The Neon Bible
Two paradoxical facts about Terence Davies’s first film adaptation:
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I suppose it could be argued that Davies’s capacity to make something at once completely different from and exactly the same as his earlier work is a rather uncommon achievement–shared perhaps with Yasujiro Ozu and Howard Hawks at various points in their careers, but not with many others. The Neon Bible may not qualify as a masterpiece, as Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes do, but it still contains moments and achievements that are as impressive as anything Davies has ever done–and to have done this with alien material makes his achievement even more remarkable.
One of the principal things Davies and Toole seem to have in common as artists is something negative–a lack of distinction as storytellers. In their relatively mature works (Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Davies’s films from Distant Voices, Still Lives on) they’re both masters of set pieces who have trouble getting from one to the next; the kind of graceful narrative flow that might connect such passages into a seamless larger form is foreign to them. Yet stasis rather than narrative development is basic to what both artists can do best. In Toole’s case, it’s a talent for defining character and life itself as a kind of quagmire from which nothing and no one escapes–a talent that focused mainly on morose, passive suffering and deprivation in The Neon Bible and turned to satire (most of it liberal bashing) in A Confederacy of Dunces. (Given the enormous differences between the two novels, it’s worth entertaining the hypothesis that The Neon Bible was written by Toole’s flamboyant mother, now also dead; it certainly doesn’t read like the work of either a 16-year-old boy or the New Orleans disciple of Alexander Pope who would write A Confederacy of Dunces.)
There are many echoes here of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Mae taking on the flamboyant, promiscuous style of Blanche Dubois and Sarah taking on her eventual madness, and Frank becoming a brute like Stanley Kowalski. (These echoes are fully present in the novel.) Perhaps an equivalent influence on Davies is the movie The Night of the Hunter and its arsenal of neoprimitive, childlike imagery and rural, homespun folk poetry–its starry skies and oversized moon, its troubled Christianity, its lyricized and almost generic treatment of madness, its period street scenes that remind you of magazine ads for hair tonic and talcum powder.
The first such epiphany occurs quite early in the movie–as early as that shot of the train in Days of Heaven–when David says, “There was no snow–no, not that year.” As he delivers the line, the ‘Scope frame becomes a diptych: on the left is an empty porch topped by icicles framing an enchanted snowfall, all clean verticals and horizontals; on the right is a lit interior where ten-year-old David is playing on the floor, all fuzzy warmth and roundness. These two images combine with David’s narration to produce a single jolt that calls to mind the hallucinatory effect of a Joseph Cornell box, as if to prove that what this whole movie is about is what’s happening inside someone’s head. If one stops to ask whether it actually snowed that year, the power of the jolt contained in that shot–combining objective and subjective experience in a manner that defies analysis–is to verify that yes, it did, and no, it didn’t. (Indeed, part of the power inherent in any Cornell box as a surrealist construction rests in the primitive, obsessive fetishism that decrees that every treasured object becomes at once totemic and sacred in its fresh context.)
