The America around Walt Whitman's birthplace in West Hills today is not exactly the one he heard singing. There are parking lots to the north, south and west, while that particularly vast one to the east, across Route 110, serves Walt Whitman mall. Listen and you hear the roar of an 18-wheeler, the whine of a hundred SUVs.Or - if you have a dog-eared copy of Leaves of Grass handy - maybe even the poet's voice. "There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon ... that object became part of him...."
In the opening and closing seconds of tonight's PBS film (9p.m., WNET/13) on the American bard from Long Island, the first objects we look upon are boughs of green, luxuriant foliage. The camera picks its way through this jungle - remnants of the howling wilderness of Whitman's ancestors - when suddenly the scene breaks into the broad expanse of a beach. "As I ebb'd with the ocean of life," wrote Walt. "As I wended the shores I know."
And so, over the span of just a few paragraphs, you, too, can understand why any filmmaker who wends his way through the life of a great poet like this one must have lost his marbles. Poets' birthplaces can be in inconvenient places. The world they knew is hardly the one we know. Their medium was the page, and their language was the language of allusion and illusion. Yet there it is, on-screen, tonight: a big, strapping beautiful film that brings Whitman and his world to life, and latter-day relevance.
You also should know that tonight's two-hour "American Experience" is drenched in the sweat (and perhaps tears) of the man who made it, Mark Zwonitzer - a PBS star who also produced one of its finest "ethnic" specials, The Irish in America, a decade ago. "The thing that drove me to do this," he said in a phone interview, "is that I think Whitman is sort of a misapprehended character. Any time you become a rest stop in New Jersey or a mall in Huntington, then everyone knows your name, but they don't remember what [you're] all about." Yet, he adds, "It ended up being quite a daunting challenge. It almost destroyed my business and put great stress on my family. It was a very, very difficult project to make and the producer and a.p. went off to Greece for months to recover."
Zwonitzer eventually threw up his hands in semi-defeat: This wouldn't be just a portrait of the man - "a slightly slippery figure" - but of the magnum opus itself. What viewers see tonight are not only the usual academic talking heads - and very good ones, like University of Iowa Whitman expert Ed Folsom - but poets such as Martin Espada and Yusef Komunyakaa, or novelist Allan Gurganus. Threaded through all this is an artful, and photographic, rendering of Whitman's world - of Brooklyn tenements and Civil War battlefields, so vivid that you can almost smell the stench of each.
The film explores Whitman's homosexuality as well - often avoided by scholars who would prefer readers go to the work itself to pick up the graphic clues. (And there are many, indeed.) Tonight's film even includes - briefly - the only gay scene in "American Experience" history, as two young men embrace, kiss and then do whatever. That scene - and others - are designed to grab the viewer by the shoulders, shake them, then say: Whitman is the poet of blood, breath, appetites, lust and life. Whitman is you (just as he would have it).
The film is in two parts. The first covers Whitman's efforts to prevent the gathering Civil War, as if poetry (and Leaves of Grass, self-published in 1855) were the balm of love and healing. That effort failed - outrageously - and the second half follows Whitman as a humbled "nurse," tending to the sick and dying in hundreds of field hospitals around Washington:
"Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide, I dream, I dream, I dream."
Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper has had great success speaking others' words, but he was more than a little nervous about this most recent role. It was Walt Whitman, from whose works Cooper reads in the PBS American Experience film. "Initially, I was a little intimidated. Poetry is not something I've done before," says Cooper (American Beauty, The Bourne Identity, Lone Star and the new Married Life), who voices the Leaves of Grass author in prose and poetry. "Getting groups of words or even singular words the full import was a challenge," he says. "And to make it very intimate. (Whitman) wanted it to be more intimate."
Walt Whitman, written and directed by Mark Zwonitzer, tracks Whitman's experience as a provocative young writer and editor in mid-19th-century New York City, a visitor dazzled by New Orleans, a volunteer who helped injured soldiers during the Civil War and an infirm older man who amended Leaves of Grass in the years leading up to his death at 72 in 1892. Over time, the work grew from 12 poems in 95 pages to more than 300 poems in 400 pages.
Although Leaves of Grass is considered a great work and is a staple on reading lists, it was reviled by many critics after Whitman self-published it in 1855. He sold only about two dozen copies, and many people took issue with his rejection of traditional rhyme and meter and his celebration of the sensuality of the human body. Even one of his supporters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, tried to get Whitman to cut some of the more erotic material. "He was a man way ahead of his time to approach the subjects he did with such daring. It was very brave what he did and what he accomplished," says Cooper, who was introduced to Whitman's work as a child by his grandmother.
Walt Whitman, which is narrated by J.K. Simmons and features readings and commentary by poets and scholars, uses contemporary photographs and film to show the poet's relevance today. As poet Martin Espada reads Whitman's description of caring for a wounded soldier from Drum Taps, pictures of today's wounded soldiers are interspersed with those of Civil War combatants.
Cooper, who won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Adaptation, can feel a connection to Whitman in the poet's love for the overflowing humanity of New York City, where the actor moved to start his career. (He recently filmed a vignette there with Robin Wright for New York, I Love You, an upcoming anthology film that will present short works by a number of noted directors and actors.) "The cultural diversity in New York was such an eye-opener for me, coming from Missouri. It was thrilling," he says.
Cooper says he felt a shared experience with Whitman when reading from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: "Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd; Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried."
"That's the beauty of his writing," Cooper says. "One hundred years later, he's talking to the person of the future." So, watch tonight and learn why someone who died 116 years ago still lives and breathes today. Plus, you'll never look at Walt Whitman Mall quite the same way.
