The Sheltering Sky

I never thought I'd come to this opinion of a movie, but in order to be better, The Sheltering Sky needs to be more boring. Bertolucci did his best to bring Paul Bowles' novel to the screen, but the book's quiet, desired doom--the quality that rescues Bowles' meditation from its easy, occasional angst--seems impossible to film. Or perhaps Bertolucci neglected to try? What he does capture is the most bourgeois part of the story--its melodrama--using the sordid smallness to confine Kit and Port, in their expatriate trauma, to sensational and uninteresting thoughts and actions. And although the adaptation is well acted, especially by John Malkovich, and visually stunning, it never quite earns its aura of solitude and despair. Lacking the gritty, dirty irreverence of post-war colonialism, or the claustrophobic silence of the land, which tolerates, absorbs, and smothers every human impulse, every wish, The Sheltering Sky, is just another love story.

One can draw a useful contrast with John Huston's adaptation of Lowry's Under the Volcano, another "unfilmable" novel of the middle generation. Rather than swath his characters in suggestive landscapes, as Bertolucci does, gambling to infuse the human drama, set among the Sahara's annihilating grandeur and poverty, with stark and ineffable truths, Huston trains his lens almost exclusively on Albert Finney, the dissipating consul. The effect is striking. By condensing the novel's sprawling emotional fog into one marvelous face and body, which, as the movie rolls, lapses further and further into incommunicable waste and self-loathing, Huston implies through the single, simple collapse all the elusive literary strengths he wisely decided to place in the film's margins: metaphysical candor, psychological and sexual uncertainty, Proustian (god help us) nostalgia. Because he limits their scope solely to the performance of a capable actor, who can control them through precise gestures and inflections, Huston succeeds where Bertolucci fails: he gets us to feel through the characters all that nervy, imperishable language that he couldn't translate into images.

Bertolucci's strategy--to let the land's desolation mute the passions of its visitors--works only sometimes. As a result, The Sheltering Sky is a movie mostly of backgrounds, albeit stirring and vaguely profound ones. In the end, his reliance on landscape reminds me of food that is half-cooked but overseasoned. Isolated scenes, like bits of a chicken, produce the expected flavor, but as a whole the texture is uneven and the structure purposeless. The esteemed Italian, so celebrated for his smoothness, here serves up a lumpy product. And what taste the movie does communicate it gathers not from its own fineness but from the book's uncorrupted guts.

On its simplest level, The Sheltering Sky belongs to the genre of literature, popular well into the sixteenth century but unfashionable today, called the Morality Play. Stock characters--the idealistic lover, the conniving merchant, the sage beggar--teach or learn a life lesson while embarking on an adventure. In our case, Port and Kit educate themselves into extinction, apprenticing their hearts and minds--the story leaves no room for souls--to the truth that desire is indeed dark. In the process, they teach each other how to be unhappy. Like an improvisation on Heart of Darkness, Bowles' novel exposes both the basic solitude at the center of desire and the feeble rage that wars against nature. As the two Americans penetrate deeper into the Continent, they, like Marlowe, come to discover truths that are too personal to ignore but too ugly to endure. Civilization, like man, is an exercise in emptiness.

Bowles was honest enough to allow his characters to come that unkind conclusion. But what he urges us to contemplate is far more meaningful and unspeakably disturbing. Consider this: curiosity causes us to delight in our senses. As we evolved more finely moduled cortices, we began to use language to transform our impressions, which we form from sensations, into genuine knowledge that we can articulate and share. This is the literal axis of experience and the reason we enjoy learning. Turning sensations into thought gives us pleasure.

But as we coded our world with this new technology, a competing prey reflex, long a part of our species behavior, also emerged in our language. Working to calm the mammalian restlessness that drives us to straighten edges, pair objects, and check twice for monsters, we began to take our own articulations and wonder at them. We distrusted their flatness and simplicity. We insisted they mean more. Fear taught us to think in symbols, to seek meanings behind our animal pleasures and terrors, to relieve our painfully literal lives. Art, mythology, culture, love: they all come from fear, fear of emptiness, fear of aloneness. Each is a special kind of lie. But none can cure us of our restlessness or rid us of our nightmares. However powerful, our tools can't manufacture heaven or eternity, or even forgetfulness. When we touch another person, or taste the water, or compose songs, we feel that we break through to deeper, more permanent realms of experience. Our impressions, and the language that builds them into meaning, suggest an authenticity, a reality more real and enduring than any we know in the common, clamorous discourse of daily life. What we actually touch, and taste, and compose is our own sense of failure. Failure to conquer time. Failure to be faithful to principles we create only in order to betray them. Failure to be anything but human. In the desert, with nothing to take in but the featureless spheres of earth and sky, we learn to cultivate these failures, and we strive, with a lust brighter and more crackling than white fire, for the very solitude we fear. Looking like oblivion, as it does at these latitudes, the sky looms, blue and unbroken, apparently solid, as though protective against the imponderable horror of mere night, mere space, mere being. But "blue" and "unbroken" are specious categories, rational constructs in a vacuum of uncreated action. "Mere" anything--the notion that behind the fluctuating affect of our perceptions lies a truer, more complete version of whatever it is we call reality--constitutes one more symbol in the allegory against emptiness, this one all the more pregnant and persuasive because inaccessible. Language itself, stripped to its fear-stealing skeleton, is simply one more lie, another story to tell. We invent concepts like "nothing" and "empty" and assign words to them. Then, when we mythologize the sky as a mask sheltering us from the awful prospect that the planets spin without a purpose, we think we have delivered a great truth. Our metaphor of the sky as a mask, we proclaim, reveals the world as it really is: terrible, literal, vacuous. How brave and deceitful, then, is our failure not to prove time a liar. But this is not what disturbs us. We can live in a universe without meaning. Our desires are unplanned and destructible; we can accept their impotence. Behind the veneer of shelter or civilization or language lies cold, unthinkable Nature; we can withstand its immobility. Already in the Enlightenment de Sade had called it "the compost," and by the close of Victoria's reign Conrad had engineered the most violent unmasking of them all. What truly terrifies us, what brings Bowles' novel to new disturbing consciousness, is the insight that cold, unthinkable nature--the compost, the lie--is itself another lie. What we really fear, what we evade through order, companionship, stories--what we really inhabit--is a world without language, without lies. Which of course is just another, better lie.

We're more alone than we want to believe. We don't have access to anything outside our own expectations. That is why, as Bowles insists, a man's destiny (what a child's word!) is personal only insofar as it may happen to resemble what is already in his memory. Personal experience is the phrase we use to signify the arbitrary sense that what will happen joins coherently with what has already happened. In that moment of coincidence, when the past and future collide, we forge the space of our selves, our identities. It is the private sphere of our consciousness. Our experiences add up to something capable and whole because we learn to expect only what we remember. Past and future, before and after, are alike, and we find in their congruence a direction and purpose for our lives. But when accident intrudes, as it must, we come to think, for the very same reason, that it all adds up to nothing, a fact which, unfortunately, puts the entire notion in some doubt.

All of that is in the book, and better. In the movie, by contrast, we get half-digested, semi-masticated love letters to unhappiness. At one point in the novel, Kit and Port argue about whether one should desire anything more than nothing. When Kit concludes that zero is value worth reaching for, Port corrects her, insisting that we don't reach it, because it reaches us. That's not in the movie, but if it were, you wouldn't shudder, as you should. You'd yawn. C+