Creature Feature: Son of Vincent van Gogh

The Insect Woman (Shōhei Imamura, 1963)

Van Gogh (Murice Pialat, 1991)

If there is to be some legacy or mythos attached to me here or hereafter, I feel it’s in everybody’s interest that we draw a basic connection between whatever is was Vincent van Gogh was and whatever it is I am, where or when or how I am yet to be established. How we are linked has much less to do with popular success having come too late and more to do instead with our particular intermeshing of bipolar-type disorder with psychotic features, substance dependency issues, artistic/creative compulsion/delirium (schizoaffective), and general tendency toward the solitary life. As mine has regularly said of me, Van Gogh’s mother worried that her son, based on his behaviour within the first two monumentally crucial years of life was going to have lots of accidents henceforth and persistently make things much more difficult than they would normally have to be, under ordinary circumstances. It is also true of Van Gogh and myself that we prize the spiritual/monastic life very highly, but we gravitate to the lower depths of the social order, for better and for worse, no bones abut it. This is actually the position of the great Japanese filmmaker Shōhei Imamura who had the stones in the ‘60s to say he was interested above all in the lower parts of the society and the lower parts of the body. The bad psychic tumult and high-minded pursuit naturally make guys like me and Van Gogh a bit like characters out of a Dostoevsky story. A nice happenstance of history: Marx and Dostoevsky were inventing modern alienation at the same time, as contemporaries. (Notes from Underground was published in 1864 and Das Kapital in 1867.) Alfred Hitchcock once said that he cast Cary Grant as the version of himself he wanted to believe in and Jimmy Stewart as the version of himself he actually was. In this light, off on a frolic of our own, might we not perhaps argue that Jacques Dutronc in Maurice’s Pialat’s Van Gogh from 1991 is the painter we wish Van Gogh was and Tim Roth in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo from the year previous is the seething, unkempt, and altogether foul Vincent who it isn’t hard to imagine perfectly real and the whole unpleasant deal. That being said, if Vincent & Theo is a fine picture indeed, Pialat’s film, with its transcendent and sublime turn from the rock star Dutronc, is a masterpiece for the ages, one of the greatest films of any I know about art and compulsive art-making. In going to bat ardently for Pialat’s Van Gogh, do I not implicitly fall into accord with that ever-sage advise from Maestro John Ford? When in doubt, print the legend. George Bataille calls Van Gogh “an overwhelming incarnation of the candelabrum of sunflowers,” and then goes on to picture the legendary painter “attaching to his hat a crown of lighted candles and going out under this halo at night at Arles […]. The very fragility of this miraculous hat of flames without a doubt stresses the striving for dislocation that Van Gogh obeyed each time he came under the influence of a fiery focal point.”