September 27, 2006
Being Nicole Kidman: Part 3
Nicole Kidman. David Thomson.Thomson wrote "Nicole Kidman" to celebrate desire, specifically movie-creating desire. This is what's unique about the medium, something that the other arts can't duplicate in the same way. Because we watch men and women, from the safety of the dark, we have the ability to project ourselves into the story, not only on the screen, but in our most secret places. Given the raw materials of the actors, we fashion our own movies.
This is why, when asked about Nicole "Do you love her?" Thomson writes:
Yes, of course I love her -- so long as I do not have to meet her.Because the Nicole of his secret life is not the Nicole of real life.
Although I understand why reviewers were creeped out by the book, with passages like these:
One final word. You will want to know, "Did I talk to her?," no matter how ardently I have stressed the point about staying strangers. Well, at the very outset, I approached her through her representatives, asking for an interview. There was silence, and then there was a Well, yes, she is interested. But she was so busy ... and time passed. So I began to write the book, and I had an entire draft done before hearing a word from her. What happened? Well, what do you think happened? One day in February 2006, my phone rang and I heard, "It's Nicole," as if she were a languid, superior, but amused prefect who had called a naughty boy to her study to see what he had been up to.
I think it's true: she tries to be what you want her to be.
One of those creeped-out reviewers was Peter Conrad, who wrote in Sunday's Guardian:
Trickily, the book slithers from critical observation to subjunctive daydreaming. Thomson has his own 'viewer's cut' of Kidman's films and concocts scenes that he imagines persuading her to perform. Thus, he adds a menstrual spillage to Birth, imagines that the secret she conceals in The Others is an affair with a Gestapo officer and phantasmally casts her as all the other women who taunt Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. The inventions are ingenious, but they too often stray into territory best left to pornography.
Excerpt
[Thomson relates a dream, what he called earlier in the book his "vision of ‘Belle de Jour,' in which he is an old man visiting a bordello in Paris and acts as a voyeur]
I was able to enter the room and stroll about and, magically, I did not get in the way of the Gestapo officer and the elderly Chinaman who were having their way with Nicole. She wore a very revealing white brassiere, a size or two too small, I calculated -- how else was her bosom such a promontory? And her matching white panties were meshed with a garter belt that held up her long black stockings. She gasped and sighed at every intrusion and indecency from her odd Abbott and Costello. You know the sort of thing.
When they were done, they left her with me. She was a trembling heap, on the bed, and I was all alone with her. But really, I wasn't there, not in a way she noticed. It was like being in a room with an intricate screen.
"I cannot see the join," I whispered to Madame.
"The technology is flawless," she agreed. "But she is a marvel -- don't you think?"
"Ravishing," I said.
I did examine her then with more of the critic's eye. It was Nicole, of course, but she had that wondrous, depraved impassivity of Deneuve, as if to say there really wasn't the least point in complaining about the treatment. It was in order; it was what she deserved. N'est-ce pas?
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