The Night of the Iguana - "Beach Boys Greatest Hits"

The Night of the Iguana (1964)

K: The character of T. Lawrence Shannon is in an obvious struggle between religion and women. What do you think torments him the most?

H: I think the combination of the two is what leads to his torment. On the one hand, he's really a devout guy, on the other he loves the ladies. He sees a conflict between these two desires, where other people (maybe Maxine?) are able to reconcile them or form a synergy.

K: Do you think he believed in God?

H: Absolutely. He always framed discussions with God talk - the existence of "God's creatures", what "belongs to God", and letting God down. I don't know that he believes in an all-powerful God, because when he frees the iguana (not a euphemism) he says he's doing what God cannot. I think he believes in a God that's a lot like himself: frail, weak, but good intentioned.

K: Instead of a strong belief in God, Ms. Jelkes believes that humans have the ability to improve. And for being a preacher, he could accept that from her better than all the years of preaching and trying to understand verse. The idea that he could connect with someone was more powerful than him wearing his cross or collar.

H: I took Ms. Jelkes to be a realist, rather than an idealist. When she talks about removing a personal article of clothing and giving to a man in a rickshaw to hold, she doesn't talk about changing this rather strange and some would say immoral behavior. She accepts everything that isn't cruelty as being human, and she never finds dirty what is human. She's about acceptance, not about the perfectibility of humankind. Shannon is the idealist - he thinks by waiving hypocrisy in peoples' faces, he'll be more accepted. Instead, he chases people out of the church.

K: She couldn't get by with the old man and no money if she didn't have that belief. And he is scrambling and stooping to these pathetic lows to keep a lousy job. Maxine is in a position of power that she can't handle. Ms. Jelkes says everybody gets by with either alcohol, pills, beach boys, or a few deep breaths. Shannon encounters people with problems, but he's the character that has to go through the most change.

H: No one expects him to change, except Ms. Jelkes. Maxine says that he goes through a breakdown twice a year. She says that he probably won't be ok when Ms. Jelkes asks. Charlotte turns on him in an instant when he rightly rejects her and the danger she represents to him.

K: The trailer bills this movie as "One man and three women." What do these three women do to affect a change in his character? It's not fair to just say three, because Ms. Fellows has a huge part in his character because of his defense of her after he'd been drinking. So, let's say four women. What do these women do to affect change in his character?

H: Charlotte has the illusion that she'll make an honest preacher of him and they'll get married. Then she thinks they'll become beach combers. Not likely since she comes from a world of privilege. Maxine wants him the way she's always wanted him, something much more than a beach boy and closer to a partner. Ms. Fellows unintentionally reforms him and teaches him to forgive and protect his enemies. Ms. Jelkes just tries to get him through the night in as nonsexual a way as possible. She's more like a suicide hotline than a forget all your troubles one night stand.

K: Ms. Jelkes' smock and hat make her look like a nun. She keeps his cross and she's a painter and shows people how she sees them, but there's the realistic side where they pay for that painting. He called her a thin, tall woman buddha.

There are a lot of fantastic camera shots that enhance the idea of "fantastic" situations. As the characters acknowledge, what's happening to them now is reality. The idea of having to live fantastically to live in reality is a true statement applies to this part of their lives. The camera shots add to everything. They make them even crazier, the bus scene where he drives off with the women, the fight scene with hank, the chase and capture of the iguana. There are a lot of closeups of people who aren't the main characters, so when you as a viewer are pushed to look at something uncomfortable (old women, the Mexican townies, feet on glass) you want to look away. You know enough to not want to see that and to try to avoid it. That's what's so fantastic, that you're pushed to look at things you normally only hear about. But that's what he's living. And there are a lot iguanas.

H: We keep returning to discussions about movies based on plays. I've got a new defintion for good movies from plays: if the movie makes the play seem unstageable, then it's a success. After seeing this movie filmed on location in Puerta Vallarta with a fast, kinetic camera I can't imagine this story on stage. In a strange way, this paves the way for appreciating the play if Iever do see it staged because if they pull it off, it would blow my mind.

K: There are parts that the play benefits from being a movie, but other than that I think of the whole thing as a play. The Shakespearean monologues done well (maybe not by Woody Harrelson) are perfect for on stage. What the play might lose from being a movie is when you see a play, you are invested in the person so many feet away from you. So Shannon's nervousness and stumbling feel more awkward on stage than they do in the movie. Have you ever seen a play where it was so awkward you wondered if the actor wasn't making a mistake or whether the character was supposed to be played that way? Shannon is an interesting stage character in that way, but all of Tennesee Williams' characters seem on the brink of failure. Maybe that's why he was so successful, because people wanted to see failure.

H: To capture the awkwardness, the camera has to substitute close shots of Shannon's haggard face and really everyone's face when they're in trouble.

Just to talk about symbolism for a moment, I've devised these equations:

Old Ladies on the tour = the chorus and/or an audience on stage
Beach Boys = Death/Strangeness/Eroticism

Iguanas are a way of examining humankind's precarious situation objectively. We can tell when they're in trouble, but we can't aways see the pit we're poised over.

Why don't you talk about the ending?

K: It's one of those movies where you know it's ending, but you know it won't achieve the ending you want. I thought five minutes to go, how is Ms. Jelkes going to live happily ever after with Shannon. When Maxine gave her a proposition, I knew that wasn't going to happen. I had two minutes to come to terms with the actual ending where Maxine and Shannon are together.

H: I wanted it to end how it ended. Shannon was interested in Ms. Jelkes the same way he was interested in the church and again taking up the cloth. He falsely idealized religion and her, but he should have and I think did come to realize that he's a man of this world, a human, and not a saint. In talking with Ms. Jelkes and realizing that she's not into physical love (and knowing that he very much is), it wouldn't have made sense for them to end up together. They ultimately want different things. Ms. Jelkes deals with the tragedies of life very practically and simply through painting and chaste kindness. Shannon and Maxine self-medicate on rum cocoas and sex. They belong together.

K: Do you think he goes back to drinking? He's kind of drama queen when he's drunk. He puts on a convincing display but as Ms. Jelkes observes, since he can't be on the cross with nails, he's in a hammock tied up with rope.

H: He idealizes Christ just as he idealizes Ms. Jelkes, but he's not like them. He can't handle truly harsh realities and he falls to pieces at the thought of losing his crumby job. He's a very poor martyr.

K: I want to know how we can accept Maxine's decision to have this new man, Shannon, in her life when Charlotte chooses the same solution, which is to find a new man, in this case Hank. It seemed reasonable when I saw it, but now I'm conflicted. I understand the difference between Charlotte and Maxine, but I wanted to believe that Maxine would fix things if she went to El Paso by herself. It's the way we first saw her, handling the villa by herself.

H: But her drug of choice was the beach boys. She would repeat that same mistake in El Paso. I think she was in almost as dire a situation when we meet her as Shannon, she just puts up a better front. The reason we can accept Maxine's decision, which is her method of coping with life, is because, as she says, she "knows the difference between loving someone and going to bed with someone." Charlotte doesn't know the difference. She consistently mistakes physical attraction, or worse the desire to avenge her guardian's treatment of her, for love. Maxine has always "been on the make" for Shannon. There's history there.

K: There is a lot of hidden meaning in the last two lines where Shannon agrees to go to the beach but he doesn't think he can make it back up the hill. She replies that she'll always help him up the hill. I took it to reference Fred's impotence/declining attraction for Maxine and Shannon's worrying that he'll end up in the same sexual funk. Maybe I was reading too much into it...

H: I didn't take it as double entendre per se, although I could see her meaning that she wouldn't leave him on the beach to go back with the beach boys. Because they're so much alike, I thought she meant that they could help each other in their similar struggles.

K: Does she regret how much she took advantage of Fred's "fishing"?

H: No, because she wasn't in love with him. She respected him like she respected Gramps. I really liked when she picked up his book of poems and tried memorizing his last poem. Had he lived, he might have composed something like "God Only Knows" or "California Girls", except the chorus would go:

"I wish they all could be the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon's girls..."