Borges and the Rock Star

Many years ago I saw the 1969 film Performance on a big screen in Cleveland. Subsequently it became a cult movie, and like most cult movies it’s campy, inartistic and generally unwatchable (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Plan 9 from Outer Space, Pink Flamingos, etc.). The film’s big attraction, of course, was Mick Jagger. I watched it again recently on video, resorting often to the “fast-forward” button. I’ve retained a fondness for some of the soundtrack, in particular Jagger’s “Memo from Turner,” but otherwise Performance is a garbled, pretentious gangster flick, redolent of late-sixties self-indulgence.

I forgot that directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg had dragged poor Jorge Luis Borges into their mess. At one point we see an underworld goon seated in a car reading A Personal Anthology, the Grove Press collection published in 1967. With Ficciones (1962) and Labyrinths (1964), it helped introduce Borges to English-speaking readers. Later, Jagger, cleverly cast as a rock star, reads aloud from the Borges story “The South,” included in A Personal Anthology. Finally, when the Jagger character is shot the bullet shatters a portrait of Borges (the one on the original cover of A Personal Anthology). This is what I meant by pretentious, and does anyone know whether Borges, a one-time movie reviewer in Buenos Aires (he reviewed King Kong and Citizen Kane), was aware of his disrespectful expropriation by the filmmakers?

One can see why they chose “The South” from among Borges’ stories. The world inhabited by the protagonist, Juan Dahlmann, is hallucinatory. He suffers an accidental head injury that becomes infected, and ends up in a sanitarium: “Though blind to guilt, fate can be merciless with the slightest distraction.” Reality is flux –a very sixties notion. Dahlmann, a librarian (like Borges), grows resigned to the malevolent instability of the world. A thug in a café baits him, Dahlmann responds, and the two leave the café, each carrying a knife. The story’s final sentence (in Andrew Hurley’s translation):

“Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains.”

Drugs and violence figure prominently in Performance, and its makers must have been attracted to Dahlmann’s fever dreams and Borges’ longtime fascination with knife-fighting and the Buenos Aires demimonde. (Unlike Performance, the Borges story is conspicuously sexless). “The South” is minor Borges, a recycling of familiar themes. There’s a tawdry, unconvincing hollowness to Performance. The clumsy attempts at depicting taboo-breaking drug use, sexuality and violence seem adolescent, like so many artifacts of the counterculture. It also seems earnest and plodding, and recalls what Borges wrote in his 1931 review of Chaplin’s City Lights:

“Its lack of reality is comparable only to its equally exasperating lack of unreality.”