Girl Model -- Film Review Shakespeare: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd -- Book Review

Girl Model

Directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin

 

This film is a public relations piece for organized criminal rackets operating internationally between Russia and the Far East.  I couldn't quite figure out why this film was made.  It is a pack of lies and misrepresentations from beginning to end.  The proof of this is in the film itself and I will point it out to you, although the film tries to cast itself as something benign or even benevolent.  But it is such a thin veneer that it is almost laughable.  This is quite obviously sordid and sinister.  The more I think about it, the darker and more frightening it becomes.  It's very curious what was motivating these filmmakers?

It starts out in Siberia, of all places.  Really.  The opening scene reminded me of a factory farm where animals are kept in large warehouse-like facilities by the hundreds and thousands being raised in close quarters for slaughter.  Except these are girls between the ages of about twelve and fifteen.  Their bikini covered bodies are examined one after another in a seemingly endless assembly line, supposedly in search of some ideal of feminine beauty that will be successful as a model in Japan. 

From the outset it is apparent that this is a scam.  If these self appointed mavens of the fashion world actually knew as much as they claim about the tastes of Japanese publishers and fashion, then there would be successful models to interview to validate the success of their judgments.  But there are none.  The only adult woman interviewed in the film is Ashley Sabin, one of the filmmakers, who seems deeply ambivalent about the modeling business and who said that "no one hated the modeling business more than me."  Yet she is now a recruiter for the enterprise she once despised, and she doesn't seem all too pleased with herself. 

I spent the first part of the film wondering why this was taking place in Siberia?  I'm not sure I've got it right, but Siberia is an out of the way place and far from media attention and public scrutiny.  The population is mostly rural and economically challenged, let's say, and probably unsophisticated in their knowledge of the outside world.  It's a good place to do something if you want to keep a low profile, and there is evidently a large pool of naive young girls who dream of escaping to a better life in a faraway place. 

Tigran, the supposed owner of the modeling agency that recruits the Russian girls and transports them to Japan, is the paradigm of a smooth talking con man.  He presents himself as something a few pegs below sainthood, giving these deprived girls from rural Siberia an opportunity to live an exciting life as a model in Japan and make a lot of money for their struggling families.  But this avatar of his organization is belied on a number of counts, and once quite explicitly and threateningly, which I found very interesting, and a bold intimation of what he is really all about. 

First of all, there are no successful models who can be held up as examples of what he has can accomplish for a girl.  A successful agent should have successful clients as examples of his capabilities and judgment, and he doesn't have any. 

Second, the contract that the girls have to sign with his agency is actually quoted on screen, and promises them two jobs in Japan and $8000.  But Madlen and Nadya,  the two girls followed in the film, do not get jobs, and leave Japan at least $2000 in debt -- to him.  So they are lied to and swindled.

Third, the contract specifies that the terms of the contract can be changed from day to day at the will of the agency.  This means that there is no contract, that they are basically working at his whim.

Fourth, once the girls are in Japan, he does not attend to them in any way.  They are passed on to Japanese handlers who send them on an series of fruitless auditions that amount to nothing.  If they do get work or their photos are used they are not paid for it, and he does not see to it that they are paid.  There is not one named Japanese advertising agency, publication, retail business, or fashion house in the whole film that has used the models that this agency has represented.  Not a single one. 

Fifth, and most tellingly, he relates how some young girls can be"difficult" -- Lord knows -- and in order to subdue them, he takes them on an outing to the morgue, so they can see the dead bodies of other young girls like themselves.  Purportedly, this is to discourage the girls from drug use.  Tigran vouches for its powerful effectiveness.  But if this is such an effective technique for keeping young girls off of drugs, maybe we should start doing it here.  Why hasn't anyone here ever thought of this after so long in the War on Drugs?  Maybe we should start organizing field trips for young girls to visit morgues to see the bodies of other young girls who died from drug abuse?  Perhaps this film does have one valuable insight to offer that can turn young girls' lives around. 

Actually, this is intimidation of the most heavy handed sort.  This is to let the girls know that 'you belong to us, now.  We own you.  And you'd better do as we tell you, or this is your destiny.'  It is a very stark choice, and he means it.  He admits that he used to be in the military and that he has killed a lot of people.  He wants you to know that he is capable and experienced at killing people.  The military part of it is questionable, but that this man is a killer I have no doubt.  This guy is intimidating and very dangerous. 

The scam works like this.  Girls from poor families in rural Russia are recruited by the Russian Mafia.  Ashley works as a scout and a recruiter.  She gives the whole process its veneer of benign legitimacy.  The modeling tryouts and the search for the ideal of feminine beauty are a sham.  What they are really looking for, and Tigran says this explicitly, are girls from disadvantaged backgrounds whose families have financial problems.  He said they check the girls out very carefully in terms of their background and their family circumstances.  They are looking for girls with the right kind of vulnerabilities.  Once they find an appropriate candidate, they are lured to Japan or Taiwan or somewhere else in the Far East with the promise of a successful modeling career.  But, of course, that does not happen.  The girls are treated miserably.  They barely have enough to eat.  They have to call home to get money to live on.  They get no jobs.  If their photos are used, they are not paid for it.  After a while they are sent home several thousand dollars in debt to the "modeling agency." 

The one instance where Nadya's photo does appear in a magazine is one where her face is covered.  Why is her face covered?  With her face covered she can't be identified.  We don't even know for sure if that is her.  This "modeling agency" does not want anyone to see their models in a magazine.  They don't want anyone to know she was ever in Japan.  They want her to remain invisible.  What about all the tryouts and photo shoots?  Some of the photos may indeed be used, but probably not in Japan, and she will never be paid for any of them.  What is really going on here? 

This is recruitment for prostitution.  Prostitution is where the real money is, not modeling.  The criminal gangs have no illusions.  Very few girls can make much money modeling, but almost any girl can make substantial money as a prostitute, even a gray mouse like Nadya.  That is what this is about, ladies and gentlemen.  This is why the film you saw doesn't make sense, and why it is hard for me to figure out why it was even made in the first place.  The "modeling agency" is just an elaborate cover.  The few thousand dollars spent on sending the girl to Japan and shaking her loose from her family is the mob's initial investment, their startup cost.  Once the girl is working as a prostitute, she will make that back and more in a very short time. 

The first step is to get the girl deeply in debt.  Once she is in debt beyond her ability to repay, and her family unable to bail her out, the Russian Mafia makes her an offer she can't refuse.  Remember that girl you saw in the morgue?  We spent a lot of money to send you to Japan or Taiwan on those fruitless modeling tryouts, and we expect to get that money back.  You've proven that you can't make money as a model.  But we've got a surefire way for you to make money, but it is not exactly modeling.  It's a little different, but another way of selling your body. 

Ashley Sabin talks a little bit in the latter part of the film about prostitution and how some girls who fail as models end up going that route.  She points out how some countries and cultures do not stigmatize prostitution and claims it is a perfectly legitimate way to earn a living.  She professes not to know anything about that aspect of the modeling business, and claims she has nothing to do with it herself.  This is very likely a lie, along with the lie we see her relating in the next few moments to Russian parents of prospective recruits that the girls from her modeling agency never return to Russia with debt, when we have just seen two girls from her agency return to Russia with thousands of dollars in debt.  So her credibility is zero, and her capability and effectiveness at deception is documented right before our eyes.  Some women are able to deal their way out of the prostitution aspect of the business by acting as recruiters of younger girls.  That could be Ashley's story, but she speaks very good English and appears to be an American.  Perhaps those qualities were seen as more valuable assets that working as a prostitute.  Ashley is a bit of a puzzle, but there is clearly much that she is not telling.  It is evident that she has very mixed feelings, but apparently strong survival instincts, and she is doing what she has to do. 

At the very end of the film in a textual postscript, we are told that Nadya went back to Japan the following year -- a rather surprising turnaround given her disagreeable experience the first time -- but maybe not, if you consider the scenario that I have painted.  We are told that she failed again to achieve success as a model and racked up still more debt and was sent on to Taiwan and China and other places in the Far East.  It did not tell us what she was doing or how she was living, but I think we can make a pretty good surmise that she is not making money as a model.  If she was, then they would have pictures and publications and advertisements to show us as evidence of her success.  But rest assured, she probably is making money, and more than she could ever make modeling, but she is not getting much of it.  Ask Tigran where the money goes. 

This film leaves me puzzling.  Not about what is going on.  That is very clear.  But what were the filmmakers intentions in making this film?  What were they trying to accomplish?  They didn't seem to be able to bring themselves to tell the real story, so they concocted something half-assed, that intimated very obliquely what was going on, and left a lot of loose ends dangling nonsensically, but they never really pursued the matter in any depth.  And they promoted a viewpoint that they knew very well was a lie.  They seem afraid to really follow this where it is leading, -- understandable, actually -- but if they don't want to tell the story, why make the film at all?  The people and organizations running this operation don't usually like to be the subjects of documentary films.  Why would a guy like Tigran appear in this film?  Did he really think that people would buy his tale about his having such a good heart and doing this for the good of the girls, when the film plainly shows that that could not be true in any shape or form?  Did they delude themselves into thinking that this would encourage young girls around the world to want to become models?  I don't get it.  It must have something to do with the relationship between Ashley and Tigran.  I think she is very much afraid of him.  I can't even speculate about it. 

Shakespeare:  The Biography.

By Peter Ackroyd.  New York:  Random House/Anchor Books.  2006 [2005].  572 pp.

 

There is much that is not known about Shakespeare, a circumstance that always poses difficulties for a biographer, and one which often tempts the biographer to overreach the spare facts that are known with surmises and interpretations that become merged with known facts leaving a distorted, confused impression.  Peter Ackroyd avoids this pitfall by masterfully recreating Shakespeare the person through the context of the time and circumstances in which he lived.  The time and circumstances of Shakespeare's life can be discerned with much more clarity and much more fullness than Shakespeare himself, but that context illuminates the person that Shakespeare must have been, and together with the writings that he left and other documents that pertain to his life, a remarkably clear and convincing portrait of Shakespeare the person emerges.  What makes this reconstruction possible and so rich and informative is Ackroyd's depth of knowledge of Elizabethan England, and particularly of the city of London.  This far reaching grasp of the history and culture of the time in which Shakespeare lived, together with encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare's writings, as well as the writings of Shakespeare's contemporaries, gives his presentation of Shakespeare a convincing weight of authority.

Shakespeare was a country boy.  Ackroyd vividly reconstructs the village life of sixteenth century Stratford and points out how Shakespeare's plays are full of references to life upon the land that are of such richness and specificity that they evince one who could only had lived and grown up there. 

"There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps, of washing and scouring, of dusting and sweeping; there are many references to the preparation of food, to boiling and mincing and stewing and frying; there are allusions to badly prepared cakes and unsieved flour, to a rabbit being turned upon a spit and a pasty being 'pinched.'

An ill-weeded garden is an image of decay.  He knows of grafting and pruning, of digging and dunging. 

In all he alludes to 108 different plants.  In his orchards hang apples and plums, grapes, and apricots.

The flowers of his plays are native to the soil from which he came; the primrose and the violet, the wallflower and the daffodil, the cowslip and the rose, sprang up wild all around him. . . He uses the local names for the flowers of the meadow, such as Ophelia's crowflowers, and Lear's cuckoo-flowers; he uses the Warwickshire word for the pansy, love-in-idleness.  He employs the local names of bilberry for the whortleberry and honey-stalks for stalks of clover.  In that same dialect, too, a dandelion is a 'golden lad' before becoming a 'chimney sweeper' when its spore is cast upon the breeze.

No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan.  He mentions some sixty species in total."  (p. 33-34)

Born in 1564, he was a first-born son to parents who had already lost two daughters.   Infant mortality was high in the sixteenth century and adult male life expectancy was only forty-seven years.   Shakespeare himself died on his fifty-second birthday.  Death was always a looming presence in sixteenth century England.  Plague struck London with regularity and often forced Shakespeare's acting company to go on the road for the summer while the city of London endured the plague. 

As an adult,  Shakespeare visited Stratford once a year and in 1597 bought a sumptuous house there where he resided until his death in 1616.  Shakespeare was not at all the poor, struggling artist.  His father, John, was a member of the glovers' guild.  He also dealt in wool, barley, and timber.  He is also known to have leant money at excessive interest rates.  John Shakespeare was active in the governance of Stratford, serving in numerous official positions including mayor.  He was apparently quite well respected and of some substance in the town.  His son, Will, would later become quite adept and astute in money matters.  Shakespeare, by the end of his life had actually become rather well to do. 

The issue that overshadowed Shakespeare's life and touched him personally at numerous points was a culture war going on in England at the time between Catholicism and Protestant reformers.  It began with Henry the Eighth (1491-1547) and continued for the next couple of centuries.  It encompassed more than just religion; it was also about secular power and governance.  Shakespeare's family was Catholic.  Shakespeare seems to have had Catholic sympathies although he was not overtly devout or outspoken on matters of religion. 

Ackroyd summarizes it thus:

"It is true that he used the language and the structure of the old faith in his drama, but that does not imply that he espoused Catholicism.  His parents are likely to have been of the old faith, but he did not necessarily take it with him into his adulthood.  The old religion was part of the landscape of his imagination, not of his belief."  (p. 472)

"Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself.  In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god.  He never adverts to any particular religious controversy . . . The safest and most likely conclusion, however, must be that despite his manifold Catholic connections Shakespeare professed no particular faith.  The church bells did not summon him to worship.  They reminded him of decay and of time past.  Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs."  (p. 474)

"Shakespeare grew up with a profound sense of ambiguity.  It is one of the informing principles both of his life and of his art.  In the plays themselves the themes and situations are endlessly mirrored in the plots and sub-plots, so that the reader or spectator is presented with a series of variations on the same subject without any one of them given preeminence."  (p. 268)

"Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes.  All of his characters have mixed natures.  Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact very few genuine resolutions of the action.  The closing scenes are deliberately rendered ambiguous, with one character generally excluded from the happy picture of reconciliation.  That is why some critics have agreed with Tolstoy that Shakespeare really had 'nothing to say.'" (p. 269)

Shakespeare seems to have had a strong sexual constitution.  We'll leave aside his "orientation." 

"There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang.  There are sixty-six terms for the female vagina. . . There are a host of words for the male penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery, and fellatio. " (p. 314)

"The poems to his 'black mistress' contain allusions to sexual disgust and sexual jealousy that are also to be found in his drama.  There is a hint of homosexual passion in  The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, and elsewhere -- a passion not unlike that evinced by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy.  There are also veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the 'Dark Lady.'  Shakespeare's sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and sexual innuendo.   The language of the poems is itself sexual, quick energetic, ambiguous, amoral.  From the evidence of the drama alone it would be clear that he was preoccupied with sexuality in all of its forms."  (p. 314)

"The Elizabethan Age was one of great and open promiscuity.  London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes.  It was not only in the capital, however, that sexual activity was commonplace."

"It was not always a clean or hygenic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling.  In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed."

"In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust.  Hamlet is a misogynist.  Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in Measure for Measure, and in King Lear,  in Timon of Athens, and in Troilus and Cressida. " (p. 315)

Sexual jealousy is a common theme in Shakespeare's plays.  His own sexual identity seemed to be, shall we say, flexible.  Ackroyd points out that Shakespeare created more memorable female roles than any of his contemporaries.  He used cross dressing more frequently than any other dramatist.  He could identify with and express the hearts and minds of females as well as males with great sensitivity.  In his later plays, especially, there is a preoccupation with father-daughter relationships.  Ackroyd notes that many biographers of Shakespeare surmise that he suspected his wife, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, of infidelity, but he points out that this is unprovable.  But infidelity, both real and imagined, is a significant element in many of his plays as well as in the sonnets.  (p. 317) 

This brings up a point that I was hoping to hear more about from Ackroyd, and that is Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare's marriage.  Ackroyd has very little to say about Anne and Will's marriage.  He does research Anne's family background and notes the relationships between some of her relatives and Shakespeare.  But the marriage between Anne and Will remains shrouded in fog.  This is not due to any deficiency or neglect on Ackroyd's part.  If anything were known about it, I'm sure he would be aware of it and included it.  Shakespeare's marriage is one of those dark patches that have resisted the penetration of posterity's curiosity. 

Ackroyd reveals a lot about how Shakespeare worked as a dramatist and it is very interesting.  He often wrote roles with specific actors in mind.  He adapted, revised, and rewrote.  Numerous versions of his plays have been found apart from the Folio edition.  A play could change depending on the venue and the actors available.  Shakespeare always had his eye on the performance.  He was not just a scriptwriter, and was perfectly willing to adapt a script to the needs of a performance.  He tended to write about the aristocracy:  kings, court intrigue, etc., but he was equally familiar and convincing in his portrayals of common people and lowlifes.  His characters are often ambivalent and ambiguous as he was himself.  Some have noticed in Shakespeare an ambivalence about the theater itself.

"One of his persistent metaphors for human futility and pretension is the theater.  When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative." (p. 313)

While much of Shakespeare's life remains murky and beyond the reach of our prying curiosity, Ackroyd has compiled an impressive wealth of information richly set in the cultural context of Elizabethan England.  I have only touched on a few of the many interesting subtopics that he covers.  There is so much that is informative, engaging, interesting in this book that it is bound to please anyone drawn to Shakespeare and his writings or the history of England.