
decade.
Part 2:
Many elements from Evans'
1994 autobiography, such as his childhood and all but one of his seven marriages,
were dropped from this doco because the producers felt that their inclusion
would slow things down, and not move the visual-auditory-experience along with
the pace required for modern audiences.
Evans started writing his autobiography
when he was in his 60s. I started
writing mine, my memoirs and autobiography, in my 40s and there was much I also
had to leave out for many reasons mainly associated with moving my story along
in the direction I wanted it to go.
A person's identity is
not to be found in behaviour, important though that is, nor in the reactions of
others, but in the capacity to
keep a particular narrative going. The individual's autobiography or biography,
if he or she is to maintain regular interaction with others in the day-to-day
world, cannot be wholly fictive. The person must continually integrate events
which occur in both their internal-world and the wider-external world, and sort
them into the ongoing 'story' about the self.'2
Part 3:
I want to thank 1ABC1TV, 10:20-11:50 p.m., 2/2/'14
for this stimulating doco, and 2Anthony
Giddens(1938-), a British
sociologist who is known for his holistic
view of modern societies, for this idea and many of the ideas in this
prose-poem.
Giddens is considered to be one of the most
prominent modern sociologists, the author of at least 34 books, published in at
least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007,
Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the
humanities.
Giddens links the rise of the narrative of the self, biography
and autobiography, with the emergence of romantic love. Passion and sex have,
of course, been around virtually forever, but the discourse of romantic love is
said to have developed from the late eighteenth century.1
Romantic love introduced the idea of a
narrative into an individual's life, a story about two individuals with little
connection to wider social processes. Giddens connects this development with
the simultaneous emergence of the novel, a relatively early form of mass media,
that suggests ideal, and less than ideal, romantic life narratives.
Part 4:
All of this sociological theory is, of course, arguable. These
stories of romantic love did not construct love as a partnership of equals, of
course. Instead, women were associated with a world of femininity and
motherhood which was supposedly unknowable to men. Nevertheless, the female
protagonists were usually independent and spirited. The masculine world,
meanwhile, was detached from the domestic sphere, both emotionally and
physically, and involved a decisive sense of purpose in the outside world.
Whilst passionate affairs might come and go, rather
unpredictably, the more long-term and future-oriented narrative of romantic
love created a 'shared history' which made sense of two lives and gave their
relationship an important and recognised role. The rise of this 'mutual narrative biography'
led individuals to construct accounts of their lives so that, even if the
relationship with their partner went awry, a story still had to be maintained.
And so now the biography of the self has taken on a life of its own.
Giddens
has much to say about the narrative of the life-span which I have found useful
in the three decades, 1984 to 2014, during which I have been engaged in writing
my memoirs.
The self is made, only partly
inherited, partly static in our
post-traditional order.....It's a
reflective project, a project we
continuously work on--reflect.
We create, maintain, revise our set
of autobiographical narratives...the
story of who we are, how we came
to be where we are. This is our self-
identity,
our understanding of who
is this self that we are, the account
of our life, actions and influences
which make sense to us and is also
oriented towards our anticipated....
future. Perhaps this all began with
the Greeks and those Romans, way
back in the Middle Ages, or in what
some historians call modern times.1
1 To Giddens modern times began in the late 18th
century. There are, of course, many
takes on the modern and when it began, as well as on the post-modern, and if it
began. In my own literary work I take the modern and the post-modern to be the
last two-and-a-half centuries associated, as those 250 years are, with the
lives of the two precursors of the Babi-Baha'i revelations and Babi-Baha'i
history into the 21st century.
Ron Price
3/2/'14.