BUK: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Tight & Shiny Productions
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When Charles Bukowski appeared in Ron Mann’s 1985 documentary Poetry in Motion, one could already see the encumbrance imposed on him by the character he created for himself: Henry Chinaski, all-time loser. The one who never wins the pay raise, the girl, the bet, or the fight. The one who always steps in the dog shit and throws up on the person least likely to tolerate such treatment. The one women love and leave within a few hours. The one who discovers the corpse. He had none of the cloying charm of Chaplin’s tramp, and accepted his ill fortune with a shrug and a gallon of muscatel. Chinaski served his maker well, winning him a huge following of semi-literati. But while the other poets featured in Mann’s film are seen performing their new works, Bukowski, who was then 65, is only Chinaski, shuffling about like an old dog, mumbling misanthropic commentaries on modern poetry. (“It’s not that I’m so good. It’s that the others are so bad. Are they jerking me off or what?”)
Buk is told as a series of reminiscences by the older Chinaski, whose first words are “What was I doing before the age of 35? Dying, sweetheart, dying.” We see the young Chinaski working in a post office under a supervisor who’s a cross between Captain Bligh and Ivan the Terrible, and we see his friend Lou crack under the strain of the regimentation. We meet Chinaski’s pals–Indian Mike, who calls everything “a bagga bullshit,” and Petey the Owl, who says, “Guy’s an asshole on earth–he’s an asshole on the moon. Makes no difference.” And we meet a caravan of individuals nourished on alcohol and sometimes art, with no escape but sex or suicide and no dream but one of security with freedom. “The myth of the starving artist was a hoax,” says the Chinaski who lived through the Depression. “A man’s soul is rooted in his stomach. The thing to do was to keep four walls around you. If you had four walls, you had a beginning, you had a chance. Give a man four walls long enough and he could own the world.”
Richard Strand’s script is so intelligent and thoughtful that you want to drag people in off the street to see it. Carefully and kindly dismissing all the cliches connected with the craft of clowning and the personalities of its practitioners, he makes every turn of his deceptively simple story simultaneously surprising and logical. When Alfie confesses that he has forgotten to buy a birthday present for his baby son, Louie offers him the stuffed bear we have come to think has been his companion for decades. When we later learn that this is not the case–stuffed toys have a way of disintegrating rapidly when used on stage–we don’t feel cheated. Reality may contradict illusion, but the illusion Louie has created for us out of love is still ours to keep. An understanding of this balance is what saves Mr. Szczepanski, arriving 13 hours late to find one irate clown still waiting, from the fate that earlier befell a young director who didn’t understand and was thoroughly trounced by the clowns.
