Editor’s Note: This month we welcome David Fear as a regular columnist. Mr. Fear is an up-and-comer in the world of San Francisco letters, swimming steadily upstream with regular appearances in the alternative press and beyond. We’ve asked him to ruminate for us on films, music, modern culture generally and, well, whatever his young spirit feels called to.
By David Fear
Published: April, 2002
Editor’s Note: This month we welcome David Fear as a regular columnist. Mr. Fear is an up-and-comer in the world of San Francisco letters, swimming steadily upstream with regular appearances in the alternative press and beyond. We’ve asked him to ruminate for us on films, music, modern culture generally and, well, whatever his young spirit feels called to.
Safe Water
He was a professional riverboat pilot and a failed amateur inventor; a misanthrope with a hair-trigger temper and a devoted husband and father; a gambler, a drinker, a man of detrimental greed and hubris, a cantankerous commentator on human foibles and fallacies and a perfect Southern gentleman. But, as our friendly narrator’s river-deep timbre never fails to remind us, Samuel Clemens was, first and foremost, a writer in touch with the roots of his environment. “I am not an American”, the walrus-mustached wordsmith once wrote. “I am the American.”
With that quote begins Mark Twain, Ken Burns’ documentary on the beloved man of letters who, as we’re reminded repeatedly throughout the film’s four-hour length (a “mere hiccup by Burns standards”, quoth New York Times critic Caryn James; I’ll counter that its running time is closer to a satisfying post-meal belch) redefined the “true” American vernacular in literature. For those viewers familiar with the figure but unfamiliar with the his works, it’s an important point that bears reiterating amidst the decades of overrating, underrating, book-banning, required reading lists and countless imitators Clemens and his alter ego have suffered since his passing. Behind the blustery character and caricatures lay one of the most original voices to pour out of our plains.
The fact that it’s another rather singular voice telling Twain’s tale might threaten to drown the subject itself out. Arguably the most recognizably non-fiction filmmaking name of the last twenty years, Burns’ role as an exemplary and exhaustively thorough chronicler of historical institutions (his best-known works, the multi-part Civil War, Baseball and Jazz series, run 11 hours, 18 hours, and 10 hours, respectively) has certainly reinvigorated the form. But his name alone is now shorthand for a genre unto itself, a genre of biographical film filled with the peccadilloes and now-predictable quirks the documentarian’s work exhibits: the use of background music to sustain atmosphere, the shots of archival shots, the fetishness of period detail, the mixture of somber tones and somewhat folksy whimsy. The minute Jazz’s narrator David Keith’s baritone booms over Twain’s soundtrack amidst the sepia toned visuals, the viewer knows they’re in Ken Burns country; it’d be impossible, frankly, to think you’re anywhere else.
It’s to Burns’ credit, however, that the familiarity of the filmmaker’s portraiture style never overshadows the film’s focus. Even in some of the documentary’s more irritating attempts at quaintness (the forever-twiddling banjo playing throughout the movie eventually causes an insane desire to leave the metaphorical rustic porch you’ll imagine you’re marooned on), the subject of Twain’s extraordinary life is well served. The details of Clemens’ childhood reverie in Hannibal, Missouri and his tenure as a steamboat pilot’s apprentice on the Mississippi River get their due, as do several of the young man’s other formative experiences with life and, prophetically, death. His family life, his touring of the lecture circuit as a humorist, his eventual critical and popular success, his procurement of wealth, and his later disillusionment thanks to poverty and personal tragedy unfurl before your eyes.
Authors, actors, historians weigh in with their two cents, shedding light and dispersing perspective whenever necessary (apparently, it’s a lucrative position, being a Twain scholar; no less than five appear onscreen throughout that bear only that esteemed title as identification), especially in regards to the thorny issues of race and language in his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. But it’s the writing itself that is most revealing, the words and thoughts fleshing out, but keeping the man behind them. Profound, lyrical, rambling, moving, funny…it’s surprising how alive his prose still seems, and how even the reading of Twain’s work in an overly bucolic style courtesy of Kevin Conway never manages to trivialize the selected excerpts.
Even his personal, subjective tangential pieces seem to resonate in their complexity. Taking a ferry from San Francisco (a town close to Twain’s heart which he not only immortalized in that oft-quoted maxim regarding our “summers” but that he also dubbed “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union) to Jack London Square several days after watching the film, it wasn’t O’Neill or Conrad that came to mind while I watched the Bay pitch around me. No, it was a quote from Twain’s Life on the Mississippi that had somehow burrowed into my brain:
“The face, in the water, in time became a wonderful book…a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it had uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day…there was never a page void of interest, never one you could leave unread or want to skip, thinking you could find a higher enjoyment in some other thing. The passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it…whereas, to the trained eye, these were not pictures at all, but the deadest and grimmest of reading matter…”
I’m no seafaring man, but damned if that didn’t seem somehow the perfect summation of gliding across the water at that very moment full of awe and grace. Clemens adopted the pseudonym “Mark Twain” in deference to the cry the steamboat pilots would use to mark passage into safe water; but as the writer Ron Powers points out, it also signals when you’ve crossed from safe waters back into dangerous currents. Twain never shied away from the dark side in even his humorous writing, and his straddling of both facets of humanity colors even the deadest and grimmest of his reading matter. It’s the same balance of the dark and the light, literally and figuratively, that gives Ken Burns Mark Twain such power and depth despite his occasional missteps and indulgences. By refusing to ignore the darkness beneath the frivolity in Twain’s or the ray of hope that permeates even the author’s bitter later pieces, the filmmaker highlights a well-rounded voice where some would be content to concentrate on all manner of pretty pictures. That he makes the journey into safe water and back again such an entertaining one is perhaps the most fitting tribute to Twain anyone could hope to offer.
