Poem Films #2: 'The Man With The Beautiful Eyes'

Bukowski through a kaleidoscope.

In March, I mused here about the link between written poetry and animated shorts. Noting that people often compare short films to poems, I decided to take the idea literally and examine shorts that work with poetry, focusing on how the text and images complement one another. I wrote about Negative Space (2017), which adapts Ron Koertge’s poem of the same name.

This time, I’m looking at a classic of British animation: Jonathan Hodgson’s The Man with the Beautiful Eyes (1999), created with designer Jonny Hannah. Set to a reading of Charles Bukowski’s poem of the same name, it is one of a score of animated adaptations of the author’s writing, and probably the best. It won a BAFTA, brought its director a ton of commercial work, and surely helped fuel the ongoing fashion for Bukowski-based animation.

The poem tells the story of a group of boys who meet a mysterious man from their neighbourhood. It is narrated by one of the boys, now an adult. The man is an aggressive alcoholic, a pariah: the boys’ parents have warned them against approaching his house. But to them, he is strong and natural and beautiful, and when his house goes up in flames, they’re convinced their parents burnt it out of jealousy. They have misunderstood, but at the same time, they have intuited a deeper truth: adult society judges, and punishes those who don’t conform. Read the poem here and watch the film below.

In its plain-spoken lyricism, Bukowski’s poem has something in common with Koertge’s “Negative Space,” but it is three times longer (and Hodgson doesn’t modify the text). The films are the same length, so this one is wordier: the narrator barely pauses. The risk here is that the words could suffocate the whole thing, the images—ink and paint on paper shot on analog film—reduced to simply and redundantly illustrating what’s being said. This was apparently a concern during production, and Hodgson wasn’t convinced he avoided the pitfall.¹

I think he did. True, he doesn’t embellish the story much, although he does make a few interesting additions which I’ll come on to. But he does something that requires great sensitivity: he changes the form and the energy while staying true to the spirit of the poem. Bukowski’s words are simple and direct, and coiled into short, terse lines. Hodgson’s film is kaleidoscopic: everything is shifting all the time. He senses the tightly wound unease—verging on delirium—behind Bukowski’s language, and unleashes it.

I’ll start with a deceptively obvious point: hearing a poem read in voiceover in a film does not produce the same effect as reading the poem. First, the voiceover has an actual voice: here, that of American musician Peter Blegvad (who recorded it on a rough hangover). His even, restrained, melancholic tone specifies something about the narrator’s mood.

Second, the use of a voiceover sparks a tension between the narration and the images. The story is effectively being told twice, and if we’re paying attention, we can’t help but notice the ways in which narration and images coincide or diverge (for example: the poem assumes a first-person perspective, but the images rarely do). This produces a distancing effect: we become aware of the storytelling itself.

Hodgson and Hannah run wild with the poem, subtly developing this distancing effect as they go. Blegvad’s steady delivery helps here, anchoring what is a highly energetic film.

The images are forever pulling away from then drawing back toward the text. At one extreme, the actual words appear onscreen, rendered in Hannah’s distinctive typefaces. These come at moments of high drama and make for some of the boldest frames in the film; I love the riot of bright paints shining from the word “blazed”—the closest we ever come to actually seeing the beautiful eyes (which, being visible only to the children, must not be shown). With blaring emphasis, this device also points right back to the textual basis of the narrative.

Then there are those scenes that depict the poem’s events directly (the kids playing among the bamboo, the man walking out of the house) or interpret them in a transparent way (the brigade of angry parents marching toward the house). Some moments are a bit prosaic: we don’t need the words “LOVE” and “HATE”— words Bukowski didn’t write—on the parent’s knuckles. But on the whole, these scenes steady the film. Had there been a total mismatch between what we see and what we hear, we would be lost.

At the other extreme, the images sometimes form a sharp contrast with the text or depart from it entirely. Here’s an example of the first. After the LOVE/HATE slip comes a redemptive moment of smart wordplay. Blegvad reads, “They had been afraid of the man with the beautiful eyes,” and as he says “eyes” the word “blazed,” with its rays of colour, reappears. It’s a clash—we’re hearing one word and seeing another—but it works, because we’ve been shown the image already and understand the link between this crucial noun and this beautiful verb, which is reaffirmed here. It’s a very cinematic effect.

And how does Hodgson depart from the text? The beginning and ending are key. The opening shot shows a “missing child” poster with an image of a boy wearing the same striped top as one of the children in the story, who may be the narrator. We can take this allegorically, as referring to the loss of childhood innocence anticipated in the poem. (If so, it’s a bit on-the-nose.) We then see the boy draw a picture of a house that morphs into the man’s actual house. The children will draw it (and the garden) again later. And the final sequence consists of a mega zoom-out from the charred ruins of the house to an aerial view of the entire US, which in turn is revealed to be a logo on a typewriter in the window of a shop called Chinaski’s (a reference to Bukowski’s literary alter ego). The frame isolates the typewriter as the credits roll.

None of this is in the poem. All of it once again serves to remind us that there is in fact a poem, with a narrator who is constructing the tale (drawing the house, so to speak), and behind that narrator an author: Bukowski. The position of the narrator is particularly interesting in this poem, which ends on a note of suspense about the dark promise of adulthood. Now that the narrator is himself an adult, has he turned out like his parents? Hodgson makes us wonder.

In its relationship to the text, then, the film is constantly boomeranging. In this sense, it is more dynamic than the other great animated Bukowski adaptation, J.J. Villard’s Son of Satan (2004). These shifts in register are aided by a great fluidity of framing and editing. Here too, the film is restless.

Although Hodgson sometimes uses simple cuts—most noticeably in the sequence showing the parents’ prim bourgeois lifestyle, with its suddenly clipped rhythm—he also deploys all manner of smoother transitions, including morphs. Look at how Jane’s hollow face becomes the pond, or at the wonderful passage from cigar smoke to facial hair. The camera also moves a lot within shots, which is typical of the director’s style. It zooms in and out, pans, and swoops down from on high to catch the boys on the way home from school.

Even the characters are unstable, their outlines, colours and proportions always evolving. There is something of children’s or outsider art in the looseness of the drawings. The poem acknowledges the naivety of children—their freedom from the civilising influence of bourgeois society—and suggests that they share this with certain rare adults. The film echoes this on the visual plane.

It takes skill and, yes, sensitivity to pull all these transitions off without alienating the audience. There’s a mighty turmoil latent in Bukowski’s poem, which is about the greatest transition of all: that from childhood to adulthood. The film gives this turmoil a new shape, making full use of its medium’s expressive capabilities. It shows wit and imagination at every turn. It blazes.

1. “I feared [the film] was following the text a bit too much, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else,” Hodgson told Clare Kitson for her book British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor. Kitson commissioned the film (and many others) for Channel 4, before writing this essential book about her experiences on the frontline of British auteur animation in its golden age. The chapter on The Man With the Beautiful Eyes explores some of the strategies discussed above that Hodgson used to keep his adaptation from being too literal.