The Human Stain (or, Boy is my wife mad at me.)

The Human Stain: The Movie, The Book

Question. You’re a screenwriter? Someone hands you a moderately popular novel by a Pulitzer-prize winning author, which is 10 % plot and 90% exposition, heady and often annoyingly repetitive, and says, “Tee this thing up and smack it down the fairway.” You don’t like golf because of its association with smug capitalists, so instead you grapple with ways to make exposition seem like movement. You settle on two common devices: The Billy Pilgrim effect (you are unstuck in time) and character narration, which is the attempt to fuse a movie with its audio book. Does it work?
This movie flunked at Cannes and garnered some seriously ugly reviews, which proves to me that film critics don’t read books. Maybe that’s why they’re film critics. This is an instance where book meets movie and they mate. They are the two sides of a lean-to, which doesn’t quite make a love triangle.
Coleman Silk is a light-skinned black that made the fateful decision in his youth to “pass” for a white after a romance with a sultry midwestern blonde failed when she met his family and learned the truth. In the book, we also learn that he was ejected from a cathouse when the whore identified him as a “full-blood nigger” with his clothes off.
He became a successful Dean of Classic Literature at a cozy, sub-ivy college, but made enemies while re-shaping the department. He referred to two missing students in his class as “spooks”, not knowing they were black and the ensuing vilification by jealous, moralistic colleagues caused him to resign, after which his wife died of a stroke. He blames his colleagues.
Both book and movie allude to the moralistic societal campaign against Bill Clinton, but only the book goes into a polemic that Clinton could have kept the whole thing quiet if only he’d “ass-fucked” Lewinski.
Silk, 71, begins an affair with a 34-year-old, Faunia, an embittered, trailer-parkesque cleaning-woman-with-baggage, played by Nicole Kidman. Faunia’s baggage is an abusive stepfather, an abusive Vietnam-psychotic ex-husband and two dead kids. Silk’s “last love” blossoms. Faunia’s ex-husband kills them both.
I’m not giving away an important plot twist here. The movie opens with the murder. Roth, more dramatically, withholds this information for the first third of the book.
The poly-critics all point out the poly-themes, such as racism, “racial passing”, the healing quality of love and the spineless tendency for society to hide behind morals. The book also explores the characters of Delphine Roux, Silk’s academic nemesis, who is a textbook study of defense mechanisms and Les, the psychotic vet. One of the high points of the book is the comic-ironic detailing of the anti-fear therapy imposed on Les by his vet buddies. They take him, repeatedly, to a Chinese restaurant so he can get use to being around “gooks”. The movie expounds on Les only with psychologist interviews.
I know and Roth knows, that all these themes are mute. There is only one theme that explains all human behavior. That is the quest for orgasm. It is the ultimate motivator and it is the foundation of all behavior: Coleman Silk’s abandonment of race and family as well as Achilles’ moodiness. Roth knows this, but it’s better not to say it or else we would quit reading his books as if they were mystery novels.
I note that director Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer) grew up in Waxahachie, Texas, which is near my old south Fort Worth neighborhood, not that this matters at all.
If anyone is reading this on Pat Fitzgerald’s web log, please note his refusal to publish my review of Batman Begins, which, indeed, was a nonsensical, drunken rant. You can find that review on my blog at http://billwoodblog.blogspot.com/ . Thanks for your insouciance.