Altman, Keillor, and the Suicide Poet Girl

When you first see Lindsay Lohan in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, playing a teenage poet named Lola Johnson, she is trailing her dithery mother (Meryl Streep) and clutching a dog-eared notebook. Her black-frame glasses and long hair partially obscure a beautiful face whose only makeup is a determinedly grim expression; all around her stagehands are bustling and performers are joshing.

Streep is a singer in a proudly nostalgic variety show broadcast on Saturday night radio, and Lola looks every inch the rebel daughter, mopey and dismissive, in an EXTINCT IS FOREVER T-shirt and olive-drab jacket. When Mom mentions a dress she brought for her, Lola grumbles her defiance.

All the signs point to her as a foil for the middle-aged, middlebrow, and Middle West whimsy that will predominate for the next two hours.

That Lohan’s role comes packaged in the guise of a young female poet is no surprise—Garrison Keillor, who wrote the metafictional screenplay and stars as Himself—has been dubbed the “Dean of Poetry” by The Chronicle for Higher Education. The man who famously referred to Anne Sexton as a “hot number” in the introduction to his best-selling anthology Good Poems knew he needed one for his movie. It’s written into financing deals, I’m pretty certain.

In movies, the role of “poet,” suicidal or not, has often stood for disobedience. From Dead Poets Society to Henry Fool to biopics such as Before Night Falls and Total Eclipse, poets rebel and die. Lola, with her name, torn jeans, and the funny oxymoron of indie glasses and flag of blond hair, could be the perfect semaphore for sexy defiance.

I had heard about the Lola role and was anticipating a reprise of Altman’s technique in Gosford Park. In that film, an even bigger cast and multiple storylines were made to cohere, more or less, through a simple director’s trick: keep the camera close to the point of view of a young, attractive observer. In Gosford Park, that observer is the clever Glaswegian brunette Kelly Macdonald playing a quiet but sharp-eyed (and sharp–eared) lady’s maid. As she glides through the halls and rooms of Gosford Park, weaving seamlessly Upstairs and Downstairs, we overhear confessions and glimpse forbidden acts through her eyes and ears. And we could sympathize with her humanity when the whirl of the action distanced us from more crucial and cruel players.

So, it made sense to me that Altman’s camera would use Lola Johnson’s youth and beauty and alienation to similar ends—to present an ironic observer. The “suicidal” edginess even promised a hint of drama. Will Lola let loose with Dorothy Parkerisms? Hurt someone’s feelings? The film’s plot revolves around the fact that this is the last Prairie Home Companion ever. When the adults at last offer her a chance to sing, will she cut through the oatmeal and give the audience some Patti Smith? Is she or isn’t she the anti-Garrison Keillor?

Maybe I just needed someone to sympathize with. Aren’t her graffitied, torn jeans coded especially for my demographic with the date 4-5-94—The Day Kurt Cobain Died? (Do girls born in 1986 worship Cobain? When Lola opens her notebook, it’s the band names she doodles that catch my eye—The Smiths? Whose The Queen Is Dead came out in 1986?)

That glimpse inside Lola’s notebook has prurience to it. We hear her say again and again that she writes suicidal poems. In a “show, don’t tell” moment, she reads one aloud. When I hear the title, “Soliloquy for Blue Guitar,” I smile. Is she going to go beyond my wildest dreams and turn all Wallace Stevens on us? No. True to type, she reads tinny, teenage free verse about death. But the camera going over her shoulder, in virtual psychic striptease, is already a clue that the character is at the mercy of the movie, not vice versa.

Sure enough, as the story unfolds, Lola Johnson devolves into a series of incoherent stereotypes. She is not our sharp observer, just one of the ensemble. She isn’t a rebel, she’s Mama’s little girl tearing up when someone else dies backstage and she’s told the show must go on. There will be no critique of the Prairie Home Companion, or Keillor, or Meryl Streep’s pink shawls. There is, instead, another cliché rearing its head: the cliché of the Interchangeable Starlet, who serves no earthly purpose in a film besides eye candy.

Reader, this is the part when I became the teenage suicide girl: contorting in my seat, drawing up my knees, playing with my hair, tilting my head, and sighing loudly, squashing my cheeks. I was bored out of my skull.

Lola’s climactic moment comes when she is indeed given the spotlight at the end of the show, loses her original music, and ends up singing a version of “Frankie and Johnny,” which she apparently ad-libs a bit (a feat of improvisatory poetics?). Moreover, she sheds the olive-drab jacket and dons Streep’s powder-pink shawl! From sullen outsider to happy ensemble member, from threatening pseudo-intellectual to performer/true daughter—her narrative is all about absorption and assimilation. The suicidal poet trope was as much decoration as young Lindsay herself.

There’s a coda. Years after the show is shut down, Keillor, Streep, and company meet in a diner to discuss a revival and tour of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Suddenly Lola breezes in, modeling a black cell phone and curve-hugging power suit softened by a touch of puffed sleeves, what clothing catalogs call the “Poet’s Blouse.” A new style oxymoron has emerged, one appropriate to a former suicide babe turned financial advisor. “Have you even heard of mutual funds?” she snaps at her mother. Guess who turns out to be the authentic artist? Mom, with her lack of investment strategies. And the author of “Soliloquy for Blue Guitar” now manages portfolios.

Why does this feel like some sort of joke at the expense of poets, from beginning to end?

Or am I reading too much into another meaningless non sequitur of a role for interchangeable starlets?

Either way, Former Teenage Poet says: Gag me.