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CRYPTOGENICS Paul Bowles’ semi-autobiographical The Sheltering Sky, about a man and his wife wandering through the pits of North Africa, has an aggravating attraction: what the fuck does it all mean? My guess: it’s most likely about escapists existentially slumming. What removes some of us from Sky is neither the husband Port (Bowles) nor the wife Kit (Jane Bowles) admit to each other their desires; they’re trapped by their own fears of freedom. Escapists who don’t enjoy the choices they’re seeking tend to be untrue to themselves: Bowles and his wife are fictionalized as heterosexuals. And because of this fakery, Bowles’ “subtlety” is being taken for something deeper than what’s there. The literary tone has a 40s “we’re-so-out-we’re-in” deceptiveness suggesting a Saharan Walpurgisnacht—gay game-playing turned nightmare becoming vogue again with playwrights in the early and mid 60s. In commenting on a work roughly seventy years old, we’re too easily check-listing Bowles’ cloaky devices, balking over Port having sex with a woman when he really wants to have it with Tanner, the unwanted accompanying traveler who has sex with Kit. (Isn’t a ménage à trois what these morose boobs need to pull themselves from their descents into sexual incommunicado?) As I read it, the inability of Port and Kit to acknowledge their sexual desires exacerbates the fraudulence; the whole bizarre thing becomes a black fantasy as warning about the perils of marriages of convenience and how they can turn a distaffer into the insatiable hustler/slave the other hasn’t the daring to be. The movie makes even less sense; trying to pictorialize the obfuscation, director Bernardo Bertolucci likewise murks up the opportunity to bring a deliriously intellectualized homoeroticism to the screen. The result is all sublimation: he uses the foreign locales and their native natural horrors as means of transforming the estrangement of Port and Kit into nebulous wanderings. The narrative confounds persistently, to those who know anything about the writer and his wife, and it will perplex even more the uninitiated. (There’s more insight into them in David Cronenberg’s version of William Burrough’s druggy curtsy Naked Lunch.) Perhaps it’s all about self-destruction and represented by Malkovich’s Port doing the longest, most tiresome Camille in years. (Neither the movie nor the audience ever recovers from it.) Debra Winger’s Kit is rewarded for her hopeless Florence Nightingale efforts by silently submitting herself as her husband’s replacement as member of a harem, through which she’s (and therefore he’s?) sexually sated like never before. Bowles seems to want to recall his sex-slumming good times and in the process elevate them in the book and Bertolucci in the movie as solemn literary penance. Cryptogenics—medical jargon for “we don’t know what’s wrong”—best explains The Sheltering Sky. Don’t forget to pack your Imodium A-D. Text COPYRIGHT © 2007 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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