The movie Jack Nicholson called “very Kafkaesque”
If there were ever a single person to represent the brilliance of American cinema, then one could do much worse than putting Jack Nicholson up on the plinth. After all, Nicholson embodies the word “icon” in just about every conceivable way, from his legendary movie performances to his charismatic public persona.
While Nicholson has indeed captured the attention of many a journalist and photographer during his more philandering years, what will remain of the man is the films themselves and just reeling off the likes of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, As Good as It Gets, Terms of Endearment, Chinatown, A Few Good Men, Batman and The Departed will go to show just how much the New Jersey-born actor has contributed to the cinematic medium.
Of course, one result of Nicholson providing so many brilliant movie performances over such a long career is that some of his lesser-known roles can be swept under the rug somewhat. We know well Nicholson’s efforts around the 1970s, like Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, but one might not have heard of his turn in Bob Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens.
Rafelson is, of course, the director of Five Easy Pieces, and after the success of the film and the acclaim that came Nicholson’s way, the director snapped up the director to star in his next movie, a drama film also starring Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn and Scatman Crothers, the latter of whom would feature with Nicholson in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining.
Set in a wintry Atlantic City in New Jersey, The King of Marvin Gardens focuses on a charismatic daydreamer who often gets involved in dodgy business dealings and convinces his melancholic radio talk show host brother to come to Atlantic City and help him buy an island off the coast of Hawaii to turn into a luxury resort.
The starkly different worldviews of depressive David (Nicholson) and enthusiastic David (Dern) play off against one another while helping to explore the nature of family, hope and disillusionment. For Nicholson, there is also a “very Kafkaesque” element to the film, relating, of course, to the Prague-born novelist and writer Frank Kafka.
“In the film, I consider the character I played a one-roomer, which is what Kafka was, a man who lives in one room – that’s a very specific image and one that relates to more people than we would care to think about,” Nicholson once told the BFI. “When I act, I try honestly to represent the peer group, and that’s what the peer group is there.”
Nicholson had been speaking in the context of the restricted release of The King of Marvin Garden, and he explained how even though many people admire the work of Kafka and know him well as a cultural and literary figure, the fact that the 1972 was “Kafkaesque” in tone, would not necessarily help to bring in a bigger audience.
“Everyone knows Kafka; everyone pays lip service to him as a great writer. But he’s not exactly a publishing item to make anybody rich,” Nicholson noted. “Now I honestly feel, to put it naively, that if I were Kafka’s agent, or if I published Kafka, I would have found some way to achieve some sort of proper remuneration for what he was and what his writings are.”
But beyond the kind of business facets behind a movie like The King of Marvin Gardens, Nicholson found within his depressive, loner character several shades of the work of Kafka, who had detailed the nature of alienation and existential anxiety in texts like The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle.
