It is well-known that the novel OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS ends with Joel's choice FOR Randolph, NOT against him, although this unbelievably coarse film relates the latter for the Sunday School set, for the Christian Right, for all the other graceless bigots.
Joel knew about Randolph's accidental shooting of his father, now lying up in the bedroom and nursed by Zoo Fever, BEFORE they go to the beautiful old ruin that is the Cloud Hotel--where Little Sunshine lives. He never held that against him, nor did he hold against him the fact that Randolph had taken him to the Cloud Hotel because he knew that Ellen had come from New Orleans looking for him. On the next to last page, Joel's thoughts turn toward the cynical regarding Ellen Kendall: "But Ellen had never answered his letters. [It's beside the point that Amy and Randolph had made sure the letters never arrived.] The hell with her. He didn't care any more. His own bloodkin. And she'd made so many promises. And she'd said she loved him..."
In the film, when Randolph and Joel get back, it is only then that Amy announces to Joel about Randolph: "He shot him!" And then this absurd series of movements--Joel throwing out the favourite things Ellen had brought him, Joel packing up, Joel telling Randolph "I loved you!" quickly followed by "I hate you!" and saying that Pepe Alvarez (the boxer for whom Randolph had become an 18th century countess at a Mardi Gras ball--the moment that Randolph has chosen to prize above all memories as he sends letters out to Pepe every day to all parts of the globe...) could by now only see him as a "ghost" were he to come back, by some miraculous chance; and climaxed by Joel's leaving the place in full view of Randolph who moans "Don't go, don't go."
Why anyone would make this movie like this is completely beyond me.
Joel GOES to join the "queer lady" in the window at the end.
Joel does not leave Skully's Landing.
He goes back to the house, having chosen homosexuality.
Yeah, he's pretty young, that's a fact. But THAT is what he does, whether you like it or not.
He is going to be as Pepe as he possibly can for Randolph.
He's going to COMFORT him.
It has to be because Rocksavage wanted to save Joel from the "fate" that is the whole point of the book. In this case, why not just make a film about a sexual predator and a young boy who manages to escape him--a young boy who escapes him because he does NOT want to have sex with Randolph.
Joel DOES want to have sex with Randolph and is going upstairs to do so.
*********************************************************************
In the novel, after Randolph, who has gotten quite drunk coming back from the Cloud Hotel, has gone back in the house, Joel stays outside in the stillness of the summery garden.
The whole passage is worth quoting to anybody who doubts that Joel made the choice FOR Randolph and not AGAINST him (or they can look at Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote).
"A sound, as if the bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden, and Joel, as though following a kite, bent back his head: clouds were coming ove the sun: he waited for them to pass, thinking that when they had, when he looked back, some magic would have taken place: perhaps he would find himself sitting on the curb of St. Deval Street, or studying next week's attractions outside the Nemo: why not? it was possible, for everywhere the sky is the same and it is down that things are different. The clouds traveled slower than a clock's hands, and as he waited, became thunder-dark, became John Brown and horrid boys in panama hats and the Cloud Hotel and Idabel's old hound, and when they were gone, Mr Sansom was the sun. He looked down. No magic had happened; yet something had happened; or was about to. And he sat numb with apprehension. Before him stood a rose stalk throwing shadow like a sun-dial: an hour traced itself, another, the line of dark dissolved, all the garden began to mingle, move.
"It was as if he had been counting in his head and, arriving at a number, decided through certain intuitions, thought: now. For, quite abruptly, he stood up and raised his eyes level with the Landing's windows.
"His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus. the wall yellowed in the meticulous setting of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold, seasonal color. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph's window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge where, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."
It seems almost conceivable that Rocksavage and Flanigan may have thought that "he knew he must go" meant that he would, in fact, need to vacate the premises since he had made the assessment that he was in grave danger; that perhaps they may have needed the text to read "he knew he must go to her" for them to know for sure what the text meant. That cannot have been the case; this has to be that they wanted to make one of the most original stories in all of American literature a "morality play" about a sexual predator--they had to know they were destroying everything Capote's work had stood for. Astonishing that they would bother with all the trouble and money for something this appalling.
I have quoted the entire passage because the only other possibilities are "the garden's edge" and "looked back at the bloomless, descending blue" that could have involved some literal working-on of the minutiae of the "set," as it were, in the text. Clearly, he had been just outside the garden, and was going in, clearly the "bloomless blue" is finally to be seen on all sides at sundown, as easily looking back from the house as toward it..in any case, Joel wouldn't have left that night in the novel with not a thing of his own on his person and defied the odds of a dark Southern swamp at night...
..and anyway, this is not Robbe-Grillet, where the same stairway can lead to any number of different rooms, full of drug dealers, full of a dead prostitute on a bed, now in the wrong room; or a pier that is the same one but that is sometimes composed of several planes, sometimes just one; or a cord in the pocket that has been lost (definitely lost) and is then there again (without having been found; or an Oriental commercial wrapper of some item or pack of cigarettes which keeps reappearing with exactly the same properties in highly differentiated places and lines of plot completely antagonistic to each other.
We know this, we just want to point out AD INFINITUM that this kind of usage of a classic text is symptomatic of the very worst dishonesty in all of world culture today. I appointed myself to point it out here, since this novel is sacred to me (there are only a handful of really good hardcore homosexual novels, and Jean Genet did a few of the others), but it is by no means an isolated incident of artistic obscenity.
George Davis hilariously told Capote that "somebody had to write the fairy HUCKLEBERRY FINN." This is funny, because it is as if Randolph's Countess is saying to Joel "Come back to the raf', Huck honey..." but we know that here Foucault's (more than Plato's) "keenest of pleasures" does prepare to occur.
This film is on a level with Trump's THE APPRENTICE.
A lot of people would rather hear Joel say to Randolph "YOU'RE FIRED!" than face the fact that he went up the stairs afterward with something a lot more like "TELL ME HOW YOU WANT ME TO GIVE IT TO YOU, BABY..."
Joel knew about Randolph's accidental shooting of his father, now lying up in the bedroom and nursed by Zoo Fever, BEFORE they go to the beautiful old ruin that is the Cloud Hotel--where Little Sunshine lives. He never held that against him, nor did he hold against him the fact that Randolph had taken him to the Cloud Hotel because he knew that Ellen had come from New Orleans looking for him. On the next to last page, Joel's thoughts turn toward the cynical regarding Ellen Kendall: "But Ellen had never answered his letters. [It's beside the point that Amy and Randolph had made sure the letters never arrived.] The hell with her. He didn't care any more. His own bloodkin. And she'd made so many promises. And she'd said she loved him..."
In the film, when Randolph and Joel get back, it is only then that Amy announces to Joel about Randolph: "He shot him!" And then this absurd series of movements--Joel throwing out the favourite things Ellen had brought him, Joel packing up, Joel telling Randolph "I loved you!" quickly followed by "I hate you!" and saying that Pepe Alvarez (the boxer for whom Randolph had become an 18th century countess at a Mardi Gras ball--the moment that Randolph has chosen to prize above all memories as he sends letters out to Pepe every day to all parts of the globe...) could by now only see him as a "ghost" were he to come back, by some miraculous chance; and climaxed by Joel's leaving the place in full view of Randolph who moans "Don't go, don't go."
Why anyone would make this movie like this is completely beyond me.
Joel GOES to join the "queer lady" in the window at the end.
Joel does not leave Skully's Landing.
He goes back to the house, having chosen homosexuality.
Yeah, he's pretty young, that's a fact. But THAT is what he does, whether you like it or not.
He is going to be as Pepe as he possibly can for Randolph.
He's going to COMFORT him.
It has to be because Rocksavage wanted to save Joel from the "fate" that is the whole point of the book. In this case, why not just make a film about a sexual predator and a young boy who manages to escape him--a young boy who escapes him because he does NOT want to have sex with Randolph.
Joel DOES want to have sex with Randolph and is going upstairs to do so.
*********************************************************************
In the novel, after Randolph, who has gotten quite drunk coming back from the Cloud Hotel, has gone back in the house, Joel stays outside in the stillness of the summery garden.
The whole passage is worth quoting to anybody who doubts that Joel made the choice FOR Randolph and not AGAINST him (or they can look at Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote).
"A sound, as if the bell had suddenly tolled, and the shape of loneliness, greenly iridescent, whitely indefinite, seemed to rise from the garden, and Joel, as though following a kite, bent back his head: clouds were coming ove the sun: he waited for them to pass, thinking that when they had, when he looked back, some magic would have taken place: perhaps he would find himself sitting on the curb of St. Deval Street, or studying next week's attractions outside the Nemo: why not? it was possible, for everywhere the sky is the same and it is down that things are different. The clouds traveled slower than a clock's hands, and as he waited, became thunder-dark, became John Brown and horrid boys in panama hats and the Cloud Hotel and Idabel's old hound, and when they were gone, Mr Sansom was the sun. He looked down. No magic had happened; yet something had happened; or was about to. And he sat numb with apprehension. Before him stood a rose stalk throwing shadow like a sun-dial: an hour traced itself, another, the line of dark dissolved, all the garden began to mingle, move.
"It was as if he had been counting in his head and, arriving at a number, decided through certain intuitions, thought: now. For, quite abruptly, he stood up and raised his eyes level with the Landing's windows.
"His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus. the wall yellowed in the meticulous setting of the October sun, and the windows were rippling mirrors of cold, seasonal color. Beyond one, someone was watching him. All of him was dumb except his eyes. They knew. And it was Randolph's window. Gradually the blinding sunset drained from the glass, darkened, and it was as if snow were falling there, flakes shaping snow-eyes, hair: a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden's edge where, as though he'd forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind."
It seems almost conceivable that Rocksavage and Flanigan may have thought that "he knew he must go" meant that he would, in fact, need to vacate the premises since he had made the assessment that he was in grave danger; that perhaps they may have needed the text to read "he knew he must go to her" for them to know for sure what the text meant. That cannot have been the case; this has to be that they wanted to make one of the most original stories in all of American literature a "morality play" about a sexual predator--they had to know they were destroying everything Capote's work had stood for. Astonishing that they would bother with all the trouble and money for something this appalling.
I have quoted the entire passage because the only other possibilities are "the garden's edge" and "looked back at the bloomless, descending blue" that could have involved some literal working-on of the minutiae of the "set," as it were, in the text. Clearly, he had been just outside the garden, and was going in, clearly the "bloomless blue" is finally to be seen on all sides at sundown, as easily looking back from the house as toward it..in any case, Joel wouldn't have left that night in the novel with not a thing of his own on his person and defied the odds of a dark Southern swamp at night...
..and anyway, this is not Robbe-Grillet, where the same stairway can lead to any number of different rooms, full of drug dealers, full of a dead prostitute on a bed, now in the wrong room; or a pier that is the same one but that is sometimes composed of several planes, sometimes just one; or a cord in the pocket that has been lost (definitely lost) and is then there again (without having been found; or an Oriental commercial wrapper of some item or pack of cigarettes which keeps reappearing with exactly the same properties in highly differentiated places and lines of plot completely antagonistic to each other.
We know this, we just want to point out AD INFINITUM that this kind of usage of a classic text is symptomatic of the very worst dishonesty in all of world culture today. I appointed myself to point it out here, since this novel is sacred to me (there are only a handful of really good hardcore homosexual novels, and Jean Genet did a few of the others), but it is by no means an isolated incident of artistic obscenity.
George Davis hilariously told Capote that "somebody had to write the fairy HUCKLEBERRY FINN." This is funny, because it is as if Randolph's Countess is saying to Joel "Come back to the raf', Huck honey..." but we know that here Foucault's (more than Plato's) "keenest of pleasures" does prepare to occur.
This film is on a level with Trump's THE APPRENTICE.
A lot of people would rather hear Joel say to Randolph "YOU'RE FIRED!" than face the fact that he went up the stairs afterward with something a lot more like "TELL ME HOW YOU WANT ME TO GIVE IT TO YOU, BABY..."