Let The Line, The Cross and The Curve be analyzed to life!

[IEDSRI@aol.com]

     The following may read like an angry attack of Vickie's recent posting
about "The Line, The Cross and The Curve".  IED apologizes in advance for the
appearance of hostility.  He assures everyone that his hot humor is not
directed at any person, but rather at an attitude which he perceives as
common among a large (and growing) number of people both in rec.music.gaffa
and in the world at large.  Ordinarily IED would say nothing about trends in
society, but when those trends threaten to affect the reception of the work
of Kate Bush, he has no choice but to voice a  protest, however feeble or
disorganized it may be, however bad-tempered it may sound.
     With all due respect,  then, IED disputes Vickie's claim that this movie
is "full of flaws".  He also questions her concluding admonition that we "not
analyze [the movie] to death".
    "The Line, The Cross and The Curve" is not in the least error-ridden;  as
for the danger of over-interpreting the movie's subtleties, well, let it
merely be said that the analyses that have reached this forum to date
scarcely raise such a danger.  
     IED is impatient with such a know-nothing, facilely populist attitude
toward Kate Bush's art, an attitude which after an incubation over many years
threatens to strangle the flow of earnest Kate Bushological discourse both in
rec.music.gaffa and in Homeground.  It is a supercilious, patronizing
attitude, one that pre-supposes that anything a given audience has failed to
notice or consider in a work of art (even, apparently, after prolonged or
multiple exposure) must be of no importance, or is at best a "mistake" by the
artist.
     Even when the artist in question is Kate Bush!  "Don't think about it --
just 'feel it!'" we are so often instructed (as if Kate's early words were
self-explanatory -- as if feeling were not as much an achievement of the mind
as of the heart). Yet what better art to establish the intellectual
complexity of human emotion than that of Kate Bush?  What better proof of the
intricacies that constitute the expressive purity of great art than the
latest production of Kate Bush?  
     The majority of critics who espouse such an attitude are of course
welcome to continue to bask in the limp climes of their own flabby thinking.
 IED, however, appeals to the rest of you to pay attention to what you see
and hear in "The Line, The Cross and The Curve" (as in all of Kate Bush's
work), whether you experience it once on a television screen or five times in
a movie theater.  If you do, he has no doubt that you will recognize as a
Great Untruth the claim that "the film isn't anywhere near brilliant."

 >All the songs in the film are from Kate's album _The Red
 >Shoes_, which isn't a concept album. 

     Is this true?  Is it really accurate to say that there is no "concept"
underpinning the album?  Certainly there is no explicit narrative linking the
songs together.  But there is a wealth of thematic, lyrical and musical
interactivity among the tracks.  The conceit of the line, cross and curve
alone comprises the themes of all the other tracks on the album, in one sense
or another.

 >Kate had to work out a story linking 5 other
 >unrelated songs to the title track, which was itself inspired
 >by Michael Powell's film _The Red Shoes_. 

     The apparent assumption here is that the decision to make a film
preceded some kind of forced, artificial concocting of a "plot" for a movie
after the fact.  This judgement was shared by  numerous loutish critics in
the print media.  But the incorporation of the images of the line, cross and
curve in the track "The Red Shoes" is incontestible proof that this is not
so.
     Kate Bush's artistic leap, in conceiving of the film, was to recognize
and exploit in a broader medium the applicability of five songs from her
album to the overriding theme of the titular song.  Once she had seen how
each of those five songs could be used so as to lend a new narrative context
for the album's pre-existing but essentially non-linear narrative theme, the
"story" took an organic, logical shape.  It is a fundamental
misinterpretation of the process to say that Kate "had to" work out a story;
rather, a story naturally evolved out of an all-embracing, philosophically
consistent theme .  
     Furthermore, the influence of the Powell/Pressburger film is perhaps
more obvious but no more important than that of Jacques Tourneur's
"Night/Curse of the Demon" (which owes its central dramatic theme -- that
magic symbols written on paper and transferred between two people may invest
one with a curse drawn from the other -- to the short story "Casting the
Runes" by M.R. James).   Kate Bush's extraordinary decision to fuse these two
historically distant but remarkably compatible morality-plays by setting the
girl of the red shoes on a journey of self-discovery through the medium of
magical runes is, exactly, "brilliant" -- as is her subtle but undeniably
consistent referencing of the two source themes throughout the film.  
     One could argue, indeed, that this flair for the alchemical fusion of
pre-existing themes -- this aesthetic 
cross-breeding, as it were -- is a key virtue of Kate Bush's artistic method,
one which can be traced in songs from her earliest years of productivity and
regularly throughout the residue of her oeuvre.  In "The Line, The Cross and
The Curve" that virtue is perhaps (and this is typical of Kate Bush) more
quietly displayed than ever, even as the vehicle chosen (a 43-minute film) is
in some respects her most ambitious to date; but that virtue is no less real
for its subtlety.  

 >The rehearsal is further delayed when the lights go out
 >because of a thunderstorm, and everyone leaves the room 
 >except for Kate. 

     Yes, and why?  This device allows the character to light a candle.
 Doesn't that suggest anything?  Does anyone see the irony in the scene that
follows?

 >There's a beatiful section involving a disoriented bird.

     Some details can of course be overlooked in a synopsis of "The Line, The
Cross and The Curve", but this one mustn't.  It's the first expression of the
theme's possible lines of resolution and of Kate Bush's increasingly serious
philosophical preoccupations as they are expressed in the new film.  
     What is the setting's significance?  
     Why is the setting lit by a candle?  
     To what or whom does Kate's character address the song -- a song which,
judging from the lyrics alone, apparently refers to a love relationship
ostensibly shared by two living people?
     What is the bird doing?  
     Who is the bird?  
     What happens to the bird?  
     What does Kate's character do to it?  
     How does she part with the bird?  
     Where is the bird finally placed, and how does that refer both backward,
to the album's theme, and forward, to a later pivotal scene in the movie?  
     IED doesn't presume to have arrived at definitive answers to these
questions; far from it.  But it doesn't take a lot of thought to recognize
that these questions are, without any doubt, being posed -- that the events
which transpire in the room with the bird during the song "And So Is Love"
are meaningful, and meaningful in an extraordinarily rich and deeply
personal, yet (within the terms set forth by the movie) logical way.  Once
this fact is recognized, our procedure through the labyrinth that follows can
at least hold some promise of useful, enlightening analysis. 

 >Unfortunately, the spell is then transferred to Kate.  Miranda
 >disappears back into the otherworld and Kate follows, where
 >she is suddenly turned into a witchy dance diva.  Her dress is
 >transformed, her hair is wild and loose, and she dances like a
 >madwoman.

     Isn't there something else to be noticed about Kate's costume?  Is she
merely a "witchy dance diva"?  

 >Remembering and singing about the people she's loved and
 >lost (those who've died) helps to give Kate back her "heart."

     How?  Also, is this the first evidence of her "heart" in the movie? What
does Kate really seem to be saying about "heart"?   

 >The trickery involves Kate drawing a line (signifying
 >a "path") and a cross (signifying the "heart") and a curve
 >(signifying a "smile") on 3 pieces of paper and giving them 
 >to Miranda.  

     But these secondary signifiers (the line, cross and curve) refer in turn
to further indirect signifiers (a path, a heart, a smile).  Do these primary
symbolic references not have more crucial meanings? If it is acknowledged
that they do have more basic and helpful significance,  how then can the
argument sensibly be made that "The Line, The Cross and The Curve" does not
support further analysis?  
     This movie is crammed, absolutely packed, with symbols, symbols which
inevitably refer to additional underlying symbols.  All of these in turn
point to and encompass an unmistakably direct and unaffected emotional core.
 Therefore, the surrounding and defining presence of these multivalent
symbols -- much like the magical angels, the circle of fire, the slips of
paper, and the procession of dead friends, all of which surround and describe
the protagonist's soul at different points in her journey -- must be
investigated seriously, if we are to have any hope of understanding the
essential personal and universal significance of "The Line, The Cross and The
Curve".  
     Please, Love-Hounds, just this once -- let's do analyze it to death.

-- Andrew Marvick (IED)