Entrapment and Emancipation in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019)
When the Orsini family invites the sailor Martin Eden to their villa, a gesture of gratitude for Martin having defended young Arturo Orsini during a brawl on the docks, Martin’s eye catches on a painting displayed in the family’s library. Martin is struck by an impressionistic depiction of a small ship, rocked by choppy waves. In awe, he gravitates toward the piece, considers it from different angles, and then tells Arturo’s sister, Elena: “From a distance it’s beautiful. But close-up you can only see stains. It’s an illusion.” Such is the trap into which Martin Eden, our postlapsarian hero, repeatedly falls. He is drawn, moth-like, toward an artistic objective that will forever remain illusory. Pietro Marcello’s rendering of Jack London’s semi-autobiographical Künstlerroman is thematically faithful to its source material, despite the relocation to Naples. The story is that of an autodidact who, in transcending his social class and achieving artistic success, becomes trapped in both the strictures of the culture industry and the confines of his own rigid ideology. It is the story of an artist’s destruction by internal and external forces.
Martin experiences an artistic awakening during his first visit to the Orsini villa — he is infatuated by the aforementioned painting, by a stray copy of Baudelaire’s Spleen and Ideal, and by the exquisite Elena Orsini herself, whom he wants more than anything to impress. Elena discourages Martin from engaging with, let alone creating, any art before he is properly educated. And so, earnest and desperate, Martin does as Elena commands and bites the fruit. He reads ravenously, reporting back to the unimpressible Elena of his “incessant march through the kingdom of knowledge.” Unfortunately, Herbert Spencer’s First Principles finds its way into Martin’s hands, and the English philosopher’s social Darwinist theories shape Martin’s self-concept and worldview. Convinced of his Übermenschness and of the literary greatness that lies in store, Martin continually submits his prose to magazines, undeterred by the many rejections. He commits his entire life to writing, refusing all day jobs and living rent-free at his sister Giulia’s house until her husband Bernardo throws him out. For Martin, artistic success is intertwined with the attainment of Elena Orsini and her social stratum, even though Elena herself dismisses his writing as gritty and unpleasant, no fun to read on the veranda. Martin insinuates himself into the Orsini’s milieu, where he befriends Russ Brissenden, a leftist and elderly party-boy. Brissenden urges Martin to get over his “princess and sailor” ideations and rethink his politics: “Socialism is inevitable,” he tells Martin. “The slaves have now become too many… Socialism will give a sense to your writing, Martin. It might be the only thing that will save you from the disappointment that’s approaching.” But Martin, jacked up on Spencerian self-assurance, runs right at this approaching disappointment, arms outstretched. The magazines finally start printing his material and, emboldened, he spews his fascist rhetoric at a local union rally. This earns him a write-up in the local paper, which inaccurately casts him as a socialist, the very thing he had railed against. At an exceedingly awkward dinner party, the Orsinis ask him to account for his alleged political ties, and Martin responds by launching into an anti-socialist diatribe, accusing the Orsinis of being closet-socialists themselves, given their support of antitrust laws. He rants crazily about the “great blond beasts” who shall inherit society, flings his napkin onto the table, and storms out. Elena ends things soon thereafter. Meanwhile, Russ Brissenden coughs blood into a handkerchief and shoots himself before tuberculosis can take hold. Martin’s life is going to shit.
Still from Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019). Luca Martinelli in the film’s titular role.
The film lurches forward. Martin hasn’t aged well: his skin is sallow, his hair is greasy, his teeth are decaying. He has been physically corrupted by his ideological rot. Despite his literary success (and his relationship with Margherita, a local waitress whom he largely ignores), he is very much alone. His readership is not so much a loyal fanbase as a crew of rubberneckers come to watch the crazed sailor rant and rave. At a press conference, Martin bitterly crows at his audience, “I wrote things that no one liked before, but which are now all the rage. They’re the same things, I can assure you.” In the film’s penultimate scene, Elena returns to Martin, having taken a renewed liking to him since his rise to renown. But, at this point, Martin is too embittered; he has nothing but disdain for Elena and her so-called “open-minded'' bourgeois family. Before expelling her from his apartment, Martin shrieks at her, “Life disgusts me. I’ve lived it so intensely that I don’t feel desire for anything else… I wish I was like your kind, spoke like your kind, thought like your kind. A dog by your side. A nice dog you can walk around! Destroy the dogs!” Ultimately, Martin is poisoned by hatred, directed inwardly and outwardly. He makes plans to set sail for America (“I want to show them how much I despise them”), but misses the embarkment. The film closes with Martin’s implied suicide; he swims into the ocean, in the direction of the setting sun.
London’s text, which is more tragedy than Bildungsroman or Künstlerroman, has been widely interpreted as the author’s attempt to come to grips with his own ideological contradictions — his own Spencerian individualism commingled with early 20th century socialism. Kolson Schlosser, in his analysis of Naturalist themes in London’s proletarian novels, explains the fusion of these seemingly contradictory ideologies:
Eden’s sling shot from starving artist to bourgeois dinner parties does not happen because of a historically specific abstraction known as exchange value, it happens for the same reason that White Fang protects property… because individualism is part of universal nature. [1]
Archival footage featured in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019).
Schlosser posits that, in London’s worldview, this universal nature will eventually transition society away from the primitive systems of exchange — namely the monetization of art — and bring about a kind of liberal artist’s utopia, in which the self-made proletarian creator (i.e. London) will live free of the constraints, artifices, and degradations of the culture industry. In this light, Martin’s rugged individualism may be at odds with the primitive pre-revolutionary society in which he lives, but his pure intellect, dauntless spirit, and unflagging faith in himself are what make him noble: basically, he is too good for this world. The story of Martin Eden, I find, isn’t actually a cautionary tale about the dangers of individualism — it is an elegy. It is London’s monument to himself, the tragic hero.
The film is formally adventurous, a rare thing for an adaptation of stodgy literature. Pietro Marcello, whose filmography largely consists of documentaries, captures Martin Eden’s diegetic world on 16mm film, using a Cooke lens that renders his subjects soft and luminescent, as though they are illuminated fragments of memory. He intersperses the frame narrative with recolored 35mm archival footage, situated in such a way as to seem like Martin’s own childhood recollections. For instance, as Martin becomes increasingly immersed in Herbert Spencer’s ruthless philosophy, Marcello inserts blue-toned footage of little boys on a rocky beach at low tide. While Martin reads passages of Spencer’s First Principles in voice over, a boy reaches into the shallows, pulls out an octopus and bites into it as it writhes between his teeth. Another such cutaway is accompanied by Martin’s own prose, providing a glimpse into his creative process and the memories that inform his writing. Against retouched footage of children running through the streets of Naples in a rainstorm, Martin reads: “That day God Almighty had left the faucet open. The city became a sea and people were like fish floating on the waves. They feared the waves.” The sequence culminates with footage of a child peering out his garret window at a pyrotechnic display. In this way, the film moves free-associatively through time, granting the spectator access to the memories and visions that constitute Martin’s sensibility. The result is a richer understanding of Martin as an individual — the pairing of archival footage with Martin’s own writings works to counteract the version of Martin put forward by the source text: an impenetrable mind, stumbling over itself and beyond help. Marcello has instead pieced together a vibrant, textured portrait of his tragic hero.
Archival footage featured in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019).
Marcello’s approach to montage is heavily informed by the theories put forward by Artavazd Pelešjan (see Marcello’s 2011 tribute to him, The Silence of Peleshian) namely the director’s “montage-at-a-distance” technique. Pelešjan writes:
The main essence and emphasis of montage work, for me, is not to join shots but to disjoin them; not their junction but their disjunction… Thus one can achieve a much stronger and deeper expression of meaning than when the shots are joined in a consecutive way. [2]
Pelešjan, whose work often addresses collective memory, trauma, and nostalgia, is particularly interested in the spectator’s engagement with his films as temporal and spatial media, imitating the ebbs and flows of human memory and the ways in which recollected fragments reappear, taking on new significance with each reemergence. Marcello is undoubtedly informed by this approach; the fragments comprising the life of Martin Eden are presented in collage form, each resurfaced memory altering in significance according to Martin’s frame of mind and the narrative context into which it’s been inserted. For example, Marcello makes use of archival footage of two children gleefully performing a swing dance in a dingy, rubble-strewn space. The clip makes two appearances: first, when Martin bids his sister Giulia farewell after her husband Bernardo banishes Martin from their apartment; second, when Martin visits Giulia to announce his departure for America. In its first iteration, the swing dance clip follows a tense spat between Bernardo and Martin. After Martin receives another batch of magazine rejections, Bernardo offers him a job at his business, to which Martin responds, “I’d rather drink poison than break my back for you.” Bernardo flips out and beats Giulia until she agrees to put Martin out on the street. The swing dance clip appears, couched between shots of Martin packing up his things while Giulia looks on, her face bruised. Here, the clip elicits the melancholy of irrecoverable joy, the dancing children functioning as stand-ins for young Martin and Giulia, energetic and radiant despite the hovel in which they dance. At this point in the narrative, the obstacle standing between the Eden siblings and their former, happier selves is Bernardo, here representative of the blue-collar philistinism that Martin deems his nemesis. But the swing dance clip’s second iteration, though also inserted into a farewell scene, carries a much weightier melancholy. Martin, now rotten with money and fame, returns to the apartment to tell Giulia of his intended trip to America. We can only assume that his suicide plan is already in place, and that this goodbye is final. After making his sister promise to never work another day in her life (it’s implied that he’s given Bernardo a generous loan), Martin reminisces, “You were the best at dancing.” Giulia responds, “When you’re in America, you go out to dance, Martin Eden.” The film cuts to the swing dance footage, which now feels more remote than ever, the two young children exhibiting the kind of pure, joyful, collective artform that Martin cannot hope to recreate, however successful he may be.
Still from Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019).
Through the interplay of archival clips and original footage, Marcello’s subjects appear stranded within their own timeline, barraged by memories and aspirations that forever remain inaccessible to them. Blake Williams, in his analysis of Pelešjan’s impact on Marcello, writes:
It is this theoretical ambition to dialectically conjoin past and future elements in the present that encapsulates Pelešjan’s most vital influence on Marcello’s filmmaking. The difference is that whereas for Pelešjan the elements within any given film are cut in order to forge an illusion of simultaneity (however out of time they may collectively be), Marcello’s subjects, places, and elicited memories still bare the temporal distances — decades, centuries — standing between them.
Pelešjan adopts a removed perspective with regard to his subjects, gazing upon the fragments at a distance and deriving meaning. Marcello is similarly unstuck in time, but he retains a human — as opposed to omniscient — perspective, lurching back and forth between memories. Such an approach shapes the way Martin Eden perceives the world: he regards the oil painting of the boat from afar and experiences a heart-swell of recognition, but he cannot achieve such a removed perspective with regard to his own life and the consequences of his antisocial behavior. Unlike the audience, who considers Martin’s life in its sad totality, Martin himself cannot access the big picture and, as such, is trapped in his own tragedy.
Still from Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019). Jessica Cressy as Elena Orsini and Luca Marinelli as Martin Eden.
Critics of Marcello’s film have pointed to its noncommittal relationship with history, finding the unspecified historical moment and frequent anachronisms disorienting, even careless. To me, the temporal ambiguity is a deliberate effort — both a testament to Martin’s self-absorption and to the general mission of the film — to lay out the fragments of a man’s life and allow them to assemble themselves in the mind of the spectator, free of time’s strictures. When, moments before Martin’s suicide, a man approaches Martin on the beach and warns him of the coming war, we wonder, of course, “Which war?” This, I suspect, is the response Marcello aims to provoke, one which matches Martin’s own confusion and realization of the extent to which he has grown detached from his own historical moment, an island unto himself.
Admittedly, I can’t say that I agree with Marcello’s interpretation of the novel. In an interview with Cinema Scope, he says, “It is indeed the story of emancipation, but in a way Martin Eden is a victim of the culture industry. And in that way it’s a very political film.” It’s hard for me to consider Martin a victim, perhaps because I find him so ideologically objectionable. The real victim, it seems to me, is Martin’s long-suffering girlfriend Margherita, whom he invites to join him in America, only to flake on her and send her off alone. But whether or not Martin Eden is worthy of emancipation, and although Martin himself doesn’t believe in the emancipatory power of art, Marcello achieves it for him, shoring up the fragments of a sad man’s life and producing an immersive, stunning work of art — one which is inscrutable at times, but striking when seen in its totality, from a distance. //
Archival footage featured in Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (2019).
[1] Kolson Schlosser, “Nature-Society Dialectics and Class Struggle in Selected Works of Jack London,” Historical Geography, no. 43 (2015): pgs. 170-171.
[2] Artavazd Pelechian, “Montage-at-a-Distance, or: A Theory of Distance,” trans. Julia Vassilieva, LOLA, no. 6 (2015), http://www.lolajournal.com/6/distance.html.
