In Marco Ferreri’s Tales Of Ordinary Madness, Ben Gazzara plays Charles Serking, an incarnation of Charles Bukowski, upon whose work and life the film is based. Those already familiar with Bukowski, will not be surprised to learn that Gazzara spends most of the film drunk, wandering from one anonymous,dysfunctional sexual encounter to another, and in between times, managing to write some poetry. Here’s a quote from the film’s voiceover to sum up Gazzara’s lifestyle…

“…Back in LA…I could have kissed the ground…I resisted the impulse. Besides, it was drink I craved, and I had to be back in my kind of town…Hollywood. Everyone thinks it’s the playground of the stars, but they pushed on years ago. Now it’s my kind of place…dangerous…with pimps, whores, no class rip-off artists, and other hard-core turf shattered types entertaining fantasies too desparate to mention…”

Gazzara’s life seems to take a turn when he meets and apparently falls in love with the beautiful but self-destructive prostitute, Cass (played heartbreakingly by Ornella Muti). They engage in a stormy on-off relationship, which eventually falls apart. In the end, Gazzara winds up on a beach, drunk, with his head resting upon the navel of a young virgin, spouting poetry. And it is this final image in the film, which has piqued me to write this blog.

Essentially, Tales Of Ordinary Madness is a film about the ambivalence of the artist – on the one hand Gazzara seeks consolation in the oblivion of cheap sex and cheap alcohol, while on the other hand, there is the need to create work, or create poetry in the film’s case, and creating that work requires focus and discipline and energy. In the final image of the film, Ferreri seeks to resolve the artist’s ambivalence by bringing these disparate aspects together as one, within a single frame, thus creating relief, and closure.

But what can this mean?

I do not believe that having a personal kink makes one a great artist. Dostoyevsky was a gambing addict, but that isn’t why he was a great novelist, he was a great novelist because he had a talent for writing. If you develop a gambling addiction, it does not follow that you will become a great writer. Bukowski himself was an alcoholic, but if you remove the alcohol, he should still have been able to write great poetry. There is, however, a key scene in the film, where Gazzara decides he wants to “disappear” for a few days, “become invisible”, so he checks himself into a homeless shelter and hangs out drinking low grade booze with the bums and the bozos. This is clearly the action of a man who cannot cope with the pressure of identity, the pressure of self-consciousness, and so he tries to relieve himself of such pressure by going to a place where he is unknown, and further, where there is no pressure to be anybody. We might then infer, that his alcoholism and anonymous sexual encounters, are also, in general, attempts to unburden himself of self-consciousness, and of identity. So, what then of his art? If the booze and sex compulsions are not a function of making art, then perhaps all three are driven by the same crisis. Perhaps the artist is compelled to make work because he too cannot cope with self-consciousness, and so the same internal crisis sets off, as in the sex addict or alcoholic. The artist loses himself by immersing himself in his work as oppose to narcotics, and so an equilibrium (ie – relief from crisis) is brought about only whilst the artist is working – . Many actors say they act because they want to become someone else, a spurious claim, as I would be hard pushed to convince myself I actually become someone else while performing, but you get the point. It is a fallacy that actors are egomaniacs, infact, the opposite is true, actors spend their lives learning to pare-back their egos in order to play a diverse range of characters, ultimately becoming a blank sheet of paper. It was Alain Delon who said he was only happy while infront of a camera, becoming miserable after the director shouted CUT.

Ferreri’s final image of the film then, this bringing together of apparently disparate and conflicting aspects of Gazzara’s life, informs us that these aspects are only different because have we have chosen to split up the means by which we resolve our inner tension. Instead of making art, sometimes we seek relief in sex, alcohol, gambling, or whatever it is that will enable us to escape ourselves. However, it’s important to remind ourselves that these self-destructive tendencies do not aid us to create work, infact, they hamper our ability to create work because they drain us of artistic energy, wasting it on empty, meaningless escapades. If we learn to eradicate this waste, we may find that we become more prolific, and the standard of our work improves. Our ambivalence however, can never be permanently resolved, but we can ensure it becomes a powerful motor for our work.