I am surrounded by mysterious people. Everyone I know is a mystery.
Some are more mysterious than others, of course. There are some who are completely unfathomable. You can study them as intently, question them as closely, look into them as deeply as you dare, and you will still only be bobbing on the surface of their dark and secret depths by the time you get in the cab. Whether you invite them up for a nightcap is your business.
Meanwhile, over on the more brightly lit side of human behaviour, there are those who seem a good deal less complicated. They often seem a good deal more boring, it's true, but somebody has to say "Cold enough for you?" Somebody has to tune to Easy-Listening radio stations by design and not by accident. Somebody has to respond warmly and positively to the combined impact of these two unavoidable facts of contemporary life: Celine Dion and the Super Bowl.
And anyway, the world functions a little better if there are more well-adjusted, cheerfully efficient, if stupendously tedious people running it. The brooding and unpredictable furnace repairman we can do without. I like my pilots to have no thought in their heads other than flying when I am in the seat beside the baby with the colic -- which is to say, when I am flying too. The less edgy improvisation my dentist brings to my mouth, the better. But even the most straightforward people are not much help when it comes to thinking that people might actually be straightforward.
If somebody doesn't have any dark corners -- if, for instance they thought watching the NDP leadership convention would be a diverting way to spend the weekend -- that's the biggest mystery of them all.
Which leaves me, I feel safe in saying, stumped by pretty much everybody. How do I know who George Bush really is? I don't know who the mailman really is.
In 1963, Federico Fellini made 8½ -- a film that I would include among my 10 all-time favourites, and that, when seen on DVD, on a big, new, spiffy television, is so engaging, so inventive and so complex it's enough to make you forget the Visa bill. 8½ is a film about making a film. More than that, it's a film about what people who know nothing about the creative process always insist on calling the creative process. It's a kind of cinematic house of mirrors -- a movie about the making of the movie that we are watching -- and one of its several working titles is instructive: it was almost called Beautiful Confusion.
The beautiful confusion Fellini had in mind is the chaos, the luck, the hard work, the intuition and the inspiration that goes into creating a work of art. My guess is that he dispensed with the idea of using Beautiful Confusion as a title because it was too literal for this, the least literal of films.
If you're going to make an enigmatic movie, you might as well give it an enigmatic name.
Guido Anselmi -- played, of course, by Marcello Mastroianni -- is a director of considerable renown who finds himself unable to make the film that he has been hired to make. He is hounded by his producer; actors show up, and Guido has no idea what to do with them; a giant set is being built, and he doesn't have much idea why.
Guido is puzzled by this director's block, but puzzled in a charmingly submissive way. He deals with the women in his life with rakish duplicity, but there is something honest in his acceptance of failure. His passive integrity is cast in high relief by the fireworks of imagination and wit and invention that are the characteristics of the film that Fellini is making about Guido.
Among the byproducts of Fellini's investigation into the confusing and occasionally terrifying proximity of inspiration to its absence, is something that I had not noticed so clearly before. The camera in 8½ looks at everyone it encounters with wonder. Somehow, Fellini and his cinematographer, Gianni di Venanzo, are able to convey to the viewer that every person in 8½, whether a major or minor character, is a mystery.
They are mysteries about which Fellini is intensely and entertainingly curious. They are mysteries that he can look at with humour and intelligence and sympathy, and that he can even articulate to a degree. But in the end, they remain mysteries. The characters of 8½ are profoundly unknowable -- just like everybody is. Everybody, that is, except characters in contemporary movies.
It may be that this quality of 8½ jumped out at me because it stands in such marked contrast to mainstream cinema of today. In contemporary movies -- even in good, well directed and beautifully acted contemporary movies, such as The Hours -- we are almost inevitably left with the impression that we are being told everything there is to tell about a character. "Ah," we think, "that's why Virginia Woolf killed herself " -- as if anyone could really know. "Oh," we say. "The poet was abandoned by his mother. Well, that explains it."
Today, 8½ seems even more radical than it did 40 years ago because so little is finally explained. Fellini believed in including the inexplicable in his films just as passionately as most contemporary directors believe in driving it out.
The accepted laws of screenwriting -- the formulas of narrative arc and instigating incident that Adaptation (a film that Fellini would have enjoyed, I'm sure) has such fun with -- demand that every scene have a meaning, and that the meaning of every scene add up to the meaning of the film.
This is an odd approach to art, when undertaken in a universe that gives every indication of being meaningless. Still, movies -- and, in particular, popular American movies -- hold enormous sway, and it's interesting to wonder how many people confuse the unmysterious laws of screenwriting with good old unpredictable, inexplicable, unresolved life. I wonder, for instance, if George Bush imagines that a war in Iraq will have a happy ending because that's the way good war movies are supposed to end. The idea seems preposterous. But then, so do mysteries from time to time.