Documentary Review: 'You Never Had It: An Evening with Charles Bukowski"

“This is where i f*** my soul” Charles Bukowski showing off his legendary typewriter

At what point did Charles Bukowski transpose from beloved genius to accouterments? I mean this in all due respect to the man, he had a particular, spiky genius that is undeniable. That said, at a certain point, veneration of Bukowski became veneration of the self. Take for example, that guy we all knew in college, you know the one. Instead of Scarface posters on his wall he had a Bukowski poster and would keep well worn copies of “Love is a Dog From Hell” or “Ham on Rye” conspicuously at hand when company came.

At some point in the time since Bukowski passed in 1994, his genius became a way to signal virtue among those who had none. People who wanted to be seen as edgy and intelligent would learn one thing about Bukowski, perhaps a passing line from his poems, and pass it off as if the man had inspired them their entire life. Never mind that they were building toward a masters degree that would land them in the kind of well heeled gig Bukowski would have spat upon, they would claim his work as the apotheosis of their personal education.

These bitter paragraphs explain why I greatly enjoyed the new short, found footage, documentary, You Never Had It An Evening with Charles Bukowski. In it, ever the trickster God, Bukowski gets drunk and disavows his great muse, sex, as merely a marketing ploy. Bukowski wrote about sex just to sell stories to dirty magazines. He insists this is true over the protests of his good friend, Italian journalist Silvia Bizio, whose found footage is the subject of this short documentary.

Silvia Bizio interviewed Charles Bukowski quite famously on multiple occasions. The footage we are watching is the uncut footage of a famous TV interview she conducted with Bukowski in Los Angeles in 1981. If you search for footage of Bukowski on YouTube you can see portions of this interview but this is the first time the uncut footage has seen the light of day since Bizio first diced it up for an Italian TV network 29 years ago.

I suppose the rarity does make the footage special but is it particularly insightful? It is as much as lengthy, windy, drunken chat with an old friend can be. As I said, I enjoyed the part where Bukowski stuck it to those who believed he wrote about sex with intent and gusto. Nope, he wrote about it for the sole reason of getting published. Yes, Bukowski sold out to get paid and more than once. Does this make him a hypocrite? A little, but, more to the point, it’s a welcome thumb in the eye to those who try to lay claim to Bukowski’s artistic purity.

It says to those pretentious SOB’s who claim that Bukowski wrote raw and real because he felt it from his soul that real life is not romanticized. Sometimes, you just need a few bucks to eat and pervs like hearing hard bitten prose about nasty, dirty, sex and are willing to pay well to read it. Everyone, including Bukowski, had to compromise and live in the real world. Thus when Bukowski says of his typewriter “This is where I F*** My Soul” he’s not merely being vulgarly poetic, he’s talking about writing for sex mags for money just so he could tell the stories he wanted to tell.

This does not change the fact that Charles Bukowski was a genius, the documentary more than once allows him some poignant insights, many of which were already mined for Vizio’s originally published and edited story in 1981. But a few choice words come out of this footage such as a fond remembrance of reading John Fante’s Ask the Dust in a small, dusty apartment not far from the very place Fante was writing about. Wistful Bukowski is somewhat of a rarity in his popular persona.

Bukowski quite famously had the words “Don’t Try” etched on to his gravestone. The fatuous among us would have you believe that this is Bukowski’s ethos, a poke at the workaday types in their 9 to 5s, wasting their lives. That is, after all, how Bukowski felt about the working class, he pitied them their soul-sucking, paper-pushing, wage slavery. But no, “Don’t Try” wasn’t a call for people to quit the world because working life is a waste of time.

In You Ne,ver Had It Bukowski expands on the idea of “Don’t Try” well before it had been etched in marble in his memory. The two word phrase was intended as a note to writers of the world, Don’t Try, if you have to make yourself do it, if you have forced yourself to write, maybe you don’t actually love doing it. If you are trying to write instead of being compelled by the joy and freedom of the written word, then simply, don’t try, leave writing to those of us who don’t need to try.

You Never Had It: An Evening with Charles Bukowski will be shown in virtual theaters beginning Friday, August 7th in support of the New Plaza Cinema in New York City and in Los Angeles in support of the legendary Laemmle Theaters. I'm saying in support of because these are virtual premieres, anyone in the country can attend via the wonders of the internet and support grand cinema traditions.