disappearance of an american family
by
Douglas Messerli
Carlos
Muguiro, Emilio Tomé, Sergio Oksman (screenwriters), Sergio Oksman (director) Uma História para os Modlin (The Story of the Modlins) / 2012
No one can quite know the family’s true
story. The only evidence left is a large trove of photographs, notes, and
tapes, and other ephemera found near a garbage bin on a Madrid side street,
near their former apartment. The packages of unexplained materials left after
the family’s deaths, were immediately recognized by the director, Oskman, to be
of interest and value, but how he might perceive and organize this material was
left up the director’s own imagination. Given the family’s isolation and
absolute secrecy, there is no way of even establishing a true chronological
track of the family’s strange activities, let alone a way of interpreting what
they semi-artistic activities and rituals actually meant.
What he does piece together is that
Margaret was born of a wealthy Carolina family, whose parents disinherited her
after she took up an acting career and, especially when she quickly fell in
love with the young would-be actor, Elmer. The couple, nonetheless, married, while
Elmer, with delusions of grandeur moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in
acting, a career which, as for so many, ended nowhere. Playing bit parts on
television and serials, Elmer, traditionally handsome but without, apparently,
much of an acting ability, grew increasingly frustrated, while his wife
increasingly moved into the art world, with a particular talent at
sculpture-making.
Today, her art seems amateurish and
crude, particularly when she later turns to painting, struggling to represent
the entire Apocalypse, particularly with her beloved son, Nelson, as model.
But, quite obviously, something
meaningful to the would-be artists happened before this, immediately after
Elmer briefly appeared in Rosemary’s Baby
as an on-looker at the very last scene, where-in Mia Farrow, knife in hand,
joins the party celebrating the birth of the devil. Peering into the
black-covered cradle she is, at first, shocked by what she sees, but ultimately
cannot resist her motherly duties. But, of course, this is fiction, and the
devil with the empty cradle is a thing of the imagination: we never see that
horrible visage, and the cradle, so the documentary reports, was empty.
With the art of Margaret at the center
of their lives, the family seemed to go into a kind of artful trance, with,
evidently, Margaret—that, at least, is the presumption of the director—filming
her young teenage son early in the mornings as he seemed play out almost ritual
stances, but which almost suggest a perverse kind child pornography. And, even
if the father was not directly involved in these photographic sessions, when
Nelson later escaped from the family, he attempted to replace him, often in the
nude.
In the last two photographs, the
beautifully lithe Pan whom his parents loved has transformed into a heavyweight
man, who has clearly attempted to shed his youthful “radiance.”
The final scenes, portrayed through a
video tape taken by clearly unexpected relatives, in which Elmer quickly tours
them through his wife’s art projects—all centered on a Christian project that
one might imagine to be a kind of apotheosis of the evil he had encountered in
the filming of the Polanski movie—ends with Margaret’s rather remarkable
sculpture of their two heads, in which their ashes were, they announced, to be
placed.
As bad as her somewhat surrealist
“Christian-based” art was, it would have been fascinating to see what the art
really looked like. It’s not exactly that she had no talent, we perceive, just
a lack of vision—which was surely, also, the problem with her husband’s
inability—just as was true with John Cassavetes’ character in the original Rosemary’s Baby—to find a role in film
and theater. The photographs of her son, moreover, are utterly fascinating.
Although we have no idea what theatrical rituals he was attempting to play out,
they are riveting. Wouldn’t it be wonderful just to see a show of those works
today?
Oskman doesn’t say this, but hints at it
the traumatic question: what do you do it you have devoted your life to art and
no one cares about it or wants even to see it. Elmer’s one great moment in his
acting career was to take his wayward visitors through his wife’s “great
contributions” to the world of art.
The story of the Modlin’s, alas, is the
story of millions of would-be artists, people of great belief in the
imagination, but who simply don’t know how to express it or haven’t the talent
to. This film reeks of the bitterness that happens when the loving and
caring artists
simply cannot face the truth. Particularly, when the society itself has not
been able to accept their self-imagined gifts.
Given all the bad art I have seen in my
life, I’d have gladly suggested to some popular gallerist to give Margaret a
show. And surely, Elmer Modlin deserved, in some grade B movie, to be given a
small speaking role. At least Nelson saw the world, whether or not he could
enjoy it is a mystery that shall never be answered.
Los Angeles,
March 27, 2017
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