Red (2018) - full transcript
Next, Alfred Molina
takes on the establishment,
his rivals, and art itself
as the American abstract
expressionist painter
Mark Rothko.
Oh, you think Andy Warhol's
gonna be hanging in museums
in 100 years alongside
the Bruegels and Vermeers?
Yeah, just a pinch of black.
Alfred Enoch
plays his assistant
challenging Rothko's
very perception of their craft.
You can try to kid yourself
you're making
a holy place
of contemplative awe,
but in reality you're just
decorating another dining room
for the super rich.
I'm here to stop your heart!
I'm here to make you think!
I'm not here to make
pretty pictures!
Alfred Molina and Alfred Enoch
in John Logan's "Red."
What do you see?
No. Wait. Stand closer.
You got to get close.
Let the picture pulsate.
Let it work on you.
Closer.
Nah. Too close.
There. Let it spread out.
Let it wrap its arms around you.
Let it embrace you, filling
even your peripheral vision
so nothing else exists or has
ever existed or will ever exist.
Let the picture do its work.
But work with it.
Meet it halfway, for God's sake.
Lean forward. Lean into it.
Engage with it.
Now, what do you see?
Oh, no, no. Wait. Wait, wait.
Now, what do you see?
Be specific.
No. No. Be exact.
Be exact, but sensitive.
You understand?
Be kind.
Be a human being.
That's all I can say.
Be a human being,
for once in your life.
These pictures
deserve compassion,
and they live or die in the eye
of the sensitive viewer.
They quicken only if the
empathetic viewer will let them.
That is what they cry out for.
That is why they were created.
That is what they deserve.
Now, what do you see?
Red?
But do you like it?
Mm, I
Yeah, speak up!
Yes!
Yes, yes, of course,
you like it.
How can you not like it?
Everyone "likes"
everything nowadays.
They like the television
and the phonograph
and the soda pop and the shampoo
and the Cracker Jack.
Everything becomes
everything else.
It's all nice and pretty
and likable.
Everything's
fun in the sun, huh?
Where's the discernment?
Where's the arbitration
that separates what I like
from what I respect,
what I deem worthy,
what listen to me now
what has significance.
Ah, maybe this is
a dinosaur talking.
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur,
sucking up the oxygen
from you cunning little mammals
hiding in the bushes,
waiting to take over.
Maybe I'm speaking
a lost language
unknown to your generation,
but a generation that does
not aspire to seriousness,
to meaning, is unworthy
to walk in the shadow
of those who have gone before.
I mean those who have struggled
and surmounted.
I mean those who have aspired.
I mean Rembrandt. I mean Turner.
I mean Michelangelo and Matisse.
I mean, obviously, Rothko.
Do you aspire?
Yes.
To what?
To what do you aspire?
I want to be a painter,
so I guess I aspire to...
painting.
Then those clothes won't do.
No. We
work
here.
Hang up your jacket outside.
No, no.
I appreciate you put on your
Sunday clothes to impress me.
It's poignant, really.
It touches me,
but it's ridiculous.
We work hard here.
This isn't a...damn
oldworld salon
with tea cakes and lemonade.
Go hang up your jacket outside.
Sidney told you
what I need here?!
Yes.
We start every morning at 9,
and we work until 5,
just like bankers.
You'll help me
stretch the canvases,
mix the paints,
clean the brushes,
build the stretchers,
move the paintings,
also help apply ground color,
which is not painting.
So any lunatic assumptions
you make in that direction,
you need to banish immediately.
You'll pick up food, cigarettes,
anything else I want,
any whim, no matter
how demanding or demeaning.
You don't like that?
You can leave right now.
Answer me yes or no?
Yes!
Consider I'm not your rabbi.
I'm not your father.
I'm not your shrink.
I'm not your teacher.
I'm not your friend.
I am your employer.
You understand?
Yes.
As my assistant, you're
going to see many things here,
many ingenious things,
but they're all secret.
You cannot talk
about any of this.
Don't think I don't have
enemies, because I do,
and I don't just mean
those other painters
and gallery owners
and museum curators
and...damn sonofabitch
art critics,
not to mention that vast panoply
of disgruntled viewers
who loathe me and my work
because they do not have
the heart nor the patience
nor the capacity
to think, to understand
because they're not even human
beings, like we talked about.
You remember?
Yes!
I'm painting a series
of murals now.
I'll probably do 30 or 40
then choose which work best
in concert, like a fugue.
You'll help me
put on the undercoat.
Then I'll paint them.
Then I'll look at them.
Then I'll paint some more.
I do a lot of layers,
one after another, like a glaze,
slowly building the image
like pentimento,
letting the luminescence emerge
until it's done.
How do you know
when it's done?
There's tragedy
in every brushstroke.
Ah.
Swell. Let's have a drink.
Answer me a question.
Don't think about it.
Just say the first thing
that comes into your head,
no cognition.
Okay.
You ready?
Yeah.
Who's your favorite painter?
Jackson Pollock.
Oh.
Sorry!
No, no, no.
Let me do it again!
No. Forget it.
Come on.
No, no. It's silly.
Come on. Ask me again.
Who's your favorite painter?
Picasso.
Pollock. It's always Pollock.
Oh, don't get me wrong.
He was a great painter.
We came up together.
I knew him very well.
What was he like?
You read Nietzsche?
What?
You ever read Nietzsche,
"Birth of Tragedy"?
No.
And you call yourself
an artist?
One can't discuss Pollock
without it.
One can't discuss
anything without it.
What do they teach you
in art school now?
I
You read Freud?
No.
Jung?
Well
Byron? Wordsworth? Aeschylus?
Turgenev? Sophocles?
Schopenhauer?
Shakespeare? "Hamlet"?
Oh, please, God.
At least "Hamlet."
Quote me "Hamlet" right now.
"To be or not to be?
That is the question."
Is
that the question?
I don't know!
You've got a lot to learn,
young man.
Philosophy, theology,
literature, poetry,
drama, history, archaeology.
Anthropology, mythology, music.
Come on.
These are your tools,
as much as brush and pigment!
You cannot be an artist
until you are civilized.
You cannot be civilized
until you learn.
To be civilized is to know
where you belong
in the continuum
of your art and your world.
To surmount the past,
you must know the past.
I thought
you weren't my teacher.
Ah, and you should be
so blessed
I talk to you about art.
How do you feel?
How do I feel?
How do
they
make you feel?
Give me a second.
So?
Give me a second.
Disquieted.
And...
Thoughtful.
And...
Uh, sad.
Tragic.
Yeah.
Yeah. They're for a restaurant.
What?
They're for a restaurant.
So, I'm minding my own business
when Mr. Philip Johnson
calls me.
You know Mr. Philip Johnson,
the worldrenowned architect?
Not personally.
Yeah, of course
you don't know him personally.
You don't know anyone
personally.
Don't interrupt.
Mr. Philip Johnson.
He's designing the new
Seagram Building on Park Avenue,
he and Mies van der Rohe.
Hoho. These are names with
which to conjure, are they not?
Philip Johnson,
Mies van der Rohe.
These are titans in their field,
revolutionists.
Together, they are making
a building unlike anything
the world has yet seen,
reflecting the golden ambitions
of not only this city and its
inhabitants but of all mankind.
In this building,
there is to be a restaurant
called the Four Seasons,
like the Vivaldi,
and on the walls
of this restaurant...
$35,000, they're paying me.
No other painter comes close.
My first murals.
Imagine a frieze
all around the room,
a continuous narrative
filling the walls,
one to another, each a new
chapter, the story unfolding.
You look, and they are there,
inescapable and inexorable.
Like doom.
Are these ones done?
They're in process.
I have to study them now.
Study them?
Yeah, most of painting
is thinking.
Did anybody teach you that?
Ten percent is putting paint
on canvas.
The rest is waiting.
All my life, I've wanted
just this, my friend
to create a place,
a place where the viewer
could live in contemplation
with the work,
give it some of
the same attention and care
that I gave it,
like a chapel,
a place of communion.
But it's a restaurant.
No. I will make it a temple.
Rembrandt and Rothko.
Rembrandt and Rothko.
Rothko and Rembrandt.
Rothko and Rembrandt.
And Turner.
Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner.
Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner.
Oh, my.
The Chinese place is closing.
Yeah, everything
worthwhile ends.
We're in the perpetual
process now
creation, maturation, cessation.
There's another Chinese
around the corner.
Oh, the eternal cycles
grind on.
Generations pass away,
hope turns arid,
but there's another Chinese
around the corner.
Not much for small talk.
Yeah, it's small.
I went to the Modern last
night, saw the Picasso show.
And...?
I don't think he's
so much concerned with
generations passing away.
Oh, don't kid yourself, kid.
That man, though now
a charlatan, of course,
signing menus for money
like Dalí
when he's not making those
those ugly little pots
also for money.
That man, at his best,
understood the workings of time.
Where's the receipt?
Ah, it's tragic, really,
to grow superfluous
in your own lifetime.
We destroyed Cubism,
de Kooning and me
and Barnett Newman, Smith,
all the others.
We stomped it to death.
Nobody can paint
a Cubist picture today.
You take pride in that?
Stomping Cubism to death?
The child must banish
the father,
respect him but kill him.
And enjoy it?
It doesn't matter.
Just be audacious and do it.
You know, courage in painting
is not facing a blank canvas.
It's facing Manet.
It's facing Velasquez.
All we can do is move beyond
what was there to what is here
and hope to gain some intimation
of what will be here.
"What is past and passing
and to come."
That's Yeats,
whom you haven't read.
Come on, but Picasso was
Picasso, I thank
for teaching me
that movement is everything.
Movement is life.
The second we're born,
we squall.
We writhe. We squirm.
To live is to move.
Now, without movement,
paintings are what?
Dead?
Yeah, precisely. Look.
Look at the tension
between the blocks of color,
the dark and the light, the red,
the black, and the brown.
They exist in a state
of flux, of movement.
They abut each other
on the actual canvas.
So, too, do they abut each other
in your eye.
They ebb and flow and shift,
gently pulsating.
The more you look at them,
the more they move.
They float in space.
They breathe.
Movement,
communication, gesture,
flux, interaction,
letting them work.
They're not dead
because they're not static.
They move through space
if you let them.
Now, this movement takes time,
so they're temporal.
They require time.
They demand it!
They don't work without it.
This is why it's so important
to me to create a place,
a place the viewer
can contemplate
these paintings over time
and let them move.
They
need
the viewer.
They're not like
representational pictures
like traditional landscapes
or portraits.
Yeah, tell me why.
Because they change.
They move. They pulse.
Representational pictures
are unchanging.
They don't require the active
participation of the viewer.
In the Louvre,
in the middle of the night,
the "Mona Lisa"
is still smiling.
But do these paintings
still pulse when they're alone?
That's why you keep
the lights so low!
Is it?
To help the illusion.
Like a magician.
Like a play,
To keep it mysterious,
to let the pictures pulsate.
Turn on bright lights,
and the stage effect is ruined.
Suddenly, it's nothing
but a bare stage
with a bunch of fake walls.
What do you see?
My eyes are adjusting.
Just white.
What does white
make you think of?
Bones, skeletons.
Charnel house.
Anemia.
Cruelty.
Really?
It's like an
operating theater now.
How does white make you feel?
Frightened.
Why?
Doesn't matter.
No, no. Why?
It's like the snow...
outside the room
where my parents died.
It was winter.
I remember the snow
outside the window. White.
And the pictures, in this light,
they're flat, vulgar.
This light hurts them.
Yeah, you see how it is
with them,
how vulnerable they are?
People think I'm controlling
controlling the light,
controlling the height
of the pictures,
controlling the shape
of the galleries.
It's not controlling.
It's protecting.
A picture lives
by companionship.
It dies by the same token.
Ah, it's a risky act
to send it out into the world.
You ever paint outdoors?
Oh, you mean out in nature?
Yeah.
Nature doesn't work for me.
The light's no good.
And all those bugs? No.
Oh, I know. I know.
Those plein air painters,
oh, my God,
they'll sing to you
endless paeans
about the majesty
of natural sunlight.
"Get out there,
muck around in the grass,"
they tell you, like a cow.
But when I was younger,
I didn't know any better.
I'd go out there
with my supplies,
and the wind
would blow the paper.
The easel would fall over.
Ants would get into my paint.
But then I go to Rome
for the first time.
I go to the
Santa María del Popolo
to see Caravaggio's
"Conversion of Saul,"
which turns out is tucked away
in a dark corner
of this dark church
with no natural light.
It's like a cave in there,
but that painting, it glowed.
With a sort of rapture,
it glowed.
Now, consider.
Caravaggio, he was commissioned
to paint that picture
for that specific place.
He had no choice.
He stands there,
and he looks around.
It's like under the ocean,
it's so...damn dark.
How's he going to paint here?
He turns to his creator.
"God, help me,
unworthy sinner that I am.
Tell me, O Lord on High,
what the...do I do now?"
And then it comes to him
the divine spark.
He illuminates that picture
from within.
He gives it inner luminosity.
That painting, it lives.
It lives, like like one
of those bioluminescent fish
from the bottom of the ocean,
radiating its own effulgence.
You understand me?
Caravaggio, he
Bring me the second bucket.
Are you really going to paint?
Now, what the hell do you think
I
have
been doing?
Yeah, give me, uh
give me the black number four
and the first maroon.
Yeah, just a pinch of black.
Yeah, just that amount again.
Yeah, twice as much maroon.
Ugh. Oh, come on.
Come on. Come on.
What does it need?
Red?
I wasn't talking to you.
Don't you
ever
do that again!
By what right do you speak?!
By what right do you express
an opinion on my work?!
Who the...are you? What have
you done? What have you seen?
Where have you earned the right
to even exist here with me
and these things
you don't even understand?!
"Red." Oh, you want to paint
the...damn thing? Go ahead.
Here's some red and red and red,
lots of red!
I don't even know
what that means.
What the hell does "red"
mean to me?!
Oh, you mean scarlet?
You mean crimson?
You mean plum, mulberry,
magenta, burgundy,
salmon, carmine, carnelian?
How about coral?!
Anything but "red"!
What the hell is "red"?!
I meant sunrise.
Sunrise?
I meant the red at sunrise,
the feeling of it.
Oh, "the feeling of it."
What the hell does that mean,
"the feeling of it"?
I didn't mean red paint only.
I meant the emotion
of red at sunrise.
Sunrise isn't red!
Yes, it is.
I'm telling you it's not!
Sunrise is red,
and red is sunrise.
Red is heartbeat.
Red is passion.
Red wine, red roses,
red lipstick.
Beets, tulips, peppers.
Arterial blood.
That too.
Rust on the bike on the lawn.
And apples. And tomatoes.
Dresden firestorm at night,
the sun in Rousseau,
the flag in Delacroix,
the robe in El Greco.
A rabbit's nose,
an albino's eyes, a parakeet.
Florentine marble,
atomic flash.
Nick yourself shaving,
blood in the Barbasol.
The ruby slippers,
technicolor,
that phone to the Kremlin
on the president's desk.
Russian flag,
Nazi flag, Chinese flag.
Persimmons, pomegranates,
redlight district,
red tape, rouge.
Lava, lobsters, scorpions!
Stop signs,
sports car, a blush!
Viscera, flames,
dead Fauvists!
Traffic lights, Titian hair.
Slash your wrists,
blood in the sink.
Santa Claus.
Satan!
So...
Red?
Exactly.
We got more cigarettes?
No. More than anything,
you know what?
What?
Matisse's painting
"The Red Studio,"
it's a picture
of his own studio.
The walls are a brilliant red.
The floor, the furniture,
it's all red.
It's like that color
had radiated out of him
and swallowed everything up.
When the Modern first
put that picture up,
I spent hours looking at it.
Day after day,
I would go, "Hmm."
You could argue
everything I do today,
you can trace the bloodlines
back to that painting
and those hours I spent standing
there letting that picture work,
allowing it to move.
The more I looked at it,
the more it pulsated around me.
I was saturated.
It swallowed me.
Oh, such plains of red he made,
such energetic blocks
of pure color, such emotion.
He
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
It's still there.
I can't look at it now.
Why?
It's too depressing.
How could all that red
be depressing?
I don't see the red anymore.
Even in that painting,
that total and profound
immersion in red,
it's there
the mantel above a dresser,
just over the centerline,
set off by yellow
of all...damn things.
He wanted it inescapable.
What?
Black.
The color black?
No, the
thing
black.
There's only one thing in life
I fear, my friend
one day, the black
will swallow the red.
That's easy for
you to say. You don't know him.
I'll show it to him if I think
the moment's right.
He knows I'm a painter.
He's got to be
expecting it, right?
No. No.
It depends on his mood.
Don't tell me what to do.
You're just like him.
He's here.
Uh, I'll tell you how it goes.
Pray for me.
Good morning!
Morning.
I got the other maroon.
I'll take over.
You finish the canvas.
I'll just go change.
I went by the Seagram Building
last night!
It's coming along.
How's the restaurant?
Still under construction,
but they took me around.
I got a sense of it.
And...?
Too much natural light,
as always, but it'll work.
You'll be able to see the murals
from the main dining room.
I made some sketches.
I'll find them for you.
You ever worry it's not
the right place for them?
How can it not be
the right place for them?
They're being created
specifically for that place.
Your logic sometimes baffles me.
So, I read Nietzsche,
"Birth of Tragedy,"
like you said.
Like I said?
You said if I wanted to know
about Jackson Pollock
I had to read
"The Birth of Tragedy."
I said that?
Yeah.
I don't remember. It's very
like something I would say.
So what about Pollock?
Well, first tell me
what you make of the book.
Interesting.
Oh, that's like saying "red."
Don't be enigmatic. You're
too young to be enigmatic.
I think I know why
you wanted me to read it.
Why?
Because you see yourself
as Apollo
and you see him as Dionysus.
Oh, don't be so pedestrian.
Think more.
Dionysus is the god
of wine and excess,
of movement and transformation.
This is Pollock.
Wild, rebellious,
drunken, and unrestrained.
The raw experience itself.
Apollo is the god of order,
method, and boundaries.
This is Rothko.
Intellectual, rabbinical,
sober, and restrained.
The raw experience
leavened by contemplation.
He splatters paint.
You study it.
He's Dionysus,
and you're Apollo.
Yeah, exactly right but for
entirely missing the point.
How so?
You missed the tragedy.
The point is always the tragedy.
For
you.
Whoa, whoa. What?
You think human beings
can be so easily divided
into character types?
You think
the multifarious complexities
and nuances of the psyche,
evolving through
countless generations,
perverted and demented
through social neurosis
and personal anguish
or molded by faith
or lack of faith
can all be so...damn simple?
"Pollock is emotion.
Rothko is intellect."
Oh, you embarrass yourself.
Think more.
Maybe it's like
one of your paintings.
Yeah, most things are. How?
Dark and light,
order and chaos,
existing at the same time
in the same plain,
pulsing back and forth.
We pulse, too.
We're subjects of both
Apollo and Dionysus,
not one or the other.
We ebb and flow, like
the colors in your pictures.
The ecstasy of the Dionysian
at war with the restraint
of the Apollonian.
Not at war.
Not at war?
It's not really conflict.
More like symbiosis.
They need each other!
Dionysus' passion
is focused
is made bearable
by Apollo's will to form.
In fact, the only way we can
endure the sheer ferocity
of Dionysus' emotion
is because we have the control
and intelligence of Apollo.
Otherwise, the emotion
would overwhelm us.
So back and forth we go,
myth to myth, pulsating.
Yeah, and the perfect life
would be perfectly balanced
between the two,
everlastingly on that fulcrum.
But our tragedy is we can
never achieve that balance.
We exist all of us for all time
in a state
of perpetual dissonance.
Oh, we long for
the raw truth of emotion
and can only endure it
with the cool lie of reason.
We seek to capture
the ephemeral, the miraculous,
put it onto canvas,
stopping time.
But like an entomologist
pinning a butterfly,
it dies when we try.
We're foolish that way,
we human beings.
We try to make the red black.
But the black is always there,
like the mantle in Matisse.
Like the snow
outside your window.
It never goes away.
And once glimpsed, you can't
help but be preoccupied with it,
for the intimations
of our own mortality are
Ah, but still we go on, clinging
to that tiny bit of hope,
that red that makes
the rest endurable.
Or just less unendurable.
Yeah, well, that's my friend
Jackson Pollock.
Finally it was just unendurable.
What do you mean?
His suicide.
He didn't commit suicide.
Oh. Didn't he?
Jackson Pollock died
in a car accident.
A man spends years
of his life getting drunk.
Day after day,
the guy is hammered.
He then gets into
an Oldsmobile convertible,
races around
these little country roads
like a...damn lunatic.
You tell me what that is
if not a lazy suicide.
Oh, believe you me,
when I commit suicide,
there won't be
any doubt about it.
No mysterious crumpled car
in a ditch.
"Did he? Didn't he?"
Ah, it gives me a headache,
it's so boring.
When
you commit suicide?
What?
You said,
"When I commit suicide."
No I didn't.
Yes, you did.
You misheard me. Let me tell
you something about your hero.
That man,
he confronted his tragedy.
He was valiant
in the face of it.
He endured as long as he could,
and then he tried to recede
from his life.
But how could he?
He was Jackson Pollock.
What was his tragedy?
He became famous.
Don't be glib.
His muse evacuated.
He grew tired of his form.
He grew tired of himself.
He lost his faith
in his viewers.
Take your...damn pick.
He no longer believed there were
any real human beings left
to even look at pictures.
How does that happen to a man?
Oh, better you should ask
how occasionally
it doesn't happen.
I mean, he's an artist.
He's in "Life" magazine.
He's young. He's famous.
He has money.
Yeah, that's exactly it!
Here's a schmuck from Wyoming
who can paint.
Suddenly, he's a commodity.
He's Jackson Pollock.
Let me tell you, kid,
that Oldsmobile convertible,
it really did kill him.
Not because it crashed.
Because it existed.
Why the...did Jackson Pollock
have an Oldsmobile convertible?
So artists should starve?
Yes. Artists should starve.
Except me.
Take a look.
Yeah.
Hey, you would've loved Jackson.
He was a downtown guy,
real bohemian.
No banker's hours for him,
believe you me.
Every night with the talking
and the drinking
and the fighting and the dancing
and the staying up late.
He was like
everyone's romantic idea
of what an artist ought to be.
He was the antiRothko.
At his worst,
you still loved him, though.
You loved him
because he loved art so much.
Jackson thought it mattered.
He thought painting mattered.
Does not the poignancy of that
just stop your heart?
How could this story
not end in tragedy?
Goya said, "We have art that
we may not perish from truth."
Well, Pollock saw some truth,
and then he didn't have art
to protect him anymore.
Who survives that?
Come on.
Oh, I was walking up to my house
last week,
and a couple was passing.
The lady looks inside my window
and says,
"Ooh, I wonder who owns
all those Rothkos."
Just like that, I've become
a noun a Rothko.
A commodity.
An overmantle.
A what?
The overmantles.
You know, those paintings
doomed to become mere decoration
over the fireplace
in the fancyschmancy penthouse.
Oh, they say to you,
"I need something to work
with the sofa, you understand?
Something bright and cheery
for the breakfast nook,
which is orange.
You got something in orange?
Or burnt umber
or seafoam green.
Here's a paint chip
from the SherwinWilliams.
Oh, and can you chop it down
to fit the sideboard?"
Or worse "Darling,
I simply must have one
because my neighbor has one,
that social climbing bitch.
In fact, if she has one,
I need three."
Or even worse
"I got to have one
because 'The New York Times'
says I got to have one.
Or somebody told me
'The New York Times'
says I got to have one
because I haven't got time
to read
'The New York Times' anymore.
Oh, no, no, no.
Don't make me look at it.
No, I never actually look at it.
It's so...damn depressing.
Jesus. All those
fuzzy rectangles!
My kid could do this
in kindergarten.
The whole thing's a scam.
This guy's nothing but a fraud."
Oh, still they buy it.
It's an investment.
It's screwing the neighbors.
It's buying class.
It's buying taste.
It goes with the lamp.
It's cheaper than a Pollock.
It's interior decoration.
It's anything but what it is.
Okay. Good.
Let's, uh
Let's prime the canvas.
That'll do.
Maybe it'll do.
Possibly adequate.
What do you think?
You mean me?
You want me to answer?
Who else?
It's, uh
It's a good ground.
A good base layer.
Nice and even.
Yeah, we'll see when it dries.
Then maybe I can start to paint.
You really care what I think?
Not at all.
What?
Nothing.
No. What is it?
It's strange.
I'm remembering something.
The, uh, color is...
Is what?
Doesn't matter.
Oh, what?
Dried blood.
When the blood dried,
it got darker.
On the carpet.
Yeah? Which carpet?
Where my parents died.
It's
exactly
the color.
When the blood dried,
it got darker.
That surprised me.
I remember being surprised
by that.
Yeah. What happened
to your parents?
I don't want to talk about it.
Yes, you do.
They were murdered.
Did you say murdered?
Mm.
Well, how old were you?
Seven.
This was back in Iowa.
What happened?
I honestly don't
remember it too well.
Sure you do.
What do you see?
What do you see?
I woke up,
and the first thing I saw
was the snow outside my window.
I was glad it snowed
because it was Saturday
and I could go sledding.
My dad would take me sledding,
me and my sister.
But...
But I didn't smell anything.
That was weird.
Normally my mom would be up,
making breakfast.
It was really quiet.
I put on my slippers.
They were those Neolite ones
that look like moccasins.
Go into the hall.
Now it's
really
quiet.
And it's cold.
There's a window open somewhere.
Then I see my sister.
She's just standing
in the hallway
staring into my parents' room.
The door is open.
My sister...
she's standing
in a puddle of pee,
just staring.
Her eyes...
I go to the door and look in
and see the snow first.
Outside the window,
so much snow.
Maybe I'll still go sledding.
And then the blood.
The bed's stained with it.
And the wall.
There on the bed.
It was a knife.
Apparently it was a knife,
I found out later.
Burglars, I found out.
At least two of them.
But right now
I don't know what to do.
I just...see.
I don't want my sister to see
any more, my little sister.
I...
I turn around and push her out
and shut the door.
The door handle...
with blood, is red.
That's all.
What happened then?
You mean after that?
Uh, nothing, really.
We went to the neighbors.
They called the police.
What happened to you two?
State took us. Foster homes.
People were nice, actually.
They kept us together, but
they shuffled us around a lot.
We were rootless.
She's married to a CPA now.
Rootless?
Never belonged.
Never had a place.
They ever find
the guys who did it?
No.
I paint pictures
of them sometimes.
You paint pictures of the men
who killed your parents?
Mm. What I imagine them
to look like.
Which is what?
Huh. Normal.
When I was a kid in Russia,
I saw the Cossacks
cutting people up
and tossing them into pits.
At least,
I think
I remember that.
Maybe someone told me about it.
Or I'm just being dramatic.
It's hard to tell sometimes.
How old were you
when you came here?
Ten. We went to Portland.
Lived in the ghetto
alongside all the other
talky, thinky Jews.
I was Marcus Rothkowitz then.
You changed your name?
Yeah, my first dealer said
he had too many Jewish painters
on his books,
so Marcus Rothkowitz
becomes Mark Rothko.
Now nobody knows I'm a Jew.
Can I ask you something?
Can I stop you?
Are you really scared of black?
No, I'm really scared
of the absence of light.
Like going blind?
Like going dead.
And you equate
the color black with death.
Doesn't everyone?
I'm asking
you.
Yes, yes,
I equate the color black
with the diminution
of the life force.
Black means
decay and darkness.
Doesn't it?
Because black is
the lack of red, if you will.
Because black is
the
opposite
of red.
Not on the spectrum,
but in reality.
I'm talking about
in paintings.
Well, then talk about painting.
In your pictures,
the bold colors
are the Dionysian element,
kept in check by the strict
geometric shapes,
the Apollonian element.
The bright colors
are your passion.
Your will to survive.
Your life force.
But if black swallows
those bright colors,
then you lose that excess
and extravagance,
and what do you have left?
Go on. I'm fascinated by me.
Lose those colors, and you
have order with no content.
You have mathematics
with no numbers.
Nothing but empty, arid boxes.
And trust me,
as you get older,
those colors
are harder to sustain.
The palette fades.
We race to catch it
before it's gone.
But
What?
Never mind.
No. What?
You'll get mad.
Me?
Ah. You will!
And?
I just think...
It's kind of sentimental
to equate black with death.
That seems an antiquated notion.
Sort of romantic.
Romantic?
I mean, not honest.
Really?
In reality, we both know
black's a tool,
just like ocher or magenta.
It has no affect.
Seeing it as malevolent
is a weird
sort of chromatic
anthropomorphizing.
Oh, you think so?
What about equating white
with death, like snow?
That's different.
That's just a personal reaction.
I'm not building a whole
artistic sensibility around it.
Well, maybe you should.
I really think
Use your own life. Why not?
It's not that I don't
Unless you're scared of it.
I'm not scared.
Get into all that white!
I'm not scared!
It's just selfindulgent.
If you say so.
Not all art
has to be psychodrama.
Doesn't it?
No!
You paint pictures of the men
who killed your parents.
That's not all I paint.
Yeah, well maybe it should be.
Then maybe you'd understand
what black is.
Back to that?
Always.
At least equating white
with death isn't so predictable.
Oh, I'm predictable now?
Kind of.
Dishonest
and
predictable?
Come on!
A painter gets older,
and the color black
starts to infuse his work?
Therefore the clichéd
declension goes, he's depressed.
He's fearing death.
He's losing touch.
He's losing relevance.
He's saying goodbye.
Yeah, that's a cliche
except for when it's not.
But it's not true!
Oh, now you know truth?!
Look at Van Gogh.
Oh.
His last pictures
are all color.
He goes out and paints
the most ecstatic yellows
and blues known to man
then shoots himself.
Or Matisse. His last works
were nothing but great shocks
of primary colors.
You admire those colors?
Absolutely.
Why?
Well, Matisse, he was dying.
He knew he was dying,
but still he was Matisse.
When he got too ill
to hold a paintbrush,
he used scissors, cutting up
paper and making collages.
He never gave up.
On his deathbed,
he was still organizing
the color patterns
on the ceiling.
He had to be who he was.
And you think
I'
m
the romantic?
Oh, can't you do any better
than that?
Matisse, the dying hero,
struggling with
his last puny gasp
to finish the final masterpiece.
And Jackson Pollock,
the beautiful, doomed youth
dying like Chatterton
in his classic Pietà pose.
Oh, and Van Gogh.
Of course Van Gogh.
Trotted out on all occasions.
The ubiquitous symbol
for everything!
Van Gogh,
the misunderstood martyr!
You insult these men.
You insult these men
when you reduce them
to your adolescent stereotypes.
Oh, grapple with them, yes.
Argue with them always.
But don't think
you understand them.
Don't think
you have captured them.
They're beyond you!
Spend a lifetime with them,
a lifetime,
you might have one moment
of insight into their pain.
Until then, allow them
their grandeur in silence.
Silence is so...accurate.
We need some coffee.
Mind if I go out?
Go on.
Wait.
In the national gallery
in London,
there's a painting by Rembrandt.
It's called
"Belshazzar's Feast."
It's an Old Testament story
from Daniel.
Belshazzar, the king of Babylon,
is giving a feast,
and he blasphemes,
so a divine hand appears
and writes some Hebrew words
on the wall as a warning.
In the painting, those words,
they they pulsate
from the dark canvas
like something miraculous.
Rembrandt's Hebrew
was atrocious,
as you can imagine,
but he wrote,
"Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin."
"You have been weighed
in the balance
and have been found wanting."
That's what black is to me.
What is it to you?
They're trying to kill me!
I swear to God they're trying to
kill me, those prosaic insects,
those presumptuous,
counterjumping,
arriviste sons of bitches!
These are the same...damn walls
where I hang.
You appreciate that?
My gallery, my walls,
polluted now beyond sanitation,
beyond hygiene
like the East River
choked up with garbage,
all that superficial,
meaningless sewage
right up there on those walls!
This is the same sacred space
as De Kooning and Motherwell
and Smith and Pollock and
What is this music?!
Chet Baker!
Oh, just when I thought
today couldn't get worse!
It's jazz!
Yeah, like I care!
When you pay the rent,
you can pick the records!
So, how did you
like the exhibits?
Oh, those young artists?
They're out to murder me.
That's kind of extreme.
Yeah, but not inaccurate.
You think Jasper Johns
is trying to murder you?
Yes.
What about Frank Stella?
Yes.
Robert Rauschenberg?
Yes.
Roy Lichtenstein?
Which one is he?
Comic books.
Yes!
Andy Warhol?
You sound like an old man.
Yeah, I am an old man.
Not
that
old.
Today I'm old!
If you say so.
Look. My point is,
people like me,
my contemporaries,
my colleagues,
all those painters
who came up with me,
we all had one thing in common.
We understood the importance
of seriousness.
You're too much!
What?
You heard me.
What the hell
did you say to me?
Who are you to assume
they're not serious?
Look at their work!
I have.
No, not like you
usually look at things
like an overeager undergraduate.
I have.
Yeah, and what do you see?
Never mind.
No. Never mind, never mind.
What do you see?
This moment right now.
What, and all those flags
and comic books
and...damn soup cans?!
This moment right now
and a little bit tomorrow.
Oh, you think that's good?
It's neither good nor bad,
but it's what people want.
Exactly my point!
So art shouldn't be popular
at all now?
It shouldn't
only
be popular!
You may not like it,
but nowadays as many people
are genuinely moved by
Frank Stella as by Mark Rothko!
Nonsense!
Don't think so.
You know the problem
with these painters?
It's exactly what you just said.
They're painting for this moment
right now, and that's all.
It's nothing but zeitgeist art,
completely temporal,
completely disposable
like Kleenex!
Like Campbell's Soup,
like comic books.
Oh, you think Andy Warhol's
gonna be hanging in museums
in 100 years alongside
the Bruegels and Vermeers?
He's hanging
alongside Rothko now.
Because those...damn galleries
will do anything for money,
cater to any wicked taste!
That's business, young man.
It's not art.
You ever get tired of
telling people what art is?
No, not ever,
until they listen.
What, better you should tell me?
...off.
You're just mad because
the barbarians are at the gate,
and what do you know?
People seem to like
the barbarians.
...Damn it.
Of course they like it.
That's the...damn point!
You know what people like
nowadays?
You know what they like?
They like happy, bright colors.
They want things to be pretty.
They want things
to be beautiful. Jesus!
When someone tells me
one of my pictures is beautiful,
I want to vomit!
What's wrong with
Pretty, beautiful, nice, fine.
God! That's our life now!
Everything's fine.
We put on the funny nose
and the glasses,
and we all slip
on the banana peel,
and the TV
makes everything happy.
Everyone's laughing
all the...damn time.
It's our constitutional right
to be amused all the time,
isn't it?
We've become a smirking nation
living under
the tyranny of fine.
How are you? Fine.
How was your day? Fine.
How are you feeling? Fine.
You like the painting? Fine.
How about some dinner? Fine.
Well, let me tell you.
Everything is not fine!
How are you?
How was your day?
How are you feeling?
Conflicted? Nuanced?
Troubled? Diseased? Doomed?
I am not fine.
We are not fine.
We're anything but fine.
Look at these pictures.
Look at them!
You see a dark rectangle?
Like a doorway, an aperture?
Yeah, but it's also
a gaping mouth
letting out a silent howl
of something feral
and foul and primal and real.
It's not nice. It's not fine.
It's real!
A moan of rapture!
Something divide or damned!
Something immortal!
Not soup cans
and...damn comic books!
Something beyond me
and beyond now.
And whatever it is,
it's not pretty.
It's not beautiful.
I'm here to stop your heart!
You understand that?!
I'm here to make you think!
I'm not here to make
pretty pictures!
Oh.
So said the Cubist the second
before you stomped him to death.
Tragic, really,
to grow superfluous
in your own lifetime, right?
The child must banish
the father,
respect him but kill him.
Isn't that what you said?
You guys went after the Cubists
and Surrealists,
and, boy, did you love it.
And now your time has come,
and you don't want to go?
Well, exit stage left, Rothko,
because pop art has banished
abstract expressionism.
I only pray to God they have
more generosity of spirit
than you do and allow you
some dignity as you go.
Consider.
The last gasp
of a dying race.
Futility.
Don't worry. You can always
sign menus for money.
How dare you!
Do you know where I live?
What?
Do you know where
I live in the city?
No.
Uptown, downtown, Brooklyn?
No.
You know if I'm married?
What?
You know if I'm married?
Dating, queer, anything?
No! What's it got to
Two years
I've been working here,
8 hours a day, 5 days a week,
and you know nothing about me?
You ever once ask me to dinner,
maybe come to your house?
What's this got to do with
You know I'm a painter,
don't you?
I suppose.
No. Answer me.
You know I'm a painter?
Yes!
Have you ever once asked
to look at my work?
Why should I?
Why should you?
You're an employee!
This is all about me!
Everything here is about me!
You don't like that? Leave.
Oh, is that what
this is all about?
Baby feels wounded? Daddy
didn't pat you on the head?
Mommy didn't hug you today?
Stop it!
Don't blame me!
I didn't kill them!
Stop it!
Oh, go find yourself
a psychiatrist
and quit whining to me about it!
Your neediness bores me!
Bores you? Bores
you?!
Christ almighty! Try working
for you for a living!
The talking, talking, talking,
...Christ,
won't he ever shut up,
titanic selfabsorption
of the man!
You stand there
trying to look so deep
when you're nothing
but a solipsistic bully
with your grandiose
selfimportance
and lectures and arias
and let's look at the...canvas
for another few weeks!
Let's not...paint!
Let's just look!
And the pretension.
...Christ, the pretension.
I can't imagine any other
painter in the history of art
ever tried so hard
to be "significant."
You know not everything
has to be
so...damn important
all the time?
Not every painting
has to rip your guts out
and expose your soul.
Not everyone wants art
that actually hurts.
Sometimes you just want
a...still life or landscape
or soup can or comic book,
which you might learn
if you ever actually left
your...damn hermetically sealed
submarine in here
with all the windows closed
and no natural light
because natural light
isn't good enough for you.
But, then, nothing
is ever good enough for you,
not even the people
who buy your pictures.
Museums are nothing
but mausoleums.
Galleries are run
by pimps and swindlers.
And art collectors are nothing
but shallow social climbers.
So who
is
good enough
to own your art? Anyone?
Or maybe the
real
question is,
who's good enough
to even
see
your art?
Is it just possible
no one is worthy
to look at your paintings?
That's it, isn't it?
We have all been weighed
in the balance
and have been found wanting.
You say you spend your life
in search of real human beings,
people who can look at
your pictures with compassion,
but in your heart, you no longer
believe those people exist,
so you lose faith,
so you lose hope,
so black swallows red.
My friend, I don't think
you'd recognize
a real human being
if he were standing
right in front of you.
Never mind!
Oh, don't give up so easy!
This isn't a game!
You do make one salient point,
though not the one you think.
Naturally.
I do get depressed
when I think of how people
are gonna look at my pictures,
if they're going to be unkind.
Selling a picture
is like sending a blind child
into a room
full of razor blades.
It's going to get hurt.
It's never been hurt before.
It doesn't know what hurt is,
which is why
I'm looking to do something
different with these ones.
They're less vulnerable somehow,
more robust,
some hues from the earth even
to give them strength.
And they're not alone.
They're a series.
They'll always have each other
for protection
and companionship,
and, most important,
they're going to a place
created just for them,
a place of reflection
and safety.
A place of contemplation.
Yes.
A place with no distractions.
Yes.
A sacred space.
Yes.
A chapel.
Yes.
Like the Four Seasons
Restaurant?
At least Andy Warhol
gets the joke.
No, you don't understand!
It's a fancy restaurant
in a big highrise
owned by a rich corporation.
What don't I understand?
You don't understand
my intention!
Your intention is immaterial.
Unless you're going to stand
there for the rest of your life
next to the pictures
giving lectures,
which you'd probably enjoy,
the art has to speak
for itself, yes?
Yes, but
Just admit your hypocrisy.
The high priest of modern art
is painting a wall
in the temple of consumption.
You rail against
commercialism in art,
but, pal,
you're taking the money.
No, I'm doing more than
Sure, you can try to kid
yourself you're making a holy
place of contemplative awe,
but in reality, you're just
decorating another dining room
for the super rich,
and these things are nothing
but the world's
most expensive overmantels.
Why do you think
I took this commission?
It appealed to your vanity.
How so?
They could've gone to
De Kooning. They went to you!
It's the flashiest
mural commission
since the Sistine Chapel.
Oh, you would've
turned it down?
In a second.
Easy for you to say.
You know what it is?
It's your
Oldsmobile convertible.
Come on.
You don't need the money.
You don't need the publicity.
Why make yourself a hypocrite
for the Seagram Corporation?
I did not enter
into this capriciously!
I thought about it!
No kidding.
And, of course,
it appealed to my vanity.
Come on.
I'm a human being, too.
But still I hesitated.
And the very same thoughts.
Is is immoral? Is it corrupt?
Am I feeding the whims
of the bourgeoisie?
Should I even do it?
I know that place is where
the richest bastards in New York
will come to feed and show off,
and I hope to ruin the appetite
of every son of a bitch
who eats there!
You mention this
to the Seagrams people?
It would be a compliment
if they turn the murals down.
They won't.
You want a drink?
Sure.
I don't know.
What?
I don't know
that I believe you.
About what?
Them, this malicious
intent of yours,
the old lion still roaring,
still trying to provoke,
to be relevant,
stick it to the bourgeoisie.
It doesn't scan.
Too romantic for you?
Too cruel to them.
Your paintings aren't weapons.
You would never do that to them,
never reduce them like that.
Maybe you started the commission
thinking that way, but...
then art happened.
You couldn't help it.
That's what you do.
So now you're stuck.
You've painted yourself
into a corner.
You should forgive
the expression.
No. You're wrong.
Their power will transcend
the setting.
Working together,
moving in rhythm,
whispering to each other,
they will still create a place.
Oh, you think
I'm kidding myself?
You think this is all an act
of monumental selfdelusion?
Answer me.
Answer me.
Yes.
I'm fired, aren't I?
Fired? This is the first time
you've existed.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Can I lower the music?!
Ooh! Oh, Christ!
I was going to paint!
Obviously!
...Christ!
You want a towel or something?
Maybe a paintbrush?
I went there.
What?
The Four Seasons Restaurant.
Oh...
After our chat yesterday.
I went there for dinner.
Ah.
It's been open
a couple weeks now.
Thought I should finally
take a look.
And...?
You go in from 52nd,
and then you go up some stairs
to the restaurant.
You hear the room
before you see it
glasses clinking, silverware,
voices hushed here
but building as you get closer.
It's a desperate sound
like forced gaiety at gunpoint.
You go in,
feel fat, feel underdressed,
feel too...damn Jewish
for this place.
Give your name.
Pretty hostess gives you
a look that says,
"I know who you are,
and I'm not impressed.
We get
millionaires
in here, pal."
She snaps for the maitre d',
who snaps for the captain,
who snaps for the head waiter,
who brings you through the crowd
to your table,
heads turning.
Everyone looking
at everyone else
all the time like predators.
"Who are you?
What are you worth?
Do I need to fear you?
Do I need to acquire you?"
Wine guy comes, speaks French.
You obviously don't understand.
He doesn't care.
You embarrass yourself
ordering something expensive
just to impress the wine guy
who goes unimpressed.
And then...
you can't help it.
You start hearing what people
are saying all around you.
That's the worst of all
the voices.
It's the chatter of monkeys
and the barking of jackals.
It's not human.
And everybody's clever.
Everybody's laughing.
No one looks at anything.
No one thinks about anything.
All they do is chatter
and bark and eat.
And the knives and forks click
and clack, and the words cut,
and the teeth snap and snarl,
and in that place...
there...
will live my paintings...
for all time.
I wonder...
Do you think
they'll ever forgive me?
They're only paintings.
Turn that off, would you?
Yeah, Mr. Philip Johnson,
please.
This is Mark Rothko on the line.
Philip, this is Rothko.
Listen.
I went to the restaurant
last night, and let me tell you,
anyone who eats
that kind of food
for that kind of money
in that kind of joint
will never look
at a painting of mine.
No, II'm sending
the money back,
and I'm keeping the pictures.
No offense.
Yeah, well,
this is the way it goes.
Good luck to you, buddy.
Now...
Now you are Mark Rothko.
Only poorer.
Ohh!
Having money
doesn't make you wealthy.
It helps, though.
This is a day for the books!
You're fired.
What?
You're fired.
Why?
Doesn't matter.
It does!
Write down your address.
I'll send you your final check.
You owe me an explanation.
No, I don't owe you anything.
Two years, and you expect me
to walk out just like that?
Oh, you want
a retirement party?
I want a reason.
It's none of your business!
I want a reason!
You're too...damn needy!
All right?!
I don't need it.
I don't need your need.
Since you're 7 years old,
you've been looking for a home.
Well, this is not it,
and I'm not your father.
Your father's dead, remember?
I'm sorry, but that's it.
Come on, Dr. Freud.
You could do better. Why?
I told you why!
Why?
Because I don't need
an assistant!
Bull...
Because you talk too much.
So do you!
Because you have lousy taste.
Bull...
Because I'm sick of you!
Bull...
Because your life
is out there!
Listen to me, kid.
You don't need to spend
any more time with me.
You got to find
your own contemporaries.
Make your own world,
your own life.
You got to get out there, now,
into the thick of it.
Shake your fist at them.
Talk their ears off.
Make them look!
Wh
When I was your age...
art was a lonely thing.
There were no galleries,
no collecting,
no critics, no money.
We didn't have parents.
We didn't have mentors.
We were alone.
But it was a great time
because we had nothing to lose
and a vision to gain.
Okay?
Okay.
Thank you.
Make something new.
What do you see?
Red.
takes on the establishment,
his rivals, and art itself
as the American abstract
expressionist painter
Mark Rothko.
Oh, you think Andy Warhol's
gonna be hanging in museums
in 100 years alongside
the Bruegels and Vermeers?
Yeah, just a pinch of black.
Alfred Enoch
plays his assistant
challenging Rothko's
very perception of their craft.
You can try to kid yourself
you're making
a holy place
of contemplative awe,
but in reality you're just
decorating another dining room
for the super rich.
I'm here to stop your heart!
I'm here to make you think!
I'm not here to make
pretty pictures!
Alfred Molina and Alfred Enoch
in John Logan's "Red."
What do you see?
No. Wait. Stand closer.
You got to get close.
Let the picture pulsate.
Let it work on you.
Closer.
Nah. Too close.
There. Let it spread out.
Let it wrap its arms around you.
Let it embrace you, filling
even your peripheral vision
so nothing else exists or has
ever existed or will ever exist.
Let the picture do its work.
But work with it.
Meet it halfway, for God's sake.
Lean forward. Lean into it.
Engage with it.
Now, what do you see?
Oh, no, no. Wait. Wait, wait.
Now, what do you see?
Be specific.
No. No. Be exact.
Be exact, but sensitive.
You understand?
Be kind.
Be a human being.
That's all I can say.
Be a human being,
for once in your life.
These pictures
deserve compassion,
and they live or die in the eye
of the sensitive viewer.
They quicken only if the
empathetic viewer will let them.
That is what they cry out for.
That is why they were created.
That is what they deserve.
Now, what do you see?
Red?
But do you like it?
Mm, I
Yeah, speak up!
Yes!
Yes, yes, of course,
you like it.
How can you not like it?
Everyone "likes"
everything nowadays.
They like the television
and the phonograph
and the soda pop and the shampoo
and the Cracker Jack.
Everything becomes
everything else.
It's all nice and pretty
and likable.
Everything's
fun in the sun, huh?
Where's the discernment?
Where's the arbitration
that separates what I like
from what I respect,
what I deem worthy,
what listen to me now
what has significance.
Ah, maybe this is
a dinosaur talking.
Maybe I'm just a dinosaur,
sucking up the oxygen
from you cunning little mammals
hiding in the bushes,
waiting to take over.
Maybe I'm speaking
a lost language
unknown to your generation,
but a generation that does
not aspire to seriousness,
to meaning, is unworthy
to walk in the shadow
of those who have gone before.
I mean those who have struggled
and surmounted.
I mean those who have aspired.
I mean Rembrandt. I mean Turner.
I mean Michelangelo and Matisse.
I mean, obviously, Rothko.
Do you aspire?
Yes.
To what?
To what do you aspire?
I want to be a painter,
so I guess I aspire to...
painting.
Then those clothes won't do.
No. We
work
here.
Hang up your jacket outside.
No, no.
I appreciate you put on your
Sunday clothes to impress me.
It's poignant, really.
It touches me,
but it's ridiculous.
We work hard here.
This isn't a...damn
oldworld salon
with tea cakes and lemonade.
Go hang up your jacket outside.
Sidney told you
what I need here?!
Yes.
We start every morning at 9,
and we work until 5,
just like bankers.
You'll help me
stretch the canvases,
mix the paints,
clean the brushes,
build the stretchers,
move the paintings,
also help apply ground color,
which is not painting.
So any lunatic assumptions
you make in that direction,
you need to banish immediately.
You'll pick up food, cigarettes,
anything else I want,
any whim, no matter
how demanding or demeaning.
You don't like that?
You can leave right now.
Answer me yes or no?
Yes!
Consider I'm not your rabbi.
I'm not your father.
I'm not your shrink.
I'm not your teacher.
I'm not your friend.
I am your employer.
You understand?
Yes.
As my assistant, you're
going to see many things here,
many ingenious things,
but they're all secret.
You cannot talk
about any of this.
Don't think I don't have
enemies, because I do,
and I don't just mean
those other painters
and gallery owners
and museum curators
and...damn sonofabitch
art critics,
not to mention that vast panoply
of disgruntled viewers
who loathe me and my work
because they do not have
the heart nor the patience
nor the capacity
to think, to understand
because they're not even human
beings, like we talked about.
You remember?
Yes!
I'm painting a series
of murals now.
I'll probably do 30 or 40
then choose which work best
in concert, like a fugue.
You'll help me
put on the undercoat.
Then I'll paint them.
Then I'll look at them.
Then I'll paint some more.
I do a lot of layers,
one after another, like a glaze,
slowly building the image
like pentimento,
letting the luminescence emerge
until it's done.
How do you know
when it's done?
There's tragedy
in every brushstroke.
Ah.
Swell. Let's have a drink.
Answer me a question.
Don't think about it.
Just say the first thing
that comes into your head,
no cognition.
Okay.
You ready?
Yeah.
Who's your favorite painter?
Jackson Pollock.
Oh.
Sorry!
No, no, no.
Let me do it again!
No. Forget it.
Come on.
No, no. It's silly.
Come on. Ask me again.
Who's your favorite painter?
Picasso.
Pollock. It's always Pollock.
Oh, don't get me wrong.
He was a great painter.
We came up together.
I knew him very well.
What was he like?
You read Nietzsche?
What?
You ever read Nietzsche,
"Birth of Tragedy"?
No.
And you call yourself
an artist?
One can't discuss Pollock
without it.
One can't discuss
anything without it.
What do they teach you
in art school now?
I
You read Freud?
No.
Jung?
Well
Byron? Wordsworth? Aeschylus?
Turgenev? Sophocles?
Schopenhauer?
Shakespeare? "Hamlet"?
Oh, please, God.
At least "Hamlet."
Quote me "Hamlet" right now.
"To be or not to be?
That is the question."
Is
that the question?
I don't know!
You've got a lot to learn,
young man.
Philosophy, theology,
literature, poetry,
drama, history, archaeology.
Anthropology, mythology, music.
Come on.
These are your tools,
as much as brush and pigment!
You cannot be an artist
until you are civilized.
You cannot be civilized
until you learn.
To be civilized is to know
where you belong
in the continuum
of your art and your world.
To surmount the past,
you must know the past.
I thought
you weren't my teacher.
Ah, and you should be
so blessed
I talk to you about art.
How do you feel?
How do I feel?
How do
they
make you feel?
Give me a second.
So?
Give me a second.
Disquieted.
And...
Thoughtful.
And...
Uh, sad.
Tragic.
Yeah.
Yeah. They're for a restaurant.
What?
They're for a restaurant.
So, I'm minding my own business
when Mr. Philip Johnson
calls me.
You know Mr. Philip Johnson,
the worldrenowned architect?
Not personally.
Yeah, of course
you don't know him personally.
You don't know anyone
personally.
Don't interrupt.
Mr. Philip Johnson.
He's designing the new
Seagram Building on Park Avenue,
he and Mies van der Rohe.
Hoho. These are names with
which to conjure, are they not?
Philip Johnson,
Mies van der Rohe.
These are titans in their field,
revolutionists.
Together, they are making
a building unlike anything
the world has yet seen,
reflecting the golden ambitions
of not only this city and its
inhabitants but of all mankind.
In this building,
there is to be a restaurant
called the Four Seasons,
like the Vivaldi,
and on the walls
of this restaurant...
$35,000, they're paying me.
No other painter comes close.
My first murals.
Imagine a frieze
all around the room,
a continuous narrative
filling the walls,
one to another, each a new
chapter, the story unfolding.
You look, and they are there,
inescapable and inexorable.
Like doom.
Are these ones done?
They're in process.
I have to study them now.
Study them?
Yeah, most of painting
is thinking.
Did anybody teach you that?
Ten percent is putting paint
on canvas.
The rest is waiting.
All my life, I've wanted
just this, my friend
to create a place,
a place where the viewer
could live in contemplation
with the work,
give it some of
the same attention and care
that I gave it,
like a chapel,
a place of communion.
But it's a restaurant.
No. I will make it a temple.
Rembrandt and Rothko.
Rembrandt and Rothko.
Rothko and Rembrandt.
Rothko and Rembrandt.
And Turner.
Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner.
Rothko and Rembrandt and Turner.
Oh, my.
The Chinese place is closing.
Yeah, everything
worthwhile ends.
We're in the perpetual
process now
creation, maturation, cessation.
There's another Chinese
around the corner.
Oh, the eternal cycles
grind on.
Generations pass away,
hope turns arid,
but there's another Chinese
around the corner.
Not much for small talk.
Yeah, it's small.
I went to the Modern last
night, saw the Picasso show.
And...?
I don't think he's
so much concerned with
generations passing away.
Oh, don't kid yourself, kid.
That man, though now
a charlatan, of course,
signing menus for money
like Dalí
when he's not making those
those ugly little pots
also for money.
That man, at his best,
understood the workings of time.
Where's the receipt?
Ah, it's tragic, really,
to grow superfluous
in your own lifetime.
We destroyed Cubism,
de Kooning and me
and Barnett Newman, Smith,
all the others.
We stomped it to death.
Nobody can paint
a Cubist picture today.
You take pride in that?
Stomping Cubism to death?
The child must banish
the father,
respect him but kill him.
And enjoy it?
It doesn't matter.
Just be audacious and do it.
You know, courage in painting
is not facing a blank canvas.
It's facing Manet.
It's facing Velasquez.
All we can do is move beyond
what was there to what is here
and hope to gain some intimation
of what will be here.
"What is past and passing
and to come."
That's Yeats,
whom you haven't read.
Come on, but Picasso was
Picasso, I thank
for teaching me
that movement is everything.
Movement is life.
The second we're born,
we squall.
We writhe. We squirm.
To live is to move.
Now, without movement,
paintings are what?
Dead?
Yeah, precisely. Look.
Look at the tension
between the blocks of color,
the dark and the light, the red,
the black, and the brown.
They exist in a state
of flux, of movement.
They abut each other
on the actual canvas.
So, too, do they abut each other
in your eye.
They ebb and flow and shift,
gently pulsating.
The more you look at them,
the more they move.
They float in space.
They breathe.
Movement,
communication, gesture,
flux, interaction,
letting them work.
They're not dead
because they're not static.
They move through space
if you let them.
Now, this movement takes time,
so they're temporal.
They require time.
They demand it!
They don't work without it.
This is why it's so important
to me to create a place,
a place the viewer
can contemplate
these paintings over time
and let them move.
They
need
the viewer.
They're not like
representational pictures
like traditional landscapes
or portraits.
Yeah, tell me why.
Because they change.
They move. They pulse.
Representational pictures
are unchanging.
They don't require the active
participation of the viewer.
In the Louvre,
in the middle of the night,
the "Mona Lisa"
is still smiling.
But do these paintings
still pulse when they're alone?
That's why you keep
the lights so low!
Is it?
To help the illusion.
Like a magician.
Like a play,
To keep it mysterious,
to let the pictures pulsate.
Turn on bright lights,
and the stage effect is ruined.
Suddenly, it's nothing
but a bare stage
with a bunch of fake walls.
What do you see?
My eyes are adjusting.
Just white.
What does white
make you think of?
Bones, skeletons.
Charnel house.
Anemia.
Cruelty.
Really?
It's like an
operating theater now.
How does white make you feel?
Frightened.
Why?
Doesn't matter.
No, no. Why?
It's like the snow...
outside the room
where my parents died.
It was winter.
I remember the snow
outside the window. White.
And the pictures, in this light,
they're flat, vulgar.
This light hurts them.
Yeah, you see how it is
with them,
how vulnerable they are?
People think I'm controlling
controlling the light,
controlling the height
of the pictures,
controlling the shape
of the galleries.
It's not controlling.
It's protecting.
A picture lives
by companionship.
It dies by the same token.
Ah, it's a risky act
to send it out into the world.
You ever paint outdoors?
Oh, you mean out in nature?
Yeah.
Nature doesn't work for me.
The light's no good.
And all those bugs? No.
Oh, I know. I know.
Those plein air painters,
oh, my God,
they'll sing to you
endless paeans
about the majesty
of natural sunlight.
"Get out there,
muck around in the grass,"
they tell you, like a cow.
But when I was younger,
I didn't know any better.
I'd go out there
with my supplies,
and the wind
would blow the paper.
The easel would fall over.
Ants would get into my paint.
But then I go to Rome
for the first time.
I go to the
Santa María del Popolo
to see Caravaggio's
"Conversion of Saul,"
which turns out is tucked away
in a dark corner
of this dark church
with no natural light.
It's like a cave in there,
but that painting, it glowed.
With a sort of rapture,
it glowed.
Now, consider.
Caravaggio, he was commissioned
to paint that picture
for that specific place.
He had no choice.
He stands there,
and he looks around.
It's like under the ocean,
it's so...damn dark.
How's he going to paint here?
He turns to his creator.
"God, help me,
unworthy sinner that I am.
Tell me, O Lord on High,
what the...do I do now?"
And then it comes to him
the divine spark.
He illuminates that picture
from within.
He gives it inner luminosity.
That painting, it lives.
It lives, like like one
of those bioluminescent fish
from the bottom of the ocean,
radiating its own effulgence.
You understand me?
Caravaggio, he
Bring me the second bucket.
Are you really going to paint?
Now, what the hell do you think
I
have
been doing?
Yeah, give me, uh
give me the black number four
and the first maroon.
Yeah, just a pinch of black.
Yeah, just that amount again.
Yeah, twice as much maroon.
Ugh. Oh, come on.
Come on. Come on.
What does it need?
Red?
I wasn't talking to you.
Don't you
ever
do that again!
By what right do you speak?!
By what right do you express
an opinion on my work?!
Who the...are you? What have
you done? What have you seen?
Where have you earned the right
to even exist here with me
and these things
you don't even understand?!
"Red." Oh, you want to paint
the...damn thing? Go ahead.
Here's some red and red and red,
lots of red!
I don't even know
what that means.
What the hell does "red"
mean to me?!
Oh, you mean scarlet?
You mean crimson?
You mean plum, mulberry,
magenta, burgundy,
salmon, carmine, carnelian?
How about coral?!
Anything but "red"!
What the hell is "red"?!
I meant sunrise.
Sunrise?
I meant the red at sunrise,
the feeling of it.
Oh, "the feeling of it."
What the hell does that mean,
"the feeling of it"?
I didn't mean red paint only.
I meant the emotion
of red at sunrise.
Sunrise isn't red!
Yes, it is.
I'm telling you it's not!
Sunrise is red,
and red is sunrise.
Red is heartbeat.
Red is passion.
Red wine, red roses,
red lipstick.
Beets, tulips, peppers.
Arterial blood.
That too.
Rust on the bike on the lawn.
And apples. And tomatoes.
Dresden firestorm at night,
the sun in Rousseau,
the flag in Delacroix,
the robe in El Greco.
A rabbit's nose,
an albino's eyes, a parakeet.
Florentine marble,
atomic flash.
Nick yourself shaving,
blood in the Barbasol.
The ruby slippers,
technicolor,
that phone to the Kremlin
on the president's desk.
Russian flag,
Nazi flag, Chinese flag.
Persimmons, pomegranates,
redlight district,
red tape, rouge.
Lava, lobsters, scorpions!
Stop signs,
sports car, a blush!
Viscera, flames,
dead Fauvists!
Traffic lights, Titian hair.
Slash your wrists,
blood in the sink.
Santa Claus.
Satan!
So...
Red?
Exactly.
We got more cigarettes?
No. More than anything,
you know what?
What?
Matisse's painting
"The Red Studio,"
it's a picture
of his own studio.
The walls are a brilliant red.
The floor, the furniture,
it's all red.
It's like that color
had radiated out of him
and swallowed everything up.
When the Modern first
put that picture up,
I spent hours looking at it.
Day after day,
I would go, "Hmm."
You could argue
everything I do today,
you can trace the bloodlines
back to that painting
and those hours I spent standing
there letting that picture work,
allowing it to move.
The more I looked at it,
the more it pulsated around me.
I was saturated.
It swallowed me.
Oh, such plains of red he made,
such energetic blocks
of pure color, such emotion.
He
Yeah, it was a long time ago.
It's still there.
I can't look at it now.
Why?
It's too depressing.
How could all that red
be depressing?
I don't see the red anymore.
Even in that painting,
that total and profound
immersion in red,
it's there
the mantel above a dresser,
just over the centerline,
set off by yellow
of all...damn things.
He wanted it inescapable.
What?
Black.
The color black?
No, the
thing
black.
There's only one thing in life
I fear, my friend
one day, the black
will swallow the red.
That's easy for
you to say. You don't know him.
I'll show it to him if I think
the moment's right.
He knows I'm a painter.
He's got to be
expecting it, right?
No. No.
It depends on his mood.
Don't tell me what to do.
You're just like him.
He's here.
Uh, I'll tell you how it goes.
Pray for me.
Good morning!
Morning.
I got the other maroon.
I'll take over.
You finish the canvas.
I'll just go change.
I went by the Seagram Building
last night!
It's coming along.
How's the restaurant?
Still under construction,
but they took me around.
I got a sense of it.
And...?
Too much natural light,
as always, but it'll work.
You'll be able to see the murals
from the main dining room.
I made some sketches.
I'll find them for you.
You ever worry it's not
the right place for them?
How can it not be
the right place for them?
They're being created
specifically for that place.
Your logic sometimes baffles me.
So, I read Nietzsche,
"Birth of Tragedy,"
like you said.
Like I said?
You said if I wanted to know
about Jackson Pollock
I had to read
"The Birth of Tragedy."
I said that?
Yeah.
I don't remember. It's very
like something I would say.
So what about Pollock?
Well, first tell me
what you make of the book.
Interesting.
Oh, that's like saying "red."
Don't be enigmatic. You're
too young to be enigmatic.
I think I know why
you wanted me to read it.
Why?
Because you see yourself
as Apollo
and you see him as Dionysus.
Oh, don't be so pedestrian.
Think more.
Dionysus is the god
of wine and excess,
of movement and transformation.
This is Pollock.
Wild, rebellious,
drunken, and unrestrained.
The raw experience itself.
Apollo is the god of order,
method, and boundaries.
This is Rothko.
Intellectual, rabbinical,
sober, and restrained.
The raw experience
leavened by contemplation.
He splatters paint.
You study it.
He's Dionysus,
and you're Apollo.
Yeah, exactly right but for
entirely missing the point.
How so?
You missed the tragedy.
The point is always the tragedy.
For
you.
Whoa, whoa. What?
You think human beings
can be so easily divided
into character types?
You think
the multifarious complexities
and nuances of the psyche,
evolving through
countless generations,
perverted and demented
through social neurosis
and personal anguish
or molded by faith
or lack of faith
can all be so...damn simple?
"Pollock is emotion.
Rothko is intellect."
Oh, you embarrass yourself.
Think more.
Maybe it's like
one of your paintings.
Yeah, most things are. How?
Dark and light,
order and chaos,
existing at the same time
in the same plain,
pulsing back and forth.
We pulse, too.
We're subjects of both
Apollo and Dionysus,
not one or the other.
We ebb and flow, like
the colors in your pictures.
The ecstasy of the Dionysian
at war with the restraint
of the Apollonian.
Not at war.
Not at war?
It's not really conflict.
More like symbiosis.
They need each other!
Dionysus' passion
is focused
is made bearable
by Apollo's will to form.
In fact, the only way we can
endure the sheer ferocity
of Dionysus' emotion
is because we have the control
and intelligence of Apollo.
Otherwise, the emotion
would overwhelm us.
So back and forth we go,
myth to myth, pulsating.
Yeah, and the perfect life
would be perfectly balanced
between the two,
everlastingly on that fulcrum.
But our tragedy is we can
never achieve that balance.
We exist all of us for all time
in a state
of perpetual dissonance.
Oh, we long for
the raw truth of emotion
and can only endure it
with the cool lie of reason.
We seek to capture
the ephemeral, the miraculous,
put it onto canvas,
stopping time.
But like an entomologist
pinning a butterfly,
it dies when we try.
We're foolish that way,
we human beings.
We try to make the red black.
But the black is always there,
like the mantle in Matisse.
Like the snow
outside your window.
It never goes away.
And once glimpsed, you can't
help but be preoccupied with it,
for the intimations
of our own mortality are
Ah, but still we go on, clinging
to that tiny bit of hope,
that red that makes
the rest endurable.
Or just less unendurable.
Yeah, well, that's my friend
Jackson Pollock.
Finally it was just unendurable.
What do you mean?
His suicide.
He didn't commit suicide.
Oh. Didn't he?
Jackson Pollock died
in a car accident.
A man spends years
of his life getting drunk.
Day after day,
the guy is hammered.
He then gets into
an Oldsmobile convertible,
races around
these little country roads
like a...damn lunatic.
You tell me what that is
if not a lazy suicide.
Oh, believe you me,
when I commit suicide,
there won't be
any doubt about it.
No mysterious crumpled car
in a ditch.
"Did he? Didn't he?"
Ah, it gives me a headache,
it's so boring.
When
you commit suicide?
What?
You said,
"When I commit suicide."
No I didn't.
Yes, you did.
You misheard me. Let me tell
you something about your hero.
That man,
he confronted his tragedy.
He was valiant
in the face of it.
He endured as long as he could,
and then he tried to recede
from his life.
But how could he?
He was Jackson Pollock.
What was his tragedy?
He became famous.
Don't be glib.
His muse evacuated.
He grew tired of his form.
He grew tired of himself.
He lost his faith
in his viewers.
Take your...damn pick.
He no longer believed there were
any real human beings left
to even look at pictures.
How does that happen to a man?
Oh, better you should ask
how occasionally
it doesn't happen.
I mean, he's an artist.
He's in "Life" magazine.
He's young. He's famous.
He has money.
Yeah, that's exactly it!
Here's a schmuck from Wyoming
who can paint.
Suddenly, he's a commodity.
He's Jackson Pollock.
Let me tell you, kid,
that Oldsmobile convertible,
it really did kill him.
Not because it crashed.
Because it existed.
Why the...did Jackson Pollock
have an Oldsmobile convertible?
So artists should starve?
Yes. Artists should starve.
Except me.
Take a look.
Yeah.
Hey, you would've loved Jackson.
He was a downtown guy,
real bohemian.
No banker's hours for him,
believe you me.
Every night with the talking
and the drinking
and the fighting and the dancing
and the staying up late.
He was like
everyone's romantic idea
of what an artist ought to be.
He was the antiRothko.
At his worst,
you still loved him, though.
You loved him
because he loved art so much.
Jackson thought it mattered.
He thought painting mattered.
Does not the poignancy of that
just stop your heart?
How could this story
not end in tragedy?
Goya said, "We have art that
we may not perish from truth."
Well, Pollock saw some truth,
and then he didn't have art
to protect him anymore.
Who survives that?
Come on.
Oh, I was walking up to my house
last week,
and a couple was passing.
The lady looks inside my window
and says,
"Ooh, I wonder who owns
all those Rothkos."
Just like that, I've become
a noun a Rothko.
A commodity.
An overmantle.
A what?
The overmantles.
You know, those paintings
doomed to become mere decoration
over the fireplace
in the fancyschmancy penthouse.
Oh, they say to you,
"I need something to work
with the sofa, you understand?
Something bright and cheery
for the breakfast nook,
which is orange.
You got something in orange?
Or burnt umber
or seafoam green.
Here's a paint chip
from the SherwinWilliams.
Oh, and can you chop it down
to fit the sideboard?"
Or worse "Darling,
I simply must have one
because my neighbor has one,
that social climbing bitch.
In fact, if she has one,
I need three."
Or even worse
"I got to have one
because 'The New York Times'
says I got to have one.
Or somebody told me
'The New York Times'
says I got to have one
because I haven't got time
to read
'The New York Times' anymore.
Oh, no, no, no.
Don't make me look at it.
No, I never actually look at it.
It's so...damn depressing.
Jesus. All those
fuzzy rectangles!
My kid could do this
in kindergarten.
The whole thing's a scam.
This guy's nothing but a fraud."
Oh, still they buy it.
It's an investment.
It's screwing the neighbors.
It's buying class.
It's buying taste.
It goes with the lamp.
It's cheaper than a Pollock.
It's interior decoration.
It's anything but what it is.
Okay. Good.
Let's, uh
Let's prime the canvas.
That'll do.
Maybe it'll do.
Possibly adequate.
What do you think?
You mean me?
You want me to answer?
Who else?
It's, uh
It's a good ground.
A good base layer.
Nice and even.
Yeah, we'll see when it dries.
Then maybe I can start to paint.
You really care what I think?
Not at all.
What?
Nothing.
No. What is it?
It's strange.
I'm remembering something.
The, uh, color is...
Is what?
Doesn't matter.
Oh, what?
Dried blood.
When the blood dried,
it got darker.
On the carpet.
Yeah? Which carpet?
Where my parents died.
It's
exactly
the color.
When the blood dried,
it got darker.
That surprised me.
I remember being surprised
by that.
Yeah. What happened
to your parents?
I don't want to talk about it.
Yes, you do.
They were murdered.
Did you say murdered?
Mm.
Well, how old were you?
Seven.
This was back in Iowa.
What happened?
I honestly don't
remember it too well.
Sure you do.
What do you see?
What do you see?
I woke up,
and the first thing I saw
was the snow outside my window.
I was glad it snowed
because it was Saturday
and I could go sledding.
My dad would take me sledding,
me and my sister.
But...
But I didn't smell anything.
That was weird.
Normally my mom would be up,
making breakfast.
It was really quiet.
I put on my slippers.
They were those Neolite ones
that look like moccasins.
Go into the hall.
Now it's
really
quiet.
And it's cold.
There's a window open somewhere.
Then I see my sister.
She's just standing
in the hallway
staring into my parents' room.
The door is open.
My sister...
she's standing
in a puddle of pee,
just staring.
Her eyes...
I go to the door and look in
and see the snow first.
Outside the window,
so much snow.
Maybe I'll still go sledding.
And then the blood.
The bed's stained with it.
And the wall.
There on the bed.
It was a knife.
Apparently it was a knife,
I found out later.
Burglars, I found out.
At least two of them.
But right now
I don't know what to do.
I just...see.
I don't want my sister to see
any more, my little sister.
I...
I turn around and push her out
and shut the door.
The door handle...
with blood, is red.
That's all.
What happened then?
You mean after that?
Uh, nothing, really.
We went to the neighbors.
They called the police.
What happened to you two?
State took us. Foster homes.
People were nice, actually.
They kept us together, but
they shuffled us around a lot.
We were rootless.
She's married to a CPA now.
Rootless?
Never belonged.
Never had a place.
They ever find
the guys who did it?
No.
I paint pictures
of them sometimes.
You paint pictures of the men
who killed your parents?
Mm. What I imagine them
to look like.
Which is what?
Huh. Normal.
When I was a kid in Russia,
I saw the Cossacks
cutting people up
and tossing them into pits.
At least,
I think
I remember that.
Maybe someone told me about it.
Or I'm just being dramatic.
It's hard to tell sometimes.
How old were you
when you came here?
Ten. We went to Portland.
Lived in the ghetto
alongside all the other
talky, thinky Jews.
I was Marcus Rothkowitz then.
You changed your name?
Yeah, my first dealer said
he had too many Jewish painters
on his books,
so Marcus Rothkowitz
becomes Mark Rothko.
Now nobody knows I'm a Jew.
Can I ask you something?
Can I stop you?
Are you really scared of black?
No, I'm really scared
of the absence of light.
Like going blind?
Like going dead.
And you equate
the color black with death.
Doesn't everyone?
I'm asking
you.
Yes, yes,
I equate the color black
with the diminution
of the life force.
Black means
decay and darkness.
Doesn't it?
Because black is
the lack of red, if you will.
Because black is
the
opposite
of red.
Not on the spectrum,
but in reality.
I'm talking about
in paintings.
Well, then talk about painting.
In your pictures,
the bold colors
are the Dionysian element,
kept in check by the strict
geometric shapes,
the Apollonian element.
The bright colors
are your passion.
Your will to survive.
Your life force.
But if black swallows
those bright colors,
then you lose that excess
and extravagance,
and what do you have left?
Go on. I'm fascinated by me.
Lose those colors, and you
have order with no content.
You have mathematics
with no numbers.
Nothing but empty, arid boxes.
And trust me,
as you get older,
those colors
are harder to sustain.
The palette fades.
We race to catch it
before it's gone.
But
What?
Never mind.
No. What?
You'll get mad.
Me?
Ah. You will!
And?
I just think...
It's kind of sentimental
to equate black with death.
That seems an antiquated notion.
Sort of romantic.
Romantic?
I mean, not honest.
Really?
In reality, we both know
black's a tool,
just like ocher or magenta.
It has no affect.
Seeing it as malevolent
is a weird
sort of chromatic
anthropomorphizing.
Oh, you think so?
What about equating white
with death, like snow?
That's different.
That's just a personal reaction.
I'm not building a whole
artistic sensibility around it.
Well, maybe you should.
I really think
Use your own life. Why not?
It's not that I don't
Unless you're scared of it.
I'm not scared.
Get into all that white!
I'm not scared!
It's just selfindulgent.
If you say so.
Not all art
has to be psychodrama.
Doesn't it?
No!
You paint pictures of the men
who killed your parents.
That's not all I paint.
Yeah, well maybe it should be.
Then maybe you'd understand
what black is.
Back to that?
Always.
At least equating white
with death isn't so predictable.
Oh, I'm predictable now?
Kind of.
Dishonest
and
predictable?
Come on!
A painter gets older,
and the color black
starts to infuse his work?
Therefore the clichéd
declension goes, he's depressed.
He's fearing death.
He's losing touch.
He's losing relevance.
He's saying goodbye.
Yeah, that's a cliche
except for when it's not.
But it's not true!
Oh, now you know truth?!
Look at Van Gogh.
Oh.
His last pictures
are all color.
He goes out and paints
the most ecstatic yellows
and blues known to man
then shoots himself.
Or Matisse. His last works
were nothing but great shocks
of primary colors.
You admire those colors?
Absolutely.
Why?
Well, Matisse, he was dying.
He knew he was dying,
but still he was Matisse.
When he got too ill
to hold a paintbrush,
he used scissors, cutting up
paper and making collages.
He never gave up.
On his deathbed,
he was still organizing
the color patterns
on the ceiling.
He had to be who he was.
And you think
I'
m
the romantic?
Oh, can't you do any better
than that?
Matisse, the dying hero,
struggling with
his last puny gasp
to finish the final masterpiece.
And Jackson Pollock,
the beautiful, doomed youth
dying like Chatterton
in his classic Pietà pose.
Oh, and Van Gogh.
Of course Van Gogh.
Trotted out on all occasions.
The ubiquitous symbol
for everything!
Van Gogh,
the misunderstood martyr!
You insult these men.
You insult these men
when you reduce them
to your adolescent stereotypes.
Oh, grapple with them, yes.
Argue with them always.
But don't think
you understand them.
Don't think
you have captured them.
They're beyond you!
Spend a lifetime with them,
a lifetime,
you might have one moment
of insight into their pain.
Until then, allow them
their grandeur in silence.
Silence is so...accurate.
We need some coffee.
Mind if I go out?
Go on.
Wait.
In the national gallery
in London,
there's a painting by Rembrandt.
It's called
"Belshazzar's Feast."
It's an Old Testament story
from Daniel.
Belshazzar, the king of Babylon,
is giving a feast,
and he blasphemes,
so a divine hand appears
and writes some Hebrew words
on the wall as a warning.
In the painting, those words,
they they pulsate
from the dark canvas
like something miraculous.
Rembrandt's Hebrew
was atrocious,
as you can imagine,
but he wrote,
"Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin."
"You have been weighed
in the balance
and have been found wanting."
That's what black is to me.
What is it to you?
They're trying to kill me!
I swear to God they're trying to
kill me, those prosaic insects,
those presumptuous,
counterjumping,
arriviste sons of bitches!
These are the same...damn walls
where I hang.
You appreciate that?
My gallery, my walls,
polluted now beyond sanitation,
beyond hygiene
like the East River
choked up with garbage,
all that superficial,
meaningless sewage
right up there on those walls!
This is the same sacred space
as De Kooning and Motherwell
and Smith and Pollock and
What is this music?!
Chet Baker!
Oh, just when I thought
today couldn't get worse!
It's jazz!
Yeah, like I care!
When you pay the rent,
you can pick the records!
So, how did you
like the exhibits?
Oh, those young artists?
They're out to murder me.
That's kind of extreme.
Yeah, but not inaccurate.
You think Jasper Johns
is trying to murder you?
Yes.
What about Frank Stella?
Yes.
Robert Rauschenberg?
Yes.
Roy Lichtenstein?
Which one is he?
Comic books.
Yes!
Andy Warhol?
You sound like an old man.
Yeah, I am an old man.
Not
that
old.
Today I'm old!
If you say so.
Look. My point is,
people like me,
my contemporaries,
my colleagues,
all those painters
who came up with me,
we all had one thing in common.
We understood the importance
of seriousness.
You're too much!
What?
You heard me.
What the hell
did you say to me?
Who are you to assume
they're not serious?
Look at their work!
I have.
No, not like you
usually look at things
like an overeager undergraduate.
I have.
Yeah, and what do you see?
Never mind.
No. Never mind, never mind.
What do you see?
This moment right now.
What, and all those flags
and comic books
and...damn soup cans?!
This moment right now
and a little bit tomorrow.
Oh, you think that's good?
It's neither good nor bad,
but it's what people want.
Exactly my point!
So art shouldn't be popular
at all now?
It shouldn't
only
be popular!
You may not like it,
but nowadays as many people
are genuinely moved by
Frank Stella as by Mark Rothko!
Nonsense!
Don't think so.
You know the problem
with these painters?
It's exactly what you just said.
They're painting for this moment
right now, and that's all.
It's nothing but zeitgeist art,
completely temporal,
completely disposable
like Kleenex!
Like Campbell's Soup,
like comic books.
Oh, you think Andy Warhol's
gonna be hanging in museums
in 100 years alongside
the Bruegels and Vermeers?
He's hanging
alongside Rothko now.
Because those...damn galleries
will do anything for money,
cater to any wicked taste!
That's business, young man.
It's not art.
You ever get tired of
telling people what art is?
No, not ever,
until they listen.
What, better you should tell me?
...off.
You're just mad because
the barbarians are at the gate,
and what do you know?
People seem to like
the barbarians.
...Damn it.
Of course they like it.
That's the...damn point!
You know what people like
nowadays?
You know what they like?
They like happy, bright colors.
They want things to be pretty.
They want things
to be beautiful. Jesus!
When someone tells me
one of my pictures is beautiful,
I want to vomit!
What's wrong with
Pretty, beautiful, nice, fine.
God! That's our life now!
Everything's fine.
We put on the funny nose
and the glasses,
and we all slip
on the banana peel,
and the TV
makes everything happy.
Everyone's laughing
all the...damn time.
It's our constitutional right
to be amused all the time,
isn't it?
We've become a smirking nation
living under
the tyranny of fine.
How are you? Fine.
How was your day? Fine.
How are you feeling? Fine.
You like the painting? Fine.
How about some dinner? Fine.
Well, let me tell you.
Everything is not fine!
How are you?
How was your day?
How are you feeling?
Conflicted? Nuanced?
Troubled? Diseased? Doomed?
I am not fine.
We are not fine.
We're anything but fine.
Look at these pictures.
Look at them!
You see a dark rectangle?
Like a doorway, an aperture?
Yeah, but it's also
a gaping mouth
letting out a silent howl
of something feral
and foul and primal and real.
It's not nice. It's not fine.
It's real!
A moan of rapture!
Something divide or damned!
Something immortal!
Not soup cans
and...damn comic books!
Something beyond me
and beyond now.
And whatever it is,
it's not pretty.
It's not beautiful.
I'm here to stop your heart!
You understand that?!
I'm here to make you think!
I'm not here to make
pretty pictures!
Oh.
So said the Cubist the second
before you stomped him to death.
Tragic, really,
to grow superfluous
in your own lifetime, right?
The child must banish
the father,
respect him but kill him.
Isn't that what you said?
You guys went after the Cubists
and Surrealists,
and, boy, did you love it.
And now your time has come,
and you don't want to go?
Well, exit stage left, Rothko,
because pop art has banished
abstract expressionism.
I only pray to God they have
more generosity of spirit
than you do and allow you
some dignity as you go.
Consider.
The last gasp
of a dying race.
Futility.
Don't worry. You can always
sign menus for money.
How dare you!
Do you know where I live?
What?
Do you know where
I live in the city?
No.
Uptown, downtown, Brooklyn?
No.
You know if I'm married?
What?
You know if I'm married?
Dating, queer, anything?
No! What's it got to
Two years
I've been working here,
8 hours a day, 5 days a week,
and you know nothing about me?
You ever once ask me to dinner,
maybe come to your house?
What's this got to do with
You know I'm a painter,
don't you?
I suppose.
No. Answer me.
You know I'm a painter?
Yes!
Have you ever once asked
to look at my work?
Why should I?
Why should you?
You're an employee!
This is all about me!
Everything here is about me!
You don't like that? Leave.
Oh, is that what
this is all about?
Baby feels wounded? Daddy
didn't pat you on the head?
Mommy didn't hug you today?
Stop it!
Don't blame me!
I didn't kill them!
Stop it!
Oh, go find yourself
a psychiatrist
and quit whining to me about it!
Your neediness bores me!
Bores you? Bores
you?!
Christ almighty! Try working
for you for a living!
The talking, talking, talking,
...Christ,
won't he ever shut up,
titanic selfabsorption
of the man!
You stand there
trying to look so deep
when you're nothing
but a solipsistic bully
with your grandiose
selfimportance
and lectures and arias
and let's look at the...canvas
for another few weeks!
Let's not...paint!
Let's just look!
And the pretension.
...Christ, the pretension.
I can't imagine any other
painter in the history of art
ever tried so hard
to be "significant."
You know not everything
has to be
so...damn important
all the time?
Not every painting
has to rip your guts out
and expose your soul.
Not everyone wants art
that actually hurts.
Sometimes you just want
a...still life or landscape
or soup can or comic book,
which you might learn
if you ever actually left
your...damn hermetically sealed
submarine in here
with all the windows closed
and no natural light
because natural light
isn't good enough for you.
But, then, nothing
is ever good enough for you,
not even the people
who buy your pictures.
Museums are nothing
but mausoleums.
Galleries are run
by pimps and swindlers.
And art collectors are nothing
but shallow social climbers.
So who
is
good enough
to own your art? Anyone?
Or maybe the
real
question is,
who's good enough
to even
see
your art?
Is it just possible
no one is worthy
to look at your paintings?
That's it, isn't it?
We have all been weighed
in the balance
and have been found wanting.
You say you spend your life
in search of real human beings,
people who can look at
your pictures with compassion,
but in your heart, you no longer
believe those people exist,
so you lose faith,
so you lose hope,
so black swallows red.
My friend, I don't think
you'd recognize
a real human being
if he were standing
right in front of you.
Never mind!
Oh, don't give up so easy!
This isn't a game!
You do make one salient point,
though not the one you think.
Naturally.
I do get depressed
when I think of how people
are gonna look at my pictures,
if they're going to be unkind.
Selling a picture
is like sending a blind child
into a room
full of razor blades.
It's going to get hurt.
It's never been hurt before.
It doesn't know what hurt is,
which is why
I'm looking to do something
different with these ones.
They're less vulnerable somehow,
more robust,
some hues from the earth even
to give them strength.
And they're not alone.
They're a series.
They'll always have each other
for protection
and companionship,
and, most important,
they're going to a place
created just for them,
a place of reflection
and safety.
A place of contemplation.
Yes.
A place with no distractions.
Yes.
A sacred space.
Yes.
A chapel.
Yes.
Like the Four Seasons
Restaurant?
At least Andy Warhol
gets the joke.
No, you don't understand!
It's a fancy restaurant
in a big highrise
owned by a rich corporation.
What don't I understand?
You don't understand
my intention!
Your intention is immaterial.
Unless you're going to stand
there for the rest of your life
next to the pictures
giving lectures,
which you'd probably enjoy,
the art has to speak
for itself, yes?
Yes, but
Just admit your hypocrisy.
The high priest of modern art
is painting a wall
in the temple of consumption.
You rail against
commercialism in art,
but, pal,
you're taking the money.
No, I'm doing more than
Sure, you can try to kid
yourself you're making a holy
place of contemplative awe,
but in reality, you're just
decorating another dining room
for the super rich,
and these things are nothing
but the world's
most expensive overmantels.
Why do you think
I took this commission?
It appealed to your vanity.
How so?
They could've gone to
De Kooning. They went to you!
It's the flashiest
mural commission
since the Sistine Chapel.
Oh, you would've
turned it down?
In a second.
Easy for you to say.
You know what it is?
It's your
Oldsmobile convertible.
Come on.
You don't need the money.
You don't need the publicity.
Why make yourself a hypocrite
for the Seagram Corporation?
I did not enter
into this capriciously!
I thought about it!
No kidding.
And, of course,
it appealed to my vanity.
Come on.
I'm a human being, too.
But still I hesitated.
And the very same thoughts.
Is is immoral? Is it corrupt?
Am I feeding the whims
of the bourgeoisie?
Should I even do it?
I know that place is where
the richest bastards in New York
will come to feed and show off,
and I hope to ruin the appetite
of every son of a bitch
who eats there!
You mention this
to the Seagrams people?
It would be a compliment
if they turn the murals down.
They won't.
You want a drink?
Sure.
I don't know.
What?
I don't know
that I believe you.
About what?
Them, this malicious
intent of yours,
the old lion still roaring,
still trying to provoke,
to be relevant,
stick it to the bourgeoisie.
It doesn't scan.
Too romantic for you?
Too cruel to them.
Your paintings aren't weapons.
You would never do that to them,
never reduce them like that.
Maybe you started the commission
thinking that way, but...
then art happened.
You couldn't help it.
That's what you do.
So now you're stuck.
You've painted yourself
into a corner.
You should forgive
the expression.
No. You're wrong.
Their power will transcend
the setting.
Working together,
moving in rhythm,
whispering to each other,
they will still create a place.
Oh, you think
I'm kidding myself?
You think this is all an act
of monumental selfdelusion?
Answer me.
Answer me.
Yes.
I'm fired, aren't I?
Fired? This is the first time
you've existed.
I'll see you tomorrow.
Can I lower the music?!
Ooh! Oh, Christ!
I was going to paint!
Obviously!
...Christ!
You want a towel or something?
Maybe a paintbrush?
I went there.
What?
The Four Seasons Restaurant.
Oh...
After our chat yesterday.
I went there for dinner.
Ah.
It's been open
a couple weeks now.
Thought I should finally
take a look.
And...?
You go in from 52nd,
and then you go up some stairs
to the restaurant.
You hear the room
before you see it
glasses clinking, silverware,
voices hushed here
but building as you get closer.
It's a desperate sound
like forced gaiety at gunpoint.
You go in,
feel fat, feel underdressed,
feel too...damn Jewish
for this place.
Give your name.
Pretty hostess gives you
a look that says,
"I know who you are,
and I'm not impressed.
We get
millionaires
in here, pal."
She snaps for the maitre d',
who snaps for the captain,
who snaps for the head waiter,
who brings you through the crowd
to your table,
heads turning.
Everyone looking
at everyone else
all the time like predators.
"Who are you?
What are you worth?
Do I need to fear you?
Do I need to acquire you?"
Wine guy comes, speaks French.
You obviously don't understand.
He doesn't care.
You embarrass yourself
ordering something expensive
just to impress the wine guy
who goes unimpressed.
And then...
you can't help it.
You start hearing what people
are saying all around you.
That's the worst of all
the voices.
It's the chatter of monkeys
and the barking of jackals.
It's not human.
And everybody's clever.
Everybody's laughing.
No one looks at anything.
No one thinks about anything.
All they do is chatter
and bark and eat.
And the knives and forks click
and clack, and the words cut,
and the teeth snap and snarl,
and in that place...
there...
will live my paintings...
for all time.
I wonder...
Do you think
they'll ever forgive me?
They're only paintings.
Turn that off, would you?
Yeah, Mr. Philip Johnson,
please.
This is Mark Rothko on the line.
Philip, this is Rothko.
Listen.
I went to the restaurant
last night, and let me tell you,
anyone who eats
that kind of food
for that kind of money
in that kind of joint
will never look
at a painting of mine.
No, II'm sending
the money back,
and I'm keeping the pictures.
No offense.
Yeah, well,
this is the way it goes.
Good luck to you, buddy.
Now...
Now you are Mark Rothko.
Only poorer.
Ohh!
Having money
doesn't make you wealthy.
It helps, though.
This is a day for the books!
You're fired.
What?
You're fired.
Why?
Doesn't matter.
It does!
Write down your address.
I'll send you your final check.
You owe me an explanation.
No, I don't owe you anything.
Two years, and you expect me
to walk out just like that?
Oh, you want
a retirement party?
I want a reason.
It's none of your business!
I want a reason!
You're too...damn needy!
All right?!
I don't need it.
I don't need your need.
Since you're 7 years old,
you've been looking for a home.
Well, this is not it,
and I'm not your father.
Your father's dead, remember?
I'm sorry, but that's it.
Come on, Dr. Freud.
You could do better. Why?
I told you why!
Why?
Because I don't need
an assistant!
Bull...
Because you talk too much.
So do you!
Because you have lousy taste.
Bull...
Because I'm sick of you!
Bull...
Because your life
is out there!
Listen to me, kid.
You don't need to spend
any more time with me.
You got to find
your own contemporaries.
Make your own world,
your own life.
You got to get out there, now,
into the thick of it.
Shake your fist at them.
Talk their ears off.
Make them look!
Wh
When I was your age...
art was a lonely thing.
There were no galleries,
no collecting,
no critics, no money.
We didn't have parents.
We didn't have mentors.
We were alone.
But it was a great time
because we had nothing to lose
and a vision to gain.
Okay?
Okay.
Thank you.
Make something new.
What do you see?
Red.