Oscar Wilde’s famous pronouncement that life imitates art far more than art imitates life was never better exemplified than last month when details of the Nancy Kerrigan assault case began to be known.
Initial reports of the attack by a masked man with a club impressed listeners as merely another instance of the endemic violence of American life. As arrests were made, however, a tidy melodrama emerged: glamor and rivalry in ice skating circles, deluded misfit plotters, potential corporate sponsors waiting in the wings. The nation followed the unfolding revelations with a rapture usually reserved for the Superbowl in progress. From the moment the police shifted their attention to Portland, Ore., fief of Kerrigan’s principal competitor, Tonya Harding, the attack in Detroit took on the familiar aspect of sordid intrigue. Journalists and the public latched on to it like soap opera addicts. Many said it was “fact triumphing over fiction,” or “worthy of the movies.”
Which leads one to wonder: If the Kerrigan case were a play, what would it have to offer? A Manichaean world view in which nice figure skaters wear Plae sequins and mean ones wear dark, in which supporting roles are shamelessly type-cast. Then there’s the dialogue. Tonya Harding commenting on the attack: “Nobody wanted to beat her worse than me.”
Add to this the hare-brained story of how the plot unraveled: the bodyguard unburdens himself to a 24-year-old minister who, insensitive to the secrets of confession, runs to tell a private eye. The minister and the private eye then go to the FBI together. Where’s the big confrontation? Where’s the blackmail? Where’s the poetry?
That so trite and artless a tale is immediately likened to a work of dramatic fiction should be felt as a stinging rebuke by those who create theatre. Presented as kitchen-sink realism, it wouldn’t play for a moment; as Grand Guignol it would be hooted off the stage. The best bet would be to play it as social satire and hope the audience laughs. If Wilde was right and life does indeed imitate art, one of our national priorities should be to find out why life is imitating art of such execrable quality.
Art can inform every aspect of national life, including crime, but hooligans today have no contact with art. Nobody raised on Chekhov, Pinter and Shepard could plan or execute anything as depraved as the Kerrigan assault–aesthetically depraved, that is. This is the sort of crime committed by people who wallow in irreality, people who can’t distinguish an episode of Mission Impossible from a PBS documentary.
There is no better gauge of any nation’s popular imagination that the quality of its crimes. No wonder the Europeans are laughing at us. The current world champion figure skater, Surya Bonaly of France, snickered, “I don’t want to comment from such a distance. It certainly seems bizarre.” The New York Times also quoted a British skating coach saying, “It does seem to be the kind of strange story that one occasionally gets out of America.”
Look at the nation’s police blotters and try to find crimes worthy of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine or de Musset’s Lorenzaccio. There aren’t any. DeQuincy considered murder an art form in itself; for Baudelaire and his admirers, including Genet, a life of crime did not exclude a sense of aesthetics. When Thomas Wainwright, the literary forger and assassin, was reproached for the murder of a woman, he replied, “Yes, it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”
Great theatre and great crimes have always gone hand-in-hand. Is it any accident that the Earl of Essex prepared for his act of treason by commissioning a performance at the Globe? That the Marquis de Sade had seen all of Beaumarchais’s comedies? That Lincoln was shot by an actor? These were criminals of vision and daring, criminals who struck at the soul and conscience of the nation, not the kneecaps of its figure skaters.
Instead of Shakespeare and Shaw, America’s criminals have grown up on Charles Bronson and Charlie’s Angels. The result is all too clear: When the representation of life is reduced to pablum and tripe, life itself responds in kind. A downward spiral begins which leads to convicted felons negotiating the movie rights to abominable crimes that owe much of their original inception to abominable movies.
The only thing art has to teach is style, and style is at the heart of everything. Theatre doesn’t make people moral; it tells stories. If the stories are well done, they allow the audience to imagine styles they do not currently command. Charity, discovery and enlightened public policy rely on a sense of style and so, ineluctably, does crime. Of necessity then, theatre and its allied arts refine and strengthen every aspect of the imaginative life of the country, from best to worst.
