Blog 3

Blog 3


Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat is a visual treat comprised of diegetic and nondiegetic inserts and sounds, leaving the viewer questioning what is real and allowing the viewer to experience the same struggle with reality as Jean Michael Basquiat experienced during his lifetime. Sequences of the film such as the opening scene of Basquiat as a boy with a lit up crown, the recurring image of a surfer above the New York City buildings, and the old footage of the bird eating the frog are interspersed between sequences of the daily happenings of Basquiat’s life— everything from him walking down the street, to making art— functioning to create this sense of ambiguity, the blurred sense of identity felt by the artist, allowing the viewer to understand the life of Basquiat on a deeper level. They propel the viewer on Basquiat’s ultimately unsuccessful journey to conquer perception (that of others’ and his own).
It takes watching the film in its entirety to fully understand the opening sequence of Basquiat as a boy donning a fantastical lit up crown, standing with his weeping mother and looking at Picasso’s Guernica with a boyish glee in his eyes. In one of the final sequences of the film following the death of Warhol, Basquiat (very near to death, himself) walks with Benny and brings up his mother once more as he explains a fairytale she would tell him as a child. The story is one in which a little prince is kidnapped and placed high up in a tower. The film cuts to a scene of the prince banging his crown against the bars of the tower’s window, his attempts to be heard and rescued. Unfortunately, as Basquiat informs Benny and the viewer, the prince was never found, but his crown against the bars made the most beautiful sound for all to hear and the prince, in that moment, filled the whole world up with beauty. The crown iconography thus serves two purposes. Not only does mark the beginning and the end of Basquiat’s lifelong struggles with the fantastical versus the real (seemingly associated with his mother), it also is analogous of Basquiat’s own attempts at being heard, at achieving the sort of recognition and perception he wanted as an artist.
Similarly, the black-and-white montage of the bird eating the frog, a questionable non-digenetic insert which is placed during a fit of creativity had by Basquiat in Gina’s apartment, creates the same sense of ambiguity, and throws the viewer into Basquiat’s struggles with reality and his place in it. This montage appears rather suddenly, and is followed by a shot of reality, as it is revealed to viewer that Basquiat has just painted all over his girlfriend’s artwork and fine clothing. Regardless, the viewer is left confused as to whether the old footage they just viewed is a real representation of Basquiat’s own thoughts, of his insanity, or if it is just an analogy for creativity and divine inspiration. The viewer, as is the trend throughout the movie is left questioning: is this meant to represent an actual experience had by Basquiat? What is real and what is fantasy?
At the end of the film, the viewer also understands the recurring scene of the surfer as being a scene quasi-representative of reality. The way in which the shot of a surfer is interspersed throughout the movie, appearing above buildings and in bathroom mirrors is purely fantasy, but, on the other hand, it is very real as it is most of the time indicative of Basquiat’s emotional state. The surfer is seen during the beginning half of the movie as Basquiat’s will power (as well as his will to live), his drive to become famous. The surfer is associated with Hawaii, and from Basquiat’s noted obsession with Hawaii as the ultimate, the dreamland, it can be deduced that the surfer is a figure Basquiat’s drive to achieve his ultimate goal, to legitimize his worldly perceptions as a famous artist. Towards the end of the film, when the going gets especially rough (after he has sky-rocketed to fame and Warhol’s death) the surfer is shown wiping out, as a means to mark the end of Basquiat’s will and drive to create. Hawaii is no longer Basquiat’s saving grace.
The film’s portrayal of Basquiat and his blurred perception of self and the world leads to an overridingly eccentric portrayal of the artist and viewer is left wondering whether this eccentricity is perhaps in fact a form of mental illness. As Kay Redfield Jamison writes, it is a common cultural stereotype to link madness with artistic genius. Jamison writes about various studies (including her own) conducted over the years which investigate the prevalence of schizophrenia and manic depression/mood disorders in artistic, creative individuals. Jamison investigates the episodic spurts of creativity of artists (shown in both Basquiat and Pollock) and connects them to manic-depressive mood disorders. Manic depression, Jamison writes, is characterized by “temperaments…part of the affective continuum, forming in turn a natural bridge between a virulently psychotic illness on the one hand and the moody, artistic temperaments on the other.” In short, the sudden spurts of energy in this mood disorder are highly conducive to artistic creativity. As films such as Pollock and Basquiat would have it, there is definite truth to this connection of madness and creativity. Though both artists suffer from some form of substance abuse (which inevitably affects their temperaments) they are each portrayed with attributes of mental illness as well. The pattern the film creates of Pollock retreating, drinking, then having a sudden spurt of creativity (`a la the Guggenheim mural) resembles the traits of a manic depression discussed by Jamison. The style in which the film Basquiat shows Basquiat’s attacking of Gina’s possessions in a fit of creativity, interspersed with the old-fashioned, zany footage (discussed earlier) also supports Jamison’s findings as Basquiat seemingly has a surge of “physical restlessness,” a drive to create.