Peter Sellers - When the Fake Exceeds the Original

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Spike Milligan said Peter Sellers was not a actor, but a freak — and meant it as high praise. Sellers’ aptitude for mimicry was so far beyond the norm, there had to be something else going on. Possibly he was sad heir to a Frankensteinian alchemy endowing the chosen to speak with genuine voices — yet unable to fake souls.

A freak? An article about Sellers in a 1960's edition of Vogue suggests that it’s genius when we accept the veracity of the fake over the fiction of the original. Director Stanley Kubrick was astonished at Sellers' seemingly limitless talent - and astonishment was rarely a Kubrickian reaction.

A Frankensteinian alchemy

That Sellers was mentally ill - yet functional - is tribute to his will power and the more morbid aspects of the entertainment industry.

There was about him sadness, a technical detachment that veered away from ensemble performances and aligned him with gadgetry — anything that wasn't alive. His best work is seen in films with thin plot lines — because  Sellers never belonged to anything, let alone himself. He was no good at life.

Not Being Anywhere

Every girlfriend, every wife, every movie, seemed to further eviscerate his damaged heart. And when the end arrived, a slumming deity gazed from a cloud and pronounced, “Let him speak to us all in the voice of God — because God is hard to imitate. Plus, He never makes us laugh."

Capucine: Snow Angel

‘Capucine’. One word, an icy brand distilled from the warmer ‘Germaine Hélène Irène Lefebvre’. But then her elegance didn’t permit intimacy. And that was her appeal. A snow angel with dazzling detachment.

Who would believe such a thing?

Born 1928. A Parisian model at 17, then into films. She was surprisingly adept at comedy, a genre strangely receptive to manic depressives. Without darkness we can’t know light?

She was saved from suicide more than once, but who would believe such a thing? The cheekbones, the plush lips, swept-back mane, the porcelain skin, who would believe it?

It’s 1952 and she lands a 2-week modeling gig aboard a French cruise ship and shares a cabin with Brigitte Bardot, 17, a chorus dancer. O pillow talk. Who would believe it?

With Peter Sellers

“Men look at me,” she opined, “like I'm a suspicious-looking trunk, and they're customs agents.” There’s a difference between beautiful and pretty — and in the face of beauty men grow wary, weakened by exposure to the spiritual, anxious to resume a cosmetic, manufactured appreciation.

She also said, “"Every time I get in front of a camera, I think of it as an attractive man I am meeting for the first time...” All the best faces know — instinctively it seems — the camera is a mirror in which you

Poor Snow Angel

slowly, with great art and artifice, seduce yourself, make love to the flesh and fear and forget-me-nots that are you. But therein lays disease and finally, after injecting one too many color chemical emulsions at 1/60th of a second — a kind of walking madness. Narcissus didn’t drown. He couldn’t tolerate the terrible pain of perfection — even his own.

So in 1990, she ended herself. A bi-polar decision lending a polar patina of white frost spangled like sapphires trailing the gorgeous curve of her neck.

The word 'Capucine' is French and refers to flowers. But poor snow angels, they never live to see spring.

Kubrick’s Killer Decade

The Kubrick glare

When you watch a Stanley Kubrick film, it’s often easy to discern an active intelligence at work – a variation on what Hemingway called the iceberg theory: there’s something going on that can felt but not seen or heard. It’s in the lighting, the framing, the timing, the editing – it’s everywhere. But with few exceptions, Kubrick is heavy.   

From about 1960 to 1970, film director Stanley Kubrick could do no wrong. He fed off the sixties zeitgeist with vampiric cunning—intellectual, cynic, craftsman, always detached, always so mindful of the light.

His best films are about death—or seen through a different lens—about life’s absurdity. He didn’t create heroes or happy endings. His films are scripted thesis.< Does thought drive emotion, or vice-versa?> Stanley’s films are top-heavy with thought—but unlike the grumpy Jean-Luc Godard, who enjoyed his salad days at about the same time, Kubrick never hits you on the head with a book.

"How you doing HAL?"

If you’re looking for the key to Stan’s mind, you might find it at the bottom of a magician’s trunk, or hidden under a chess board. The general sterility of his sets tricks you into believing ‘here’s a serious artist’ , but it is indeed a trick. Above all else, he is a humanist, and like others of his ilk, wasn’t too crazy about humans, at least their bodies.

So—similar to Hitchcock, actors never did that well in his films. Only two or three performances stand out. It’s no coincidence that his most memorable character is a computer.

Here’s killer Kubrick:

- Lolita (1962)
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
- A Clockwork Orange (1971)

After ‘Clockwork’, one got the feeling that Kubrick wasn’t making the films that he wanted to – he was just keeping the wheels in motion with goofy stuff like ‘Barry Lyndon’ and ‘The Shining’. His final film, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ is disturbing, given that the same talent once gave us ‘2001’.

The Composer & Composition

Today, Kubrick enjoys legions of diehard fans that have sanctified every frame of his opus. He was the kind of guy who could inspire such devotion. Only an artist who tells the Truth, his own Big Truth in his own Time, ever reaches that rarified stratum where angels dispense the mixed blessing of immortality.

And what is Kubrick's Big Truth? It's plays on the other side of the screen.