Art After Angela.docx

8/13/2019 Art After Angela.docx

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ART AFTER ANGELA

with quotes from The Picture of Dorian Grayby Oscar Wilde

by Sam McKinniss


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Harry, said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face,

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of

the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is

revealed by the painter it is rather the painter who, on the coloured

canvas, reveals himself.

Angela Lansbury is often called a legend, which is accurate, because

she is a talented star who has enjoyed enormous artistic success as a film,

stage, and television actress since the 1940s. She is a legend in the mythical

sense as well, since she appears never to die. Lansbury is an 88-year-old

Dame of the British Empire, active embodiment of a wealth of character

contradictions such as decency, common sense, fairness, warmth, as well as

strength, murder, villainy, and psychotic bitchiness. There are 264 episodes

of Murder, She Wrote, her biggest hit in terms of outreach, a television

series made for CBS between 1984 and 1996. Every episode features the

gruesome murder of at least one person acquainted with Lansburys

character, the amateur sleuth and mystery novelist Jessica B. Fletcher, a


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widow living in small-town Maine and later in New York City. The weekly

violent demise of a person close to her was a ritual broadcast event lost on

approximately no one. I watch it now all the time on Netflix. Lansbury

cheerfully possesses an intimate closeness to death like nobody else who at

the same time is so beloved by such an enormous popular audience

impressed with her apparent goodness. My father used to tell me when I was

a child that he would never want to be friends with Jessica Fletcher because it

was likely that he would be murdered, even though it was obvious that he

liked her very much. As I understand it, this was a joke that many people

used to tell.

Before the TV series made her world famous, which she

unquestionably still is, Lansbury was a highly regarded character actress who

played several despicable women living various lives of crime, including the

incestuous political operative Mrs. Iselet in 1962s The Manchurian

Candidate as well as the deranged cannibal Nellie Lovett for a Broadway

musical called Sweeney Todd in 1979.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, a film version of Oscar Wildes classic

morality tale directed by Albert Lewin, was the second movie Lansbury ever

made, in the role of Sybil Vane. It earned her the Academy Award


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nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1945, her second time being

nominated. The first nomination came for playing a maid named Nancy in

1944s Gaslight which also happened to be her first film. She was 18 and

19-years-old and failed to win on either occasion. As music hall entertainer

Sybil Vane, Lansbury was Dorian Grays love interest. A precious looking

gay man named Hurd Hatfield plays Mr. Gray, but did not go on to have

much success as an actor. Hatfield and Lansbury share their few scenes

together, which are exquisitely lit and photographed. Vane sings the song

Goodbye Little Yellow Bird, which has something to do with freedom.

Less than halfway through the movie, Vane commits suicide somewhere off

camera after Dorian Gray is cruel to her. Her time on screen is brief but

memorable and above all incredibly beautiful. Lansburys pretty teenaged

face will always exist on celluloid as a motion picture of youth, a dazzling

projection of silvery light and velvety shadow, never changing, never aging.

She is captured on film just like all movie stars are, an analogous situation to

Wildes ironic legend of Dorian Gray, whose looks remain perfect in life

while the artist Basil Hallwards portrait of him magically transforms into a

picture of a hideous monster. Wildes mystery functions critically in part

because of this movie and every other piece of cinema featuring the young


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and beautiful, whose players seem to yearn to sell their souls in exchange to

have their youthful looks immortalized, but Lansbury is special. She

embodies Wildes drama through her physical performance as Vane.

Thereafter her career is imprinted with the peculiar mark of Wilde, arguably

the greatest writer ever to use the English language. Hence, Lansburys career

is marked from the get as an update to Wildes prophetic narrative, a modern

morality tale in the form of an image cult disguised by supernatural portraiture

shaded with paradox, vanity, narcissism, youth obsession and homicide.

Lansbury persists despite the cult of Wilde, becomes visibly very old while

managing to thrive.

But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us

at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate

into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we

were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the

courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world

but youth!

To watch Angela Lansbury accept an honorary Academy Award


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recently was like watching an aggressively aged woman take revenge and

conquer a curse. Her second picture enjoined her to the cult of Wilde.

Making films as a teenager guaranteed that there will always be moving

pictures of her lovely face, young forever as if this guarantee affords the

option to make deals with death, should she ever need one, a representation

to counteract the future degradation of her beauty, unless she trades her soul

as Gray does, to die in favor of the portrait living on instead.

Because you have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one

thing worth having Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly,

when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded

your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.

After The Picture of Dorian Gray, for whatever reason she was

typecast for years as a tremendous bitch playing women older than she was

in reality. Powerful men in Hollywood held a grudge against her, or they

misunderstood her. She never became a Hollywood leading lady. Even

though in real life she wasnt old enough to have given birth to any of these

handsome leading men, Lansbury played Elvis Presleys mother (Blue


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Hawaii, 1961), Warren Beattys mother (All Fall Down, 1962), Laurence

Harveys mother (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962). Later she made

Broadway musicals, most notably starring inMame (1966), Gypsy (1973),

and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). She played

dowdy Miss Marple in a film called The Mirror Crackd based on an

Agatha Christie mystery co-starring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in

1980, both of whom she has outlived.

By the time she finally did achieve senior citizenship, revenge was fully

operative, her weekly routine spent solving murders while the image of her

face aged realistically on television screens everywhere, making millions of

dollars, her somewhat humble but brilliant charisma upheld and practically

sainted by an adoring, fanatical populace. Today she is very old and looks it,

and she hasnt stopped working. No one would dare idolize her youth, and

yet those early films are preserved, watchable and perfectly compelling in

each their own right.

When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you

will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to

content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past


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will make more bitter than defeats.

This past November in Hollywood, when Lansbury was formally

presented with the Oscar at the Governors Ball, she clutched the statuette

near to her bosom in an embrace so rich with symbolism that it was difficult

for me not to watch the clip over and over again on YouTube and marvel at

the worlds treachery and her masterful triumph in spite of it. Angela thanked

several people by name, discussed her accomplishments at work, expressed

her gratitude, wept, and left the podium in less than seven minutes. She

hugged a work of art. The Oscar is a sculpture, after all, even if it is also a

trophy. Tall yet miniature, sleek and nude, a golden man holds the sword of

righteousness, standing erect upon a film reel pedestal like an Art Deco idol

to immortality bestowed on behalf of the motion picture industry, an

arrangement which Oscar Wilde could have foretold. Intentionally or not, the

entire culture has collectively worshipped the Oscar a little bit or a lot for

most of the 20thcentury and into the 21st. Now, of course, the Academy

Awards seem more out of touch and boring than ever. In some way this

makes Lansburys award acceptance even more uncanny, because we get to

see her relish the objects significance just before the dawn of a time in


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history when the Academy disappears from relevance. That, or else just

before her own unlikely death, whichever event occurs first.

It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done, said

Lord Henry, languidly. You must certainly send it next year to the

Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have

gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able

to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not

been able to see the people, which was worse.


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Art After Angela.docx