I thought we’d take another quick break from the culture war and return to my occasional series of mildly obscure film reviews.
I recently rewatched one of my favourite mildly obscure films, The Whole Wide World, starring the always delightful Renée Zellweger, and Vincent D'Onofrio, who is incapable of being anything other than intense and interesting at all times.
The film is about genius pulp writer and inventor of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard, and his relationship with Novalyne Price, based on her memoir One Who Walked Alone.
It is both a moving story of thwarted love, and a fascinating depiction of a writer who was truly sui generis, in his work and his personality.
D'Onofrio’s Howard displays what would now be considered some fairly ‘based’ views, such as: women shouldn’t be educated or vote, the world is only getting more demonic, sex will eventually infest everything, the only virtue of the French is ‘the ability to gild decay’, and evolution is a scam (‘I can imagine a lot of things’, he says, ‘but I can’t imagine man was once a monkey’).
In other ways, too, Howard is a strangely modern figure. He was into bodybuilding, took part in occasional boxing matches, and if alive now would almost certainly have a YouTube channel.
In fact he would probably get called an ‘incel’. Although, at least in the movie, he is a lot closer to a MGTOW. Which, in case you don’t live on the internet, stands for ‘Men Going Their Own Way’—basically a movement of men who have given up on women entirely. Howard keeps women at a distance and brags ‘I walk alone!’, hence the title of Price’s memoir.
Those of us who have not managed to make the conventional life path work may sympathise with Howard’s torment. He loves Novalyne, in his way, and she loves him. But, except for one kiss scene (which captures the borderline supernatural magic of romantic love better than almost any other movie I can recall) it is a courtship that never really gets off the ground.
This is largely due to Howard’s odd relationship with his mother, his dedication to the writing life, and his general eccentricity. Novalyne wants to write but is too bourgeois, Howard wants love but is too bohemian, at times bordering on flat out nuts.
When he eventually stops pissing around and admits ‘I want a woman to love, a woman to believe in me, is that so much to ask?’ Novalyne replies that it’s not, but implores him: ‘Tell me that you’ll change your attitude. Tell me that you’ll get out once in a while, and that you’ll try to let go of your mother’.
Of course, he can’t do it.
Howard committed suicide aged 30, with an extraordinary body of published work to his name. Though, as so often with great writers, his work became far more successful only after his death.
When it comes to his mental health, there is speculation about whether he had an Oedipal complex or a ‘major depressive disorder’ (the film hints at both), or if he just couldn’t cope with the stress of his mother’s death, against the backdrop of an already hardscrabble life.
Howard had the misfortune of living though 1930s America, and thus had to cope not just with depression but the depression. At different times, he and Price both got ill from simple overwork. The pulp magazines he relied on for money would suddenly close down, sometimes owing him large sums. He lost his life savings when the bank folded. He transferred to a new bank, then that folded as well.
The hardship was exacerbated by living in a small town that alternated between being broke, and becoming overrun by opportunists hoping to make money off various oil booms.
The latter gave Howard a cynical view that doesn’t sound too far off a blackpilled Rumble streamer talking about wokeness and mass immigration. His Wikipedia page, summarising a passage from Mark Finn’s biography, Blood & Thunder, states:
Direct experience of the oil booms in early twentieth-century Texas influenced Howard's view of civilization. The benefits of progress came with lawlessness and corruption. One of the most common themes in Howard's writing is based on his view of history, a repeating pattern of civilizations reaching their peak, becoming decadent, decaying and then being conquered by another people.
His understanding of such broad themes allowed him to create an entire fictional world, known as The Hyborian Age, that appears to have been almost Tolkienesque in scope.
This is all alluded to in the movie, though the full genius of the man cannot be captured in a film that is predominantly a love story.
As a fellow genius loner who thinks women shouldn’t vote, of course I relate to the film to a painful degree. (Though to be fair to Howard he was actually considered a feminist in his time, and his views in the movie appear to be merely a case of teasing a girl on a date. Whereas I mean it).
I, too, know what it’s like to be called ‘extraordinary’ by a woman who later goes off and has a family with a normie. I know what it is to both envy and look down upon the world of people with stable jobs and stable minds.
Though, tragically, I will probably never create a mythological character later played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I highly recommend the film, available on Amazon Prime, with a few short adverts included that make it feel like you’re watching on TV, which actually suits the lush 1990s soft focus vibe.
Unfortunately we are now closer to the 2030s. Though, learning about the life of Robert E. Howard, I’d probably still take it over the 1930s.
Life is hard. Love is rare. But, as The Whole Wide World shows us, everyone needs it. Even those who ‘walk alone’.