Beckett Smackdown
The New York Times has published a piece on the 100th birthday of Samuel Beckett. In the piece, they solicit comments from a number of playwrights about Beckett’s influence on their works.
One of the playwrights contributing to the piece is Will Eno, who nearly won the Pulitzer last year for his somewhat Beckettian monologue Thom Pain (based on nothing), which vaulted to legendary status with the help of Mr. James Urbaniak’s volcanic performance.
Indeed, the Times referred to Mr. Eno as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”
Will Eno is a wonderful writer deserving of all the success that he’s had. But I just want to point out that I was influenced by Beckett when Mr. Eno was in short pants. I yield to no man in my being influenced by Beckett, and yet somehow the New York Times never got around to asking me about it. That might have something to do with me not having a play run off-Broadway for fourteen years (and unsuccessfully at that), but I prefer to see it as blatant favoritism. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that payoffs were made.
I can hear the discussions at the Theater desk:
EDITOR: So who are you gonna ask about the Beckett piece?
WRITER: Oh, the usual suspects. Mamet, Vogel, Durang, Guare, Eno.
EDITOR: What about that guy who co-wrote Antz? Isn’t he a playwright?
WRITER: Chris Weitz?
EDITOR: No, the other one.
WRITER: Paul Weitz?
EDITOR: No, the OTHER one.
WRITER: Oh, you mean that Alcott guy?
EDITOR: Yeah, didn’t he used to write plays with a heavy Beckettian influence?
WRITER: Yeah, but I didn’t get a check from him.
EDITOR: Understood.
Here are some indications of the depth and breadth of Beckett’s influence on me and my work:
1. I have read everything that Beckett has written, usually more than once, and own at least one copy of each work, in English and in French (or whichever language the piece was originally written in).
2. I have a picture of myself standing in front of Beckett’s house in Paris, as well as pictures of the front door of Les Editions du Minuit, his publishers (the door reads, in French, Please Enter, Do Not Ring).
3. I have seen productions of all of Beckett’s plays, some of them many times, including many weird, distaff productions of prose works adapted awkwardly to the stage.
4. I own a copy of the Beckett On Film DVD set (my favorite is Anthony Mingella’s film of Play).
5. I have a little metal bust of Samuel Beckett on top of my computer monitor. It features Beckett’s head on top of an open book. I got it on Ebay.
6. I have three cats, named Didi, Gogo and Lucky.
7. My son’s name is Samuel Alcott.
Your move, Mr. Eno.
Tomie
There are five of these creepy, nasty little J-horror films: Tomie, Tomie: Replay, Tomie: Reborn (I know, I know) Tomie: Another Face and Tomie: Forbidden Fruit.
Tomie (pronounced Toe-mee-ayy) is a beautiful teenage girl. She seduces every man she meets and drives them crazy, makes them hurt each other, their friends and their families. Eventually their guilt and horror get the better of them, and they turn their anger toward Tomie, and they kill her in some brutal way. Methods include decapitation, dismemberment, incineration, freezing, impalement, drowning and falls from great height.
But Tomie, it turns out, is not an ordinary teenage girl. She is, apparently, some kind of ancient demon who takes the shape of a teenage girl. She has, apparently, come into our world many times over the past millenia or so, wrecked a whole bunch of people’s lives, been destroyed, and come back, again and again and again.
So, you kill Tomie because she’s ruining your life, and a few days later Tomie shows up to ruin your life all over again. Only this time she’s really mad.
Maybe she goes after your friends or family first. And you can’t very well say “Hey! You’re not supposed to be walking around, I dismembered you in the bathtub and bury you in the woods!” Because that would tend to cast a shadow of suspicion upon you. So you kind of have to take it and go crazy as she dismantles your life and drives you to suicide.
My favorite of the series is Tomie: Replay, where she emerges from the belly of a girl in the opening credits (don’t ask me), grows to maturity in a fish tank in the basement of a hospital, and goes on to ruin the lives of some hospital administrators.
There are always a couple of great set pieces in each movie. Tomie can spring back to life from even a speck of blood, so even if you’ve incinerated her body, if a speck of her blood got on your rug while you were cutting her up, she can grow back from that. Oh my gosh it gets icky.
In Tomie: Forbidden Fruit, there’s an ugly-duckling schoolgirl whom Tomie befriends, and when the girl’s father kills Tomie with a meat cleaver, cuts her up and dumps her in the river, the girl goes to find Tomie’s head and carries it around in a gym bag while it grows little stumpy limbs again. There’s a priceless scene where the girl is pushing Tomie’s severed head around in a baby carriage and runs into a fussy matron, who bends over to coo at what she thinks is a baby, and is instead confronted with the severed head of a teenage girl, who says something like “Could you stop staring? It’s very annoying,” upon which the woman screams and runs away.
Good fun for the whole family.
Tomie: Reborn is directed by Takashi Shimizu, who later went on to direct Ju-on and its American remake, The Grudge.