why does rimbaud change?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Total Eclipse
blue-lagoon — 17 years ago(February 01, 2009 08:17 AM)
I didn't get one thing. After Verlaine is sent to prison, why does Rimbaud dump him, considering that they were so in love upto that point? Later even though Verlaine tries to rekindle the old flame, Rimbaud again shrugs him off. That seemed awkward.
So much to see, so little time! -
gorye — 17 years ago(February 01, 2009 03:21 PM)
They were real, Verlaine and Rimbaud I mean. Not fictional caracters from the book.
And because of that only Rimbaud himself could tell you for sure whether he loved Verlaine or not.
I think he didn't. And very likely he loved no one and nothing at all in the whole course of his strange and so short life. Even poetry. He simply was given a rare gift - but was able just to throw it aside when desided that he had enough of it. -
AlmostReal — 14 years ago(July 04, 2011 12:22 PM)
Some have suggested Rimbaud was a sociopath. I don't know his work well enough to make a guess. What do you all think? He was also supposedly gang raped shortly before his trip to Paris so I guess he may just have been cynical and .or traumatized.
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tkrolak — 16 years ago(April 07, 2009 01:51 PM)
The root of the problem was in the younger poet's childhood. His father had deserted the family when Arthur was a boy. Verlaine was ten years his senior and Rimbaud looked upon him as a father figure. But Verlaine couldn't choose between Rimbaud and his wife. The feeling of betrayal that Rimbaud got from his father he switched to Verlaine.
The key to this attitude was revealed in Rimbaud's line early in the film. He tells Verlaine all that is uncertain is love-it has to be re-invented. -
JuggsyMalone — 16 years ago(April 16, 2009 10:13 AM)
Near the beginning of the film, Rimbaud tells Verlaine that love doesn't exist, and that attachment based on personal gain exists, but not love. I personally think this is Rimbaud's way of saying that he won't ever love Verlaine - simply because he doesn't believe in it.
Further on in the film, Rimbaud tells verlaine that they should make a bargain, that they should travel around together and then, once they had taken all they could from each other, they would part and that would be the end of it.
Rimbaud was honest with Verlaine, to the point of brutality. Verlaine was weak and his infatuation with Rimbaud blinded him to what was really happening. Rimbaud was clearly not blameless, he used Verlaine to his own advantage and used that infatuation to get his own way. Rimbaud was a genius, no question, but he was also a petulant child and liked to have things all his own way. When Verlaine couldn't choose between Rimbaud and his wife, Rimbaud wasn't heartbroken and upset because he loved Verlaine, he was upset because Verlaine wasn't choosing HIM.
In one scene of the film, Rimbaud and Verlaine discuss the merits of the body versus the soul. Verlaine says he chooses the body. There is plenty of time for the soul, he says, because the soul is immortal. Flesh rots. Rimbaud makes his disdain for this statement very clear, and it is obvious that he believes the soul is the more important. He wants Verlaine to be in tune with his soul and not simply lust after his body. But Verlaine is never in tune with his soul, he does simply lust after his body. So when they meet again, all that time later and after all that has passed, Rimbaud gives him the choice again: soul or body. Once again, Verlaine chooses his body. So after everything that has happened, Verlaine still hasn't learned to love Rimbaud the way he wants him to, and so they part. It's not awkward. Perhaps a little uncomfortable because they both know that nothing has changed and so they would just be recreating the disfunctionality of their relationship if they became involved again. And so they go their separate ways.
"Ferris Bueller, you're my hero." -
tkrolak — 16 years ago(April 17, 2009 02:42 PM)
I agree with much of what you write. Verlaine never completely understood Rimbaud. That the latter didn't leave the vacillating older man long before he did, is puzzling.
"And so they go their separate ways."
Verlaine still wants a relationship with Rimbaud when they meet for the last time. But he says everything wrong to Rimbaud, such as asking him why he doesn't want his poetry published, and giving the wrong answer to the soul v. body question. Rimbaud drops a big hint, when he is walking away from Verlaine during their conversation. Instead of their agreeing not to see each other again, Rimbaud pushes Verlaine off the rock. In real life, he knocked him out with a punch. -
piry12 — 13 years ago(April 04, 2012 09:21 AM)
I never read Rimbaud did any horrible things to women later in his life. I also think that when we are young our love is more ephemeral and the age difference between Verlaine and Rimbaud might explain the difference between Verlaine more physical attraction and Rimbaud romanticism and volatile feelings.
They also portray Verlaine as not attractive . Have you seen a portrait of him? He was not attractive at all. Rimbaud had a pretty face. Verlaine looks grotesque. Maybe that is why (as someone said here) Rimbaud liked him. Because reminded of a father figure.
A romance like this was expected to be short. And to the initial question of this post about Rimbaud changing, Verlaine wasn't too stable either with his ambivalence between his wife and Rimbaud and his own sexuality.
By the wayI love Rimbaud's poetry. I haven't read any poetry that is close to the images and lyricism that he can convey with his words. There is so much beauty in it and yet so much strength. -
Bluedusk — 12 years ago(July 04, 2013 04:24 PM)
Rimbaud, like Lautramont and to a certain extent Mozart, was a precocious genius who had burned everything at the end of his adolescence.
At 17 he had decided to join the revolution (the real one: the Commune of Paris) and to revolutionize everything in and out of himself: language, morality, etc. in hope he would build a genuine self and become a new and better man in his adult life.
That failed. The result of his experience, written down in A Season In Hell, was an empty man, in heart and in mind - and possibly also in body. As one of the first rimbaldian poets, Mallarm, will write in one of his own poems:
"Flesh is sad alas, and I've read all the books."
The adult Rimbaud was just a guns and slaves trafficker in Eastern Africa who craved for money to the point that it killed him: the belt he wore contained all his gold and money, and was attached so tight to his body that it caused bones cancer at the age of 36, when he came back to France just to die at the hospital, with the chaplain and his sister at his bedside.
Rimbaud wanted to fulfil Hoelderlin's dream, but it turned out to be a nightmare.
"Would I be a comet ?
Yes. For they have the quickness of the birds, they bloom of fire
and they are in purity like children."
(Friedrich Hoelderlin) -
j-pro — 11 years ago(June 19, 2014 10:53 AM)
When they first met Rimbaud must have been interested in the life of Parisian intellectuals, poets, bohemians, etc. Verlain proceeded to introduce R to that world. Perhaps Rimbaud found Verlain's world to be vapid and phony, like a French version of Holden Cauldfield. His problems with Verlain's indecisiveness regarding his wife might have been the trigger that led Rimbaus to give up writing poetry at 17 and make his escape away from the beauty of Paris to a place very much the opposite, a squalid existence in Abyssinia.
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ranc1 — 10 months ago(May 31, 2025 07:19 PM)
Idealization - Discard phases are basic characteristics of Cluster B personality disorder.
It is disgusting to live through but quite fascinating as scientific observation of human behavior.
It all stems from alcoholic dysfunctional parenthood / toxic childhood ambient.