Me and Orson Welles

Orson Welles seems like an odd subject for Richard Linklater, a director whose films often feel very much like celebrations of people other than himself. Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater’s warmly evocative period suite, adapted from highschool English teacher Robert Kaplow’s novel of the same name by Vincent Palmo Jr. and Holly Gent Palmo, possess a sly agrammatical title that sneakily tells you a great deal about what the film is actually about: the serious folly of allowing ones ego to put itself trippingly in the way of one the size of an Orson Welles’s. Such egos, at the top and bottom of the theater food chain, are not merely a byproduct of collaborative artistic endeavors, but actually a fundamental component of what makes such collective expression excel on the rare occasion that it manages to truly do so, and a fairly substantial part of what presumably drives anyone into a field where they would presume to demand the undifferentiated attention of a rapt audience. As much as we postmodern neuters may wish to dispel great man theories, it is hard not to concede that the theater has long been a place where self-stylized great men have traditionally excelled, and presumably will continue to do so for as long as such an institution exists. The film tells the story of glib seventeen-year-old (and entirely fictional) New Jersey pretty boy Richard Samuels (the almost obscenely self-possessed Disney hunk Zac Efron as walking embodiment of cocky youthful hubris), and his magical consciousness-raising / illusion-shattering momentary immersion in Welles’s 1937 Mercury Theater Italo-fascist “black shirt” adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which he lands the role of Brutus’s lute-playing page, Lucius, during the last week of chaotic by-the-seat-of-the-pants rehearsals. Welles, played w/ heroic verisimilitude (particularly in the eyes and brow) by Christian McKay, is a careening, petty genius, juggling a bevy of mistresses and a pregnant wife, whose incredulous belittling of everyone w/ whom he comes into contact is matched only by his profound ability to massage effortlessly to brilliant life egos he has freshly gotten through bending to the point of tensile threshold. McKay’s Welles is a garrulous showboating fiend and cocksure, cornball charmer who has an ability to tune his fellow artisans to the precise pitch he requires of them through effortless manipulation of the sinewy strings of unpretty pride. He remains, in so doing, entirely unsullied by authenticity – something the film implicitly argues has no place in the communal realization of theatrical greatness. Artifice and calculation become twin strengths within the film (and childishness almost a sign of moral life), and can thus be read a posteriori as part of Me and Orson Welles’s own charming, infectious autocelebratory self-image w/ its heavily manufactured sound stage Depression New York front and center in its continuous demonstration of its supreme joy in being itself, manufactured as it was in Britain using a bare minimum of well exploited pseudo-exteriors. (In this way the film brings to mind Samuel Fuller’s entirely independently made 1952 Park Row, the bulk of the budget of which went toward the fabrication of the titular strip of 1880s Manhattan real-estate that Fuller understandably wanted to shoot every last fucking fabricated inch of – after all, he paid for it). Poor Richard makes the mistake of falling for the theater company’s young, shrewdly career-minded-deployer-of-pussy secretary Sonja (fussily busy-faced Claire Danes), who seduces him as a gaff and mindfucks poor full-of-himself-beyond-his-means Richard by casually demonstrating that her eye remains unapologetically on the prize. Of course, she promptly fucks Comandante Orson and has designs on none other than David O. Selznick. Young Richard, crestfallen and full of a righteous indignation (to which he has no right), misunderstanding the advise of cooze-hound Joseph Cotten (James Tupper, unsettling look-alike), overplays his hand and fights for the girl – by fighting w/ Orson. Oops. Though Welles strings our young hero expertly along in the wake of this colossal error of judgment, the great man’s ego cannot stand to be so stressed. Opening night will be Richard’s last. Welles even has Joe Cotten fire the poor fucker. The kid learns his lesson. There is a hierarchy of ego in place. By all means, throw yrs in the fight; just keep the fuckin’ thing right-sized (the size that it has earned); keep yr angling on the down low. A man like Orson Welles will never demand that you respect him as long as you can perform respect like a “God-born actor.” Where Kierkegaard saw the despair in the self of having a self, Welles knows, cherishes, and would have his minions truck in the business of carving, out of silence and gaping time, this marvelous collective emancipation: no self left at all. To remind Orson Welles that he has a self beyond imposture is to invite yr ass to be handed to you. The cold trauma of being one person, one accountable individual, scared and ultimately alone, may be a fact of life. But it ain’t the fuckin’ theater. A man like Orson Welles can spend an entire life running from the specter of himself as a self. Running in the direction of greatness and/or disaster. It’s ultimately irrelevant which.