Derek Jarman | The Garden / 1990

the antithesis of cold silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Derek Jarman (screenwriter and director) The Garden / 1990

 

Diagnosed as HIV positive in 1986, Jarman moved soon after to what might have been perceived as a retreat, to a seaside cottage in Dungeness, Kent, between a power station and a nature reserve. But instead of resting, Jarman built a garden there among the stones with hardy plants that could survive both the wind and the cold. Indeed, through several late cinematic works, the director built up a world there that came to stand almost for the end of the world, certainly his world, but perhaps also for the end of England considering what it had previously stood for. Just as in his earlier films, centered on major figures who lived their difficult and tortured lives in a world which set them apart of the rest of society, so Jarman’s garden in the midst of what looked like desert, offered a possible new vision for the society, like him, on its death bed.

    Now, in his fourth year of suffering from AIDS-related conditions, Jarman determined to focus on what that “garden” stood for, not only the lost world of Adam and Eve, but the lost opportunities of entire cultures which had rejected their often most vital and moral figures, by turning the moral lessons of religion and learning on their head in their perpetual miscomprehension of love and morality. The director himself had argued that, in fact, “I feel the moral high ground—particularly in the ‘80s with the AIDS crisis—was held by gay men and women. I feel that strongly.”*

  Jarman, like most others of  Britain’s gay communities, was even more disturbed by the British government’s lack of action against AIDS and even worse, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government’s introduction of Section 28, adding in 1988 to the Local Government Act of 1986, the clause stating: a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality of publish material with the intention of promotion of homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” The shocking demand to close all ears and eyes to homosexuality in the very midst of the AIDS crisis struck most of the LGBTQ community, Jarman among them, as not only perverse but as representing a kind of public abuse and murder.

      As “The Cinephile Gardener” nicely puts it (in his site devoted only to gardens in film): “The Garden is a howl of rage from a dying man.”

      In the film, the poem the director himself had written in his diary about AIDS appears at the very end, read by Michael Gough; but I think it might be interesting to consider the poem before approaching the film, a work which in some respects is the very opposite of Dylan Thomas’ insistence to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” yet clearly incorporates those sentiments. But here there is a kind of “cold”—the key word, along with “silence,” that dominates this work—objectivity of what is going on around him and will soon surround himself:

 

I walk in this garden

Holding the hands of dead friends

Old age came quickly for my frosted generation

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

Did the forgotten generations scream?

Or go full of resignation

Quietly protesting innocence

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

I have no words

My shaking hand

Cannot express my fury

Sadness is all I have

Cold, cold, cold you died so silently

 

Linked hands at four AM

Deep under the city you slept on

Never heard the sweet flesh song

Cold, cold, cold they died so silently

 

Matthew fucked Mark fucked Luke fucked John

Who lay in the bed that I lie on

Touch fingers again as you sing this song

Cold, cold, cold we died so silently

 

My gilly flowers, roses, violets blue

Sweet garden of vanished pleasures

Please come back next year

Cold, cold, cold I die so silently

 

Goodnight boys,

Goodnight Johnny,

Goodnight,

Goodnight.

 

     Given his fury that cannot be properly expressed, Jarman chose the most possible open-ended structure he could create. Unlike the objectivity of the poem, the film is almost entirely subjective, whirling around the director’s own private associations, his visions of other possibilities for a religious hagiography while including highly personal associations of place and friends (as in several of his films, actor Tilda Swinton is a major figure) as well as several comic, almost music-hall tropes that swing the otherwise terrifying and quite serious story of the crucifixion among other religious stories into joyfully comic satires such as the performance of Roger Eden’s song of fashion insanity (perfect for the Barbie film-days in which I am writing this review) “Think Pink” from the movie Funny Face (1957). Even The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin recognized the work as a “virtually wordless 90-minute assemblage of turbulent images…a peculiar blend of reflectiveness and fury,” turning Jarman’s thoughts on AIDS, Christianity and intolerance, “into a feverish vision of far-reaching decay.”

      If you might think, however, that decades after the provocatively open-ended works of everyone from Antonioni to Fassbinder Maslin could make sense of the cinema, you’d be mistaken as she bows out of a full review by simply summarizing her exhausted emotions: “motivation, like everything else here, is rather too widely open to interpretation.”

      In fact, the motivation is the one totally clear aspect of this film, as I already have argued. Its form, moreover, if disjunctive is no more difficult to assimilate than a film by Resnais or Tarkovsky.

     Indeed, Jarman himself has rather nicely summarized some of its parts:

 

“The film is structured like a dream allegory, in a poetic tradition, rather like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The film is a dream allegory of the author, in this case, myself. I could have put somebody else into it, but really dreams are always in the first person, though people often invent proxies. I go to sleep and go on a mental journey. Sleep can take lots of side turnings and in turnings a lot of things can happen. …It starts off with the Garden of Eden, then it progresses through various moments in Christ’s life, again not in a particular way. …You have recognizable scenes like the Judas kiss or Pontius Pilate and the arrest. There is no problem identifying and knowing where you are. Then there is another whole level of my childhood memories. This kid—Jody Gruber—is in a way my childhood self. A strict schooling and everything else. The schoolmasters’ canes become the canes of the flagellation.”

      Indeed, early in the film the narrative makes quite clear that his is the story of Christ, beginning with his birth in Nazareth, and even citing passages from the Bible. What changes are the figures who perform those characters, how they are presented, and how famous Biblical scenes are transformed into personal associations very much the way the noted US dramatist Richard Foreman does in his plays and films.

       Highly formalized ways of perceiving events shift when recontextualized with contemporary contexts. For example, Tilda Swinton as the Madonna with child begins in the usual images art has long taught us to perceive them but quickly grow ludicrous as the paparazzi, their heads in  balaclavas begin photographing her, gradually disrobing both child and mother, and eventually, as they move in closer and closer to get their shot, almost hinting at an attempted rape, as she, going on the run, abandons her baby and finds herself, time and again, rolling under the crushing bodies of photographers in a manner that reads almost like a prophecy of what would happen to Princess Diana 7 years later.

      Judas hangs with an extended purple tongue while he attempts to sell credit cards on TV. The Devil (Pete Lee-Wilson) is a sleek leather daddy presenting his famous song-and-dance. Mary Magdalene (Spencer Lee) is a drag queen dressed in a blue sequined gown who is attacked and stoned by the members of the local community, mostly cis-gender women. The Twelve Apostles are imagined as the same number of women in babushkas sitting at a Last Supper-like setting as they run their fingers around the rims of wine glasses creating an ear-piercing hum.

     I have previously argued in discussing short works by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Peter de Rome of 1962 and 1972 that Yēšūa of Nazareth was the perfect homosexual. Obviously, Jarman agrees, turning his Christ into a gay man who finds a lover as a young local sailor (possibly even being a boy who he encounters on the desolate beach) the two eventually becoming a model gay couple, complete with baby. Together the gay Christ couple (Johnny Mills and Philip MacDonald) spend most of their time making love and simply standing in slightly moony poses, child-often-in-hand. It is in one of these scenes, as our pretty boy Christs are dressed in pink tuxedos that West End performer Jessica Martin sings her rendition of “Think Pink.”

     Jarman comments on his obvious religious desecration: “Putting the two young men in certain elements of the passion draws immediate attention and shows that this whole morality thing is topsy turvy. These people are the ones one should be admiring and actually listening to. … Though the most appalling things happen to them, the myth remains intact and they are resurrected in the end. In carrying the whole thing through by putting them in the position of being the Christ figure, you can say it’s a great muddle, but I can’t see how else one can deal with it. It is all too enormous.” One wonders whether such a movie could possibly even be made today without riots in the street. In the art-house world of Jarman’s day, the fundamentalists fortunately did not even notice. Today, this film might have shown up in the US Supreme Court, the majority insisting it stands against the original signers of the Constitution’s beliefs.

     We begin to realize, however, that their situation is becoming dangerous in the narrative of the film when, as they sleep, “three sinister Santa’s sing” (I’ve stolen Maslin’s lovely alliteration) each stanza of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" louder and louder until our sleeping Christs are rudely awakened.

     The court of Pontius Pilate looks more like the steam room out of Hollywood movies such as The Robe and Spartacus, with Herod and Pilate licking their tongues in lust as other cute boys are slowly massaged while our Christ couple cower together in the middle of the room.

      The soldiers to whom Christ and his lover are consigned are a mix of the standard Teutonic bullies, in this case first torturing the two by pasting chocolate Nutella all over their foreheads and hair before tearing apart their own uniforms to pull out the feathers in order to finish their tar-and-feathering torture.

      The brutal flagellation comes later, reminding us of the professor’s canes striking time and again upon the table where earlier on the young boy who joined Christ was attempting his lessons.

But here blood and pain are far more obvious, the Christ men suffering before their long walk to Golgotha. But along that slow march, Mary Magdalene, still in her blue gown, appears and bends to kiss both their feet.

 

      In and amongst these narrative tales are endless images of earth, air, wind, and fire along with the storyteller himself in this version of the Christian mythos. Yet as Pat Brown observes in the 2019 Slant review “…Despite being guided by a dream logic that’s nightmarish more often than not, the film isn’t oppressive. Jarman appears in a few roles, including that of a dreamer, asleep on a bed in a shallow sea as white-linen clad figures circle around him holding flares. … The film’s images burn, yet Jarman understands that fire can symbolize both destruction and creation. After all, one burns the vestiges of last year’s crops before replanting, and The Garden isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.”

      The intent of this film is quite obvious, but the result, alas, remains in the hands of its viewers. Alas, I am afraid a lot of weeds of grown up in the garden Jarman—who died of AIDS in 1994—once planted, instead of the beautiful flowers he had intended.

 

*The comments by Jarman, which evidently appeared in the material published in connection to the release of the movie, were reprinted in on-line site, The Metropole.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).