F for Fake
F is For Failure is this post’s preferred title, but it’s already been taken, a mere couple hundred times. It’s also unfair. The film succeeds, like this:
As Finnegans Wake was for Joyce, F for Fake was for Welles a playful repository of public history intertwined with private in-jokes as well as duplicitous meanings, an elaborate blend of sense and nonsense that carries us along regardless of what’s actually being said. For someone whose public and private identities became so separate that they wound up operating routinely in separate households and sometimes on separate continents, exposure and concealment sometimes figured as reverse sides of the same coin, and Welles’s desire to hide inside his own text here becomes a special kind of narcissism.
It succeeds like this, which is to say, it succeeds in its own way, but it might have been something far more subversive. The editorial playfulness, the reflections on authenticity and fraudulence, the market, surveillance and sex, and the entanglement of all these in the hidden figure of capital (played here by Howard Hughes), all that couldn’t have been more prescient of postmodernism. All of what I remember about Mark Leyner is here, in this film.
But that 1990s postmodernism is done with, and good riddance. Were someone to make this film, now, I’d like F for Fake to be a far more serious enemy of culture. Let my filmmakers clear out the girl-watching opening and the whole invented sequence at the end with Picasso–both the invention of Oja Kodar (herself presciently engaged in postmodern feminism)–and be interested in the right subject. Let it remember that our Hungarian art forger, Elmyr de Hory (born Elemér Albert Hoffmann), was gay and Jewish, definitely imprisoned for both by the Nazis, and that his parents may or may not have survived the Holocaust. And, making his way through America and Europe, imprisoned for a time in Franco’s Spain, de Hory gets by, his forged “new” paintings by the great prewar European artists–Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani–finding their way into collections worldwide.
J for Gay.
The believer in authenticity will always be victimized by those who just don’t care. And who better to be the enemy of authenticity than a gay European Jew, the last lover (maybe?) of a great white Minnesotan giant with the improbable name of Mark Forgy? Who would make a better enemy to Europe’s dream of itself, to its Great Named Men of Modernism, to its Iberian dream of Gothic Purity, to its dream of Christian Virility, who better than this fraud out of Central Europe? Who better than this true fraud who never signed his forgeries?
T for Troll.
All this is may be getting us back into the territory of Lee Edelman: good. The Nazis thought Jews were an infestation, a drain on the nation and its masculine order, the enemies of its authenticity and future. And along comes de Hory, it almost seems, to willingly step into that role, but, and this is of paramount importance, to use that charge against them. If we read de Hory correctly, we have to know, of course, that there’s no there there, that the Nazi dream of lost authenticity is, like any dream of authenticity, a fraud.
But this doesn’t get us back to postmodernism, because there is another authenticity, practiced by de Hory, who’s so much better than a Troll.
F for Fan.
de Hory’s perfect imitation of European Culture witnesses to his perfect knowledge, acquired and practiced not through credentials, not through “natural” right, not through knowing the right people or being the right people, but through style and love. This is the authenticity not of the name but of the fan, the only authenticity that matters, and the enemy, in its pleasure, its serious delight, of all “natural” pretensions to heritage.
For more from me on fandom, see here.
