Author: Darren

Attack! (1956)

Dir. by Robert Aldrich

The following was written for a graduate seminar on Cold War military history. It examines the confluence of social, political, and economic events that allowed the financing and production of such an ambivalent anti-war film in Eisenhower America. For a thorough formal analysis of the film itself, see: The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich by Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene L. Miller (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986)

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“Grinding at You Head-On Like a Ten-Ton Tank”: Attack! and the Changing Face of the Military in Independent Films of the Late-1950s

On the cover of the December 9, 1957 issue of Time magazine, Vice President Richard Nixon stares directly into the camera eye. He’s framed in a medium close-up, his hair neatly groomed, his mouth turned in a slight smile. Published only days after President Eisenhower’s stroke — the third significant health crisis of his term, following a heart attack in 1955 and a bout with ileitis the following year — the cover photo is apparently intended to arouse public confidence in the man who would be king. However, as would be the case throughout Nixon’s career, the Time portrait betrays his unease in the spotlight. His shoulders are rounded, causing his neck to disappear into the rumpled collar of his suit jacket, and despite his recent weight loss (achieved “by grace of careful calorie counting,” the feature article alliteratively informs us), his often-caricatured jowls and small eyes are lost in dark shadows.

The photo seems oddly representative of American culture in the late-1950s, a nebulous era sandwiched between the more clearly-compartmentalized McCarthyian hysteria of Eisenhower’s first term and the social unrest of the Kennedy/Johnson years. After his decisive victory over Adlai Stevenson in 1956, a victory that collected votes from such disparate, traditionally liberal-leaning figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jack Kerouac, Eisenhower stood metaphorically like a flagpole around which the vast majority of Americans proudly congregated. But by the midpoint of his second term, Ike’s power position, and the consensus it represented, had begun to show its first signs of weakness. Those rifts in the “consensus of the liberal ideology,” as Godfrey Hodgson has usefully described it, would, of course, be more violently exposed in the following decade. As Stephen J. Whitfield writes in The Culture of the Cold War, “After 1956, when the Federal Bureau of Prisons closed the detention camps that had been set up six years earlier, [J. Edgar] Hoover complained about the ‘growing public complacency toward the threat of subversion.’” In a series of landmark cases in 1956 and 1957, the Supreme Court likewise reflected changing public attitudes by gradually stripping the Smith Act of its power and by “giving civil liberties greater weight on the scales of justice.” By the end of the Eisenhower administration, Premiere Khrushchev had walked on American soil and the Civil Rights movement had taken shape in the South. That cover photo of Nixon, intended to portray confidence and strength, instead reveals (at least in hindsight) the slow birth of public ambivalence toward a changing world, and more particularly, toward America’s role as the moral, social, and political leader within that world.

Given the tumultuous social environment surrounding that week in December 1957, it is little surprise then that within the pages of that same issue of Time — surrounded by advertisements for Allied Chemical, Convair, Carter’s Knit Boxers, and General Electric that all proudly assert their affiliation with “America’s hidden line of defense” — two new American war films inspire notably different responses from a staff reviewer. The first, Gordon Douglas’s Bombers B-52, is called a “$1,400,000 want ad for Air Force technicians-the ground crews needed to keep ’em flying in the Strategic Air Command.” Starring Karl Malden, Natalie Wood, and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., Bombers B-52 is a typical service film of the era: a major studio release (in this case, Warner Brothers) presented in CinemaScope and featuring equal helpings of romance and action. The reviewer acknowledges the public fascination with such films, noting, “SAC being what it is, a powerful discouragement to missile warfare, audiences might be prepared by recent headlines to take the picture seriously,” but he or she ultimately concludes that the film “is all pretty silly in an amiable way.” Other reviewers agreed. InfluentialNew York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it “nice,” but was more impressed by Malden’s performance than by the film’s cliché-ridden promotion of America’s Department of Defense.

The other war film reviewed in that issue of Time, however, elicited a much more heated response. The reviewer claims, “[Stanley Kubrick’s] Paths of Glory made 20 years ago, might have found a sympathetic audience in a passionately pacifist period, might even have been greeted as a minor masterpiece. Made today, it leaves the spectator often confused and dumb, like a moving speech in a dead language.” Based on Humphrey Cobb’s best-selling 1935 novel of the same name, Paths of Glory tells of a failed attempt by a French squadron to take an important German position during World War I. Kirk Douglas stars as a noble sergeant forced to watch his men die due to the incompetence of power-hungry senior military officials. Paths of Glory is like the anti-Bombers B-52; it is explicitly anti-war, anti-military, and anti-‘service film.’ Shot on location in black and white, and eschewing easy sentimentality for detached realism, Paths of Gloryexemplifies a new breed of war film, a breed willing to move beyond the simplistic assessment: “War is hell!” Instead, Kubrick and other vanguard filmmakers such as Robert Aldrich — whose Attack! played in American movie houses more than a year before Paths of Glory — fought for independence from studio and government interference in order to question more firmly-rooted beliefs, particularly the unquestioned support of the growing ‘Military Industrial Complex’ and its leaders.

A study of Hollywood’s changing and often tumultuous relationship with Washington, relying on careful analysis of Attack! as a case study, reveals that this period of transition was difficult for both the filmmakers and their audience. Comfortable codes of cinematic narrative and characterization were thrown off in lieu of a new, highly confrontational and morally ambiguous aesthetic. It would take more than a decade, and the flowering of America’s “Hollywood Renaissance,” before audiences would grow accustomed
to those new codes. The Time reviewer seems to have been aware that he or she was witnessing the first shots of a large-scale assault, concluding, “[Paths of Glory]’s only real mistake: it attacks an unfashionable devil.”

The Washington/Hollywood Connection

The history of cooperation between Hollywood studios and the War Department/ Department of Defense is almost as old as the history of American cinema itself. In 1911, only fifteen years after Thomas Edison’s first moving pictures were exhibited in New York City, D.W. Griffith employed engineers from West Point as technical advisors on his Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation. The film amazed audiences with its large-scale, realistic battle sequences, and set a standard for spectacle against which all contemporary war and historical films were judged. As Lawrence Suid notes in Guts and Glory: Great American War Movies, “Virtually all American films about war and the military followed the pattern established from the earliest days of the industry, showing only the glamorous side of combat — the excitement, the adventure, the camaraderie. Battle was not always shown as pleasant, but the films made it clear that pain was necessary for ultimate victory.”

While this war film formula continued to solidify, a notable change in the cultural climate had occurred by 1924, when King Vidor, a young Hollywood director, set out to make the first war movie told from the soldier’s perspective. Again, seeking historical accuracy and cinematic spectacle, Hollywood turned to Washington, this time requesting from the Army “two hundred trucks, three to four thousand men, a hundred planes, and other equipment.” Made during the isolationist years between the wars, The Big Parade — very much like Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front released five years later — was a huge success with audiences and critics alike, this despite its complex representation of man and war. The film’s protagonist, John Gilbert, is shipped to the western front where he loses a leg and watches his two best friends die. Ultimately,The Big Parade questions accepted notions of heroism and imagines war as a deeply flawed and very human endeavor. Vidor himself viewed war as “a mixed-up sentiment,” and did little to overtly support or denounce it. That the War Department would so enthusiastically support such a production dramatically distinguishes the pacifistic 1920s and 1930s from the two decades that would follow.

Like every other facet of American life, the course of Hollywood film history was dramatically altered by the events of December 7, 1941. The three months preceding Pearl Harbor had seen the opening of an investigation by the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce into the production of “propaganda” films by the major Hollywood studios. Senators Champ Clark (D-MO) and Gerald Nye (R-ND), along with other leading isolationists, accused the studios of attempting to hasten America’s involvement in World War II by producing “preparedness” films such as Dive Bomber (1941), Sergeant York (1941), and Confessions of a Nazi Spy(1939). A similar charge was leveled against Charlie Chaplin, whose The Great Dictator (1940) was later deemed “prematurely anti-fascist” by Senator D. W. Clark (D-ID). Although such noted figures as the Warner brothers did eventually testify in Washington, the investigation proved to be little more than political posturing and was abruptly abandoned when America entered the war.

Like much of the general population, Hollywood also immediately enlisted in the war effort, producing great numbers of service films for popular consumption. The studios, of course, were more than willing to take advantage of the explosive levels of public interest in modern combat (and the box office revenue it created), but the War Department also became keenly aware of how the cinema might be used for its own purposes. A symbiotic relationship quickly developed and by the end of 1942 several films based on actual events and made with the assistance of the armed services were released to a public brimming with patriotism and clamoring for swift and decisive victory.

Criticized only months earlier for its propagandist pictures, Hollywood churned them out with impressive regularity for the remainder of the war. The earliest examples looked to the South Pacific for inspiration. Wake Island, Air Force, and Bataan, all released in late-1942 or early-1943, showed the Marines, Air Force, and Army respectively in their heroic efforts against the ‘Japs’ following the setbacks at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, and the Philippines. As Suid points out, these early films helped establish what would quickly become the standard service film format. A “crusty old sergeant” serves as a father-figure to a heterogeneous pack of raw recruits. The brave young men fight nobly — and often die even more so — against insurmountable odds, all in hopes of returning to their faithful women “back home.” Of course, each film also features spectacular battle sequences, often made with the assistance of the service that the film was promoting. The collective message of the films, quite simply, is that America was in for a good, hard fight, but that through perseverance and bravery, American democracy would inevitably triumph over the depraved, Godless forces of fascism and Jap-treachery.

When that inevitable triumph did finally come, Hollywood, like the rest of the country, turned its attention briefly to the transition to peace-time life in films such as Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Till the End of Time(1946). For a few years, combat films no longer translated automatically into box office gold. While a few war pictures were released between 1946 and 1948, it wasn’t until the ignition of the Cold War that the American public began to reexamine World War II and its effects on the global landscape. Certain events between 1947 and 1951, however, made that reexamination compulsory. The trial of Alger Hiss and the arrests of Klaus Fuchs in England and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the United States made Communist infiltration an ever-present threat. Mao Tse Tung’s victory in China, the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, and the outbreak of the Korean War threatened America’s dominance of global politics. And Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist histrionics inspired a national case of hysterical xenophobia.

Again, Hollywood studios were called up for action, this time against an enemy that could not be so clearly defined and in a war that could not be so easily won. The late-1940s and 1950s saw a re-birth of the service film genre. Studio scenarists returned to the landmark victories of World War II and found fresh content in Korea. John Wayne, through his performance in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), came to personify both the modern Marine — “the anti-intellectual doer in contrast to the thinker” — and the patriotic ‘Star’ who stood out in Hollywood, “the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.”

Studio heads looked to epic scale and modern technology to pull audiences back into the theaters. Weekly movie attendance had reached its all-time peak in 1946, when an average of 90 million tickets were sold each week. Through the influence of several social, political, and technological factors, that number had been cut in half by 1954. Following the early example set by Griffith and Vidor, filmmakers used visual and, now, aural spectacle to attract ticket-buyers. Films were promoted for the very things against which television could not compete: new widescreen, color formats such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, and Cinerama; explosive, stereophonic soundtracks; gimmicky effects like 3-D; and epic scale possible only with equally epic budgets. The Department of Defense was more than willing to aid in the cause, offering complete cooperation to films like Strategic Air Command (1955), an unapologetically pro-military film starring World War II hero Jimmy Stewart and showcasing the latest technology in America’s most powerful deterrent to outward threat. The film’s premiere was even attended by top brass and several prominent Congressmen.

But by Eisenhower’s second term, film reviewers, and, to a lesser extent, film-goers were beginning to become jaded by the onslaught of formulaic service films, films that were growing increasingly exploitative of combat situations for the telling of trite love stories and increasingly bland in their representations of war. In his review of 20th Century Fox’s D-Day, the Sixth of June (1956), Bosley Crowther writes, “But if they think they’re kidding the public into believing that this is the way World War II was — wistful love in cozy London apartments and a quick little scramble up a cliff, in CinemaScope and color, not to forget stereophonic sound — then they’d better watch the box office figures on this one.” These sentiments are echoed nearly a year later in his review of Universal’s Battle Hymn: “It follows religiously the line of mingled piety and pugnacity laid down for standard, idealistic service films. What’s more, it has Rock Hudson playing the big hero role. Wrap them up and what have you got? The popular thing.” Although it would take more than a decade before Hollywood would fully emerge from the shadows of the Pentagon and the Capitol building, new voices in the film community soon found independent outlets for their less popular opinions, and, in doing so, helped to change the face of the military in the movies.

Independent Production and the Re-Birth of United Artists

In 1947 the House Committee on Un-American Activities paid an official visit to Hollywood at the bequest of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, a group that included such notable personalities as John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Walt Disney, and Adolphe Menjou. The visit sparked a highly flammable relationship that would leave long-lasting scars on the film community. Those most visibly wounded by the ‘Red Scare’ hysteria were those who saw their careers destroyed (at least temporarily) by the blacklisting — the Dalton Trumbos, Abraham Polonskys, and John Howard Lawsons of the industry. But perhaps more damaging on a larger scale was the total silencing of even Roosevelt-era liberalism, let alone progressive ideology, in the subject matter of studio films. The Battle Hymns of the late-1950s are vapid, two-dimensional melodramas compared to many of the war films of the 1930s, but the studios were left with few alternatives. Whitfield writes:

Because strongly ideological films were considered unlikely to attract the masses anyway, the studios apparently reasoned that anti-Communist pictures might mollify the American Legion and the right-wingers in Congress without losing too much money. . . . Movies of the era were not permitted to locate the motivations for turning toward Communism in economic or social conditions, since themes of class and race, injustice, and impoverishment contradicted the complacent ideology of the 1950s.

It would take a major restructuring of the Hollywood studio system, and the first rifts in the consensus of the liberal ideology, before filmmakers would be able, really for the first time, to fully address the complexities of Cold War American society.

The same combination of factors that led to the dramatic drop in weekly box office attendance between 1946 and 1954 also caused the studios to shift their main mode of film production. Janet Staiger refers to the shift as one from the “Producer-Unit System” to the “Package-Unit System.” The Producer-Unit System became established in the early-1930s and contributed to what is generally considered the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. Within that system, each studio clearly compartmentalized the division of labor, creating separate departments for cinematography, art, costuming, etc., and signing “talent” (actors, actresses, directors) to long-term contracts. The power rested firmly in the hands of the studio heads, often to the financial and creative detriment of the filmmakers and actors.

The shift to the Package-Unit System is significant within this discussion because it allowed, among other things, the diffusion of independent film production. Whereas under the Producer-Unit System, projects were born, approved, financed, scripted, and produced all within the walls of a single studio, the Package-Unit System allowed independent producers to develop a property, to raise independent financing, and to assemble on their own terms both the talent and the technicians. The assemblage is short-lived, intended to produce only the one film. The result of the shift was a major restructuring of the Hollywood hierarchy and the disappearance of the self-contained studio. The system as it exists today is, in fact, very little changed from that of forty years ago. As Tino Balio writes, “By 1970, the transition, with the notable exception of Universal Pictures, had become complete. The majors functioned essentially as bankers supplying financing and landlords renting studio space. Distribution now became the name of the game.”

Independent film production was hardly a new phenomenon when the film community shifted to the Package-Unit system in the mid-1950s. Some estimates, for example, claim that as many as one-third of all films produced between 1916 and 1918 were independent productions. Staiger describes the independent production firm as, “a small company with no corporate relationship to a distribution firm. An independent producer might have a contract with a distributor or participate in a distribution alliance, but it neither owned nor was owned by a distribution company.” The breakdown in the Producer-Unit System resulted in a greater distribution of wealth, allowing big name stars and filmmakers to collect enough capital, either by means of their own wealth or through investors, to establish personal production companies, thereby guaranteeing greater freedom in developing projects for themselves or for others. As early as 1943, talents such as James Cagney, Hal Wallis, and Joseph Hazen had inked independent deals and by 1947 every major studio except MGM had acknowledged the financial advantages of distributing independently produced films by adding them to their regular schedules.

Leading the move toward independent production and distribution was United Artists, a company founded in 1919 to distribute the films made by its four owners: Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. Balio explains UA’s original business structure: “UA was not expected to generate profits but to function as a service organization that operated at cost. UA could therefore charge a lower distribution fee than the competition and return to the producer a larger share of the film rentals. In other words, a UA producer could enjoy as production profits what otherwise would be distribution profits.” The operation ran smoothly throughout the 1920s, but the company then experienced two decades of frustration and financial difficulties, mostly due to the majors’ oligopolistic business practices. With ownership of not only important distribution avenues, but also the movie theaters themselves, the majors were able to block out the smaller distributors, eliminating competition.

However, in the early-1950s, thanks in part to both the Supreme Court’s ruling against Paramount and the production shift described above, UA saw its star once again on the rise. After taking over the company’s struggling business operations in 1951, Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin planned an aggressive strategy. Balio writes, “in return for distribution rights, UA would offer talent complete production financing, creative control over their work, and a share of the profits. . . . The company and a producer had to agree on the basic ingredients — story, cast, director, and budget — but in the making of the picture, UA would give the producer complete autonomy including the final cut.” Other terms included requiring talent to defer much of their salary until the film broke even, allowing producers to work wherever they desired, surrendering ownership of the film to the producers, and abandoning all long-term contracts. The strategy paid off quickly, attracting powerful players who were seeking autonomy and guaranteeing a steady supply of product for UA. By 1955, important Hollywood names Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Bob Hope, Yul Brynner, Robert Mitchum, and Burt Lancaster, along with filmmakers Stanley Kramer, Sam Fuller, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, and Robert Aldrich had all, at least temporarily, joined the UA family.

Robert Aldrich’s Attack!

In August 1979, Robert Aldrich delivered a speech to the Director’s Guild of America in honor of Lewis Milestone, the famed director of All Quiet on the Western Front. Aldrich had served under Milestone during his apprentice years, working on The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), Arch of Triumph (1948), and The Red Pony (1949). In his speech, Aldrich thanked his mentor for teaching him the most valuable lesson of filmmaking: “The game is power.”

The power is for the director to do what he wants to do. To achieve that he needs his own cutter, he needs his cameraman, he needs his own assistant and a strong voice in his choice of writer; a very, very strong voice on who’s the actor. He needs the power not to be interfered with and the power to make the movie as he sees it. Milestone had all the tools, but above all, he had the capacity to know when trouble was coming and how to deal with it. And it worked, really worked.

That struggle for power became the hallmark of Aldrich’s career. The grandson of prominent Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich (R) and first cousin of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller (R), Aldrich abandoned a likely career in banking or publishing, opting instead to work in Hollywood, where the consistently liberal message of his films would conflict sharply with that of his conservative family. In 1941, Aldrich left the University of Virginia without a degree and took a job at RKO studios. Working for $25 a week as a production clerk — “the lowest job in existence on a sound stage” — Aldrich took advantage of every opportunity afforded him, learning the film business from the ground up. Over the next twelve years he rose quickly through the ranks, first working exclusively for RKO, then free-lance at other studios. A summary of those apprentice years reads like a “Who’s Who of Film Legends.” Along with Milestone, Aldrich served under, among others, Jean Renoir (The Southerner, 1945), William Wellman (The Story of G. I. Joe, 1945), Max Ophuls (Caught, 1949), and Charlie Chaplin (Limelight, 1952). Aldrich looked back on those years as a time of education by “assimilation, . . . you try to make yourself a composite of what you like and stay away from the things you didn’t like.”

From 1946 to 1948, Aldrich worked under contract at Enterprise Productions, an interesting but ultimately failed experiment in independent filmmaking. The experience significantly shaped both Aldrich’s view of the film industry and his aesthetic. Enterprise became a gathering place for big name stars, including Ingrid Bergman, John Garfield, Joel McCrea, and Barbara Stanwyck, along with filmmakers such as Milestone and Ophuls, who were seeking a larger share of profits and greater artistic freedom. Arnold and Miller write, “many of the creative people who gathered at the studio shared a liberal philosophy: for them a film could and should do more than entertain. A belief in the essential decency of the ‘common man’ and a basic distrust of wealth and power were at the heart of many of their pictures.” Significantly, it was while at Enterprise that Aldrich befriended Robert Rossen and Abraham Polonsky, two of his many Enterprise associates who would later be called before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee. Aldrich first worked with both men on Body and Soul (1947), the only hit of the nine films produced by Enterprise. It tells the story of a prize fighter who must choose either the physical safety and economic gain of corruption or the possibility of moral regeneration and the danger that accompanies it. Aldrich later explained to James Powers exactly what he had learned from the film:

Polonsky said in 1945 that to tell that kind of story you need to establish a heroic figure who falls from grace and spends the rest of the picture trying to regain his self-esteem. It doesn’t make any difference whether he’s successful or not. From the fact that he struggles to regain his opinion of himself, he will prove to be a heroic figure.

John Garfield’s Charlie Davis would become the prototype of the Aldrich hero, a character whose struggle for redemption is central to the central conflict of most Aldrich films.

But his experience at Enterprise did more than shape Aldrich’s aesthetic. It also taught him the importance of power, business sense, and effective leadership. In an interview conducted during the late-1960s, Aldrich remembered Enterprise as “a brand new departure, the first time I can remember that independent film-makers had all the money they needed.” But he realized regretfully how such an opportunity was wasted by poor management. “The studio, in fact, had everything in the world in its favor except one thing,” he said. “It didn’t have anybody in charge who knew how to make pictures. . . . When, as they inevitably must, people began to realize that the end product wasn’t worth all this extra care and concern, the bubble burst and the dreams faded. But I think it will be tried again some day.” Aldrich, in fact, spent much of his career trying to recapture the spirit and freedom of Enterprise Productions, eventually investing his sizable profits from The Dirty Dozen(1967) in his own independent studio. However, Aldrich Studios, like its predecessor of two decades earlier, proved another failure, closing after only two years and four films. But during those twenty years between the closing of Enterprise and the launch of Aldrich Studios, Robert Aldrich exercised impressive freedom as an independent producer and director, completing seventeen films, including the acknowledged classics Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1963), and The Dirty Dozen.

After cutting his teeth as a director on several New York television dramas and two low-budget features, The Big Leaguer (1953) with Edward G. Robinson and World For Ransom (1954), Aldrich was hired by Ben Hecht and Burt Lancaster, who were independently developing Apache (1954) as a star vehicle for Lancaster. Aside from the obvious opportunities such a high-profile project afforded, Aldrich was also drawn to the story, which, like Body and Soul, centers on an alienated man who suffers for his refusal to compromise to larger social forces. The original script that Aldrich agreed to shoot ended with Massai, the Apache warrior played by Lancaster, returning home where he is shot needlessly in the back by Federal troops. About Massai, Aldrich later said, “I felt he could not possibly be re-accepted or survive, for progress had passed him by. I respected his audacity, courage, and dedication, but the world no longer had a place for his kind.” That ending, however, did not sit well with Hecht-Lancaster Productions, who agreed that killing the star would significantly affect the film’s box office returns. Aldrich was asked to shoot a compromised ending. Nearly twenty years later, he reflected on the experience with palatable bitterness:

If Burt had stood firm, I think the picture would have been more — “significant” is a pompous word — but I think it would have been more important. It was seriously compromised. You make a picture about one thing, the inevitability of Massai’s death. His courage is measured against the inevitable. The whole preceding two hours becomes redundant if at the end he can just walk away.

The compromise, however, would literally pay off. Shot in thirty days on a tight budget, Apache eventually grossed over $6 million. The film’s success brought Aldrich international acclaim, but also left him desperate for greater creative control.

After reteaming with Hecht-Lancaster once more on Vera Cruz (1954), Aldrich began his career as an independent. Although Victor Saville is credited as executive producer of Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Aldrich had agreed to direct the Mickey Spillane mystery only if he were allowed “to make the kind of movie [he] wanted and provided [he] could produce it.” Both Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife (1955) attack McCarthyism, personifying the HUAC witch hunt as Mike Hammer, a “cynical and fascistic private eye,” in the former film and as Stanley Hoff, an “incompetent, tyrannical” studio head, in the latter. Although he had been spared McCarthy’s wrath himself, several of Aldrich’s friends and colleagues were brought under investigation. For Aldrich, McCarthy’s fundamental assumption that the ends justified the means was simply terrifying. It was exactly the type of social force under which the Aldrich hero, as typified by Jack Palance’s Charlie Castle in The Big Knife, would be destroyed for refusing to compromise.

With the profits from Kiss Me Deadly, Aldrich financed the birth of The Associates and Aldrich, thereby securing his official entrance into the turbulent world of independent film production. A year later, after producing and directing Autumn Leaves (1956) for Columbia Pictures, Aldrich turned his attention to making an “angry” war film. Frustrated by the steady stream of overly simplistic Hollywood service films, he attempted first to purchase the rights to both Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Unable to acquire either, he instead bought Norman Brooks’s unsuccessful stage play, Fragile Fox, and took the project to United Artists. UA was a natural fit for Aldrich. The company had distributed both Hecht-Lancaster pictures, as well as Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Knife. UA was also known for its active commitment to its talent, having already waged publicity campaigns for such controversial films as Howard Hawks’s The Outlaw (distributed by Howard Hughes in 1943, redistributed by UA in 1946), Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947) andLimelight (1952), and Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue (1953). That commitment would be crucial for Aldrich’s project to succeed. Fragile Fox, renamed Attack! (1956), is a study of incompetence and corruption in American military leadership, obviously a sensitive issue during the years of the consensus of the liberal ideology. The play ends with the murder of a commanding officer by his men, an ending that Aldrich was determined to keep. Now an independent, and secure in the power he had lacked on Apache, Aldrich was able to do so.

Attack! was budgeted at $750,000, a far cry from the blockbuster budgets of contemporary war spectacles likeStrategic Air Command and Away All Boats. Securing even that much financing for such an overtly anti-military, anti-authoritarian film, however, would have been unthinkable even two or three years earlier. The Associates and Aldrich borrowed a large portion of the money from banks, and were advanced the rest by United Artists. This had become standard UA practice under Benjamin and Krim, who bought out original owners Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford in the mid-1950s and reorganized the company with the financial backing of the Walter E. Heller Co., a Chicago financing firm. In Movies and Money: Financing the American Film Industry, Janet Wasko writes, “By 1958, [UA] was arranging financing for approximately 85% of its releases, and that year provided $6 million for production, with $25.7 million guaranteed by the company but procured from others.” Their financing strategy guaranteed United Artists a steady flow of product (and the distribution revenue it provided), which by 1956 had become a hot commodity. The major studios had all been forced to scale back production because of the dramatic decrease in box office receipts. UA, on the other hand, emerged from those transition years as a leader, signaling an unprecedented paradigm shift in Hollywood film production.

Aldrich deferred the majority of his salary in lieu of a larger percentage of the film’s gross, placing the financial burden squarely on his own shoulders. It was a risky bet. Not only was he working with a small budget and an unknown and potentially inflammatory commodity in Fragile Fox, but, not surprisingly, he was also refused the cooperation of the Defense Department. While the armed services may have been willing to cooperate with Milestone and Vidor in the 1930s, Aldrich was afforded no such luxuries. As he later told Arthur Knight, “The Army saw the script and promptly laid down a policy of no co-operation, which not only meant that I couldn’t borrow troops and tanks for my picture — I couldn’t even get a look at Signal Corps combat footage.” Instead,Attack! was shot in thirty-two days on the back lot of RKO Studios with a small cast and a few pieces of military equipment (including only two tanks) that Aldrich had bought or rented and that he used throughout the film with great economy.

Critical and Public Reception

On August 30, 1956, Representative Melvin Price (D-IL), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, spoke out publicly against the Defense Department for its refusal to cooperate in the making of Attack!. He called the decision a “shameful attempt to impose censorship on a film because it dares to present an officer whose character is marred by the human failings of weakness and cowardice.” The Congressman had recently attended a preview of the picture and considered it an “exceptionally fine film.” He praised Aldrich for having completed the project without assistance, and disputed the assumption that Attack! might adversely affect a viewer’s opinion of the military, pointing out the noble actions of Costa and Woodruff, whom he described as “more representative of the Army than the cowardly captain, who is clearly an exception.” Referring to the Pentagon and its self-serving policies, Price concluded his speech, saying, “I hope the American people will not let those responsible for the injustice get away with their attempt to depict all phases of military life through brass-colored glasses.”

United Artists and Aldrich quickly capitalized on the controversy. They had originally intended to open Attack! in only a few key cities during late September and early October. However, after learning that 20th Century-Fox would be releasing Richard Fleischer’s Between Heaven and Hell (1956), a similarly-themed war film, to saturation bookings on October 11th, UA counter-attacked, switching to a more aggressive release strategy. According to Balio, UA typically based a film’s promotion budget on its projected income. Although specific figures are difficult to come by, the promotion budget for Attack! was probably between $200,000 to $300,000. The first print advertisement appeared in The New York Times on September 12th, a full week before the film would open. The teaser features head shots of the cast, their faces arranged geometrically in the shape of a mountain, along with only the name of the film and an announcement of when and where it would be opening. Capitalizing on Price’s much-publicized speech, the only other words in the ad read, “A Congressional Statement Of Thursday, August 30th Told The Inside Story!” A similar ad appeared two days later, this time featuring only an extreme close-up of Palance pulling out the pin of a hand grenade with his teeth and the question, “Is This The Most Controversial Picture Of The Year?” The two teasers prepared readers for what would greet them in the “Screen” section of the Sunday edition. It’s a fascinating advertisement — twice as large as the teasers and almost entirely textual. It begins:

THIS IS WHAT HELL IS LIKE!

This is a picture that grabs you by the throat and shoves you into the shell-ripping, lood-drenched, screaming heat of war.

Here is the hell behind the glory . . . the real guts and smell of battle! This is the story they didn’t tell-of the heroes who stood up under fire, and the few who belly-crawled out!

While pitching Attack! as one of a “handful of great battle pictures,” United Artists is also clearly trying to separate it from its contemporaries, sensationalizing the film for its lack of the “candy-coated sentiment” that dilutes their films. The only images accompanying the text are a photograph of Costa’s and Cooney’s bodies lying on stretchers and an illustration of Costa being chased by a tank. It is also the first of the ads to list the film’s credits, along with its tagline, “Attack! . . . the story of the flash-fused, fouled-up company the army called ‘Fragile Fox’!” Two more advertisements appeared in The Times, one on Tuesday, the 18th, and another on the 19th, opening day. All five ads exploit the controversy surrounding Attack!, selling it as the “raw naked guts of war grinding at you head-on like a ten-ton tank,” and comparing it to All Quiet on the Western Front and the other stories that “none would dare tell.”

When Attack! hit theaters, it ran into heavy competition. Three weeks before the film’s release, a short article in Variety examined the growing trend toward the production of big screen epics and their impact on the movie exhibition business. Because of their longer running times, films like War and Peace, The Ten Commandments, and Giant were held over for extended engagements, thereby creating a shortage of exhibition outlets and greater box office competition. United Artist’s sensationalist promotional campaign forAttack! was obviously intended to pique the interest of New York film-goers — to get them to the theater on opening day for, if no other reason, curiosity alone. The plan worked. On September 19th Attack! opened at the Mayfair Theater on Broadway to impressive box office numbers. By week’s end it had taken in more than $32,000, making it the second highest-grossing film in the city. The day after its opening, Bosley Crowther called Attack! a “ruthlessly realistic drama” that “draws a grim and discouraging picture of the behavior of some Army officers in World War II.” He praised the film’s breathtaking battle sequences and fine ensemble acting, but complained of holes in its premise and faults in its resolution, concluding, “the completion of the drama is so charged with personal anger and hate that the whole situation collapses in a flood of hysteria.” Crowther’s mixed review, however, did little to discourage attendance. Attack! played at the Mayfair for six weeks, taking in nearly $100,000 in the process.

Attack! opened slowly across the country over the next six weeks and was met by mixed reactions. In general, it was most well-received in East Coast urban centers such as Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., where it played at the Viking and the Columbia respectively for three weeks and collectively earned more than $60,000. But, as the old saying goes, Attack! didn’t really “play in Peoria.” Typical of its reception is in Denver, Detroit, and Portland, where in all three cities it opened to fairly impressive numbers, before dropping off by 30-40% in its second, and final, week. Reviews were likewise mixed. John McCarten from The New Yorker echoed Crowther’s sentiments, criticizing the film for its melodramatic collapse, but then calling it “a damn sight more interesting than most war films, where everybody but the enemy is as noble as an eagle Scout.” Philip Hartung in Commonweal also appreciated Aldrich’s message more than his presentation of it, writing, “So much carnage piled on carnage gets somewhat ridiculous after a while, and there is a real possibility that many viewers will end by not believing any of this diatribe — even the parts that need saying and are said so well by this good cast.” The reviewer for Time faulted Attack! for spending “more time making melodrama than making sense,” while a writer at Newsweek praised it for “giving melodrama almost the look of a newsreel.”

The mixed reactions to Attack! seem symptomatic of the culture in which it was released. As the reviewers repeatedly mention, audiences were growing increasingly anxious for a new breed of war film, anxious to critically reconsider their accepted notions of combat and its consequences, but they had yet to be socialized for doing so. Attack! ultimately earned a respectable $2 million and, according to Aldrich, turned a profit. It placed #44 on Variety‘s list of the “Top Film Grossers” of the year, finishing twenty spots and $1.5 million behind Universal Studio’s big-budget service film, Away All Boats. But 1956 was clearly a year in which film-goers were still more interested in widescreen epics and musicals — Guys and Dolls and The King and Ifinished #1 and #2 respectively — than in uncompromising and morally ambiguous examinations of our military leadership. It’s interesting to note that only a decade later, The Dirty Dozen, a violent and subversive film about a squadron of degenerate “heroes” committed to almost certain death by Allied officers, proved to be Aldrich’s greatest financial success, earning more than $18 million to become the box office champ of 1967. But by then, independent director and producer Stanley Kubrick had already exposed the ridiculousness of the arms race in his satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Arthur Penn was simultaneously redefining our notions of screen violence in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). In 1956, however, Americans had not yet grown accustomed to the confrontational images of Vietnam as displayed nightly on the evening news. Their eyes were only slowly opening to the dangers buried beneath the consensus of the liberal ideology. Attack! quickened the process, hitting American audiences head-on like a ten-ton tank.
— presented at American Culture Association National Conference
New Orleans, LA, April, 2000

May 8, 2000
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Dir. by Stanley Kubrick

The following was written for a graduate seminar on James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. Please forgive the fumbling psycho-babble. I think it actually serves a very legitimate reading of this film.

– – –

Sally: You’re Bill . . . the Bill? You’re the doctor who was here last night?

Bill: Well, I suppose I am.

As Garry Leonard has recently noted, a Lacanian reading of James Joyce’s “The Dead” would describe Gabriel Conroy’s interactions with Lily, Molly Ivors, and Gretta as three attempts by the protagonist to “confirm the fictional unity of his masculine subjectivity.” His after-dinner speech, then, serves as an attempted “seduction of the Other” (Lacan’s phrase), a linguistic ploy by which Gabriel confirms his own identity by “seducing the audience into authenticating it for him.” While he is able to carefully avoid significant fragmentation during his early encounters with Lily and Miss Ivors, Gabriel is finally forced — through Gretta’s admission of her love for Michael Furey — to confront the outwardly-constructed fiction of his unified subjectivity (Leonard, 289-90). For Lacan, Gabriel’s epiphany is, in Joyce’s words, that inevitable dissolution of his “own identity . . . into a grey impalpable world” (224-25).

In Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella, Traumnovelle (1926), Dr. Bill Harford experiences a similar dissolution, though the film essentially reverses the basic plot structure of Joyce’s story, thereby turning its focus on the terrifying consequences of that epiphany rather than its preludes (and giving us, in effect, a glimpse of the proverbial “morning after” that has intrigued readers of “The Dead” for decades). Bill’s wife, Alice, confesses in the opening act that, while on vacation, she had fantasized about abandoning her family in exchange for even one night with a naval officer who was staying in their hotel. “I was ready to give up everything,” Alice tells her disbelieving husband. “You, Helena [their daughter], my whole fucking future. Everything” (49). The admission explodes Bill’s imagined subjectivity, sending him on a dizzying odyssey through the streets of New York, where he encounters a string of Others, both women and men, with whom he attempts to recapture the unity that has suddenly become lost to him.

His search is necessarily in vain, however, as is evidenced by the film’s conclusion. Bill’s decision to “tell [Alice] everything” and Alice’s desire to “fuck . . . as soon as possible” are desperate, and ultimately unsatisfying, attempts to mask Bill’s permanently split subjectivity behind established ideological structures and jouissance. His inevitable lack of satisfaction, I will argue, is likewise experienced by the film viewer, who is presented with a story that steadfastly refuses to tie together its many loose ends. In fact, in his attempts to force “progression [and] effective closure” on the source material, Kubrick’s co-writer, Frederick Raphael, instead further exposes the futility of such an endeavor (Raphael, 119). Sean Murphy’s conclusion concerning Gabriel Conroy and “The Dead” can, I think, be likewise applied to Bill Harford and Eyes Wide Shut: “[He] will never achieve the unity that the linear narrative supposedly achieves at the end; he can never illuminate the entire beginning and middle of his consciousness via some epiphany because his subjectivity is forever split” (471).

Kubrick and Schnitzler

In 1970, Joseph Gelmis asked Stanley Kubrick why he wished to make a film about Napoleon. Fresh from his recent success with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the filmmaker claimed to have found in the French leader a subject that spoke to his own fascination with history and strategy, while remaining “oddly contemporary — the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relation of the individual to the state, war, milatirism, etc.” Kubrick’s Napoleon project never came to fruition. However, his answer to Gelmis’s question reveals that more than thirty years ago, the seed for Kubrick’s final film had already taken root. Napoleon’s life, he continued, “has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was of Arthur Schnitzler” (29). Kubrick’s obsession with Schnitzler’s short novel, Traumnovelle, was fairly well-known by those who had closely followed his career. In his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open, Frederick Raphael recounts how his editor, Stanley Baron, and the director, Stanley Donen, both correctly guessed the source material after learning that Raphael had been hired to write for Kubrick. Donen, according to Raphael, “knew that Kubrick had been trying to ‘lick’ the Schnitzler” since at least 1972.

Set in fin-de-siecle Vienna, Traumnovelle tells the story of a young doctor, Fridolin, and his wife, Albertine, who, while attending a masked ball, are separately propositioned by strangers. The couple returns home to enjoy an unusually amorous evening, but both wake feeling troubled by the events of the previous night. “Those trivial encounters,” Schnitzler writes, “became magically and painfully interfused the treacherous illusion of missed opportunities. . . . both felt the need for mild revenge” (177). After putting their daughter to bed, Fridolin and Albertine discuss the ball and other past indiscretions: Albertine admits her lust for an officer she had noticed while vacationing on the Danish coast; Fridolin describes his brief encounter with a “young girl of no more than fifteen, her loose, flaxen hair falling over her shoulders and on one side across her tender breast” (180). Though guilty only in mind and not in body, both are disturbed by the other’s admissions. They agree, with measured assurance, to tell each other of their true feelings in the future.

Fridolin is then called away to the home of a dying patient, thus beginning the odyssey that serves as the central narrative device of both Traumnovelle and Eyes Wide Shut. His voyage leads him through a dream-like world of sexual fantasy in which he plays an increasingly active role. At each stop along the journey — his patient’s home, a young prostitute’s apartment, a costume shop, and a large country manor — Fridolin escapes without physically betraying his wife, this despite the unusually forward advances from the young women he meets along the way. The temptation, however, intensifies as he travels through increasingly unfamiliar territory. His final destination is a masked orgy, where he is exposed as an interloper and threatened with physical harm. But Fridolin is saved — or “redeemed” — by a mysterious woman who had earlier warned him of the danger. She is ushered from the room, while he is placed in a carriage and sent away.

Fridolin returns home to discover his wife lying still in bed, “her half-open lips distressingly contorted by the play of shadows: it was a face unknown to Fridolin” (237). When he bends down to touch her, Albertine explodes in a fit of dream-induced laughter. She wakes to describe the details of the dream, a dream in which she makes love to the Danish officer while Fridolin is crucified, accompanied by the sound of his wife’s mocking laughter. He determines then to discover the identity of the mysterious woman from the orgy, so as to “get even” with Albertine, “who had revealed herself through her dream for what she really was, faithless, cruel and treacherous, and whom at that point he thought he hated more profoundly than he had ever loved her” (247). His search, however, is fruitless. The next day he retraces his route from the night before, but discovers only greater ambiguities, the result of which is his gradual dissolution. “He felt helpless and inept and everything seemed to be slipping from his grasp,” Schnitzler writes; “everything was becoming increasingly unreal, even his home, his wife, his child, his profession, his very identity as he trudged on mechanically through the evening streets, turning things over in his mind” (263).

When Fridolin does finally return home, he finds on his pillow the mask that had, on the previous evening, concealed his identity at the orgy. The terrifying sight provokes “loud, heart-rending sobs” from the doctor and forces him to confess “everything” to his wife (280). After listening quietly to his story, Albertine suggests that they be grateful for having “safely emerged from these adventures — both from the real ones and from those we dreamed about.” They then doze off together, sleeping dreamlessly until the morning, when they are woken by “a triumphant sunbeam coming in between the curtains, and a child’s gay laughter from the adjacent room” (281).

The “happy” ending of Traumnovelle, however, is problematized by the sentiments expressed in Fridolin’s and Albertine’s final lines. “Neither the reality of a single night, nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth about his innermost being,” she says. To which, he replies, “And no dream is altogether a dream.” Their reconciliation is tempered by their barely-suppressed awareness of the tenuous nature of their relationship: “Never enquire into the future,” Albertine whispers (281). They have each witnessed a frightening glimpse of the other, but have chosen — for the sake of their marriage and as a means of coping with the struggles of daily life — to ignore it. As Martin Swales says of the scene, “There is no solution — only a gratefully accepted working arrangement which is of necessity tentative and reticent in the certainties it offers” (147).

It is precisely that unsatisfying ambiguity, I would conjecture, that so fascinated Stanley Kubrick for nearly three decades. Each of his films — from his first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), an ambitious but almost laughably failed attempt to examine the two greatest motivating forces in human nature, to Full Metal Jacket (1987) — dissects socially constructed dichotomies, blurring the boundaries between good and evil, hero and villain, love and hate, fantasy and reality, us and them. Traumnovelle offered Kubrick the opportunity to observe the human animal in its most intimately guarded environment: the marriage bed. He had broached the subject in several earlier films, including Lolita (1962), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980), but none provided a suitably engaging subject for an extended study. Traumnovelle, however, would allow Kubrick to investigate the complex dynamics of “married sex,” as Raphael describes it, sex that is equal parts passion and domesticity — “the naked woman at the refrigerator door as she remembers to put the chicken away before she goes to bed” (43). Schnitzler’s novel negotiates that border zone where selflessness, responsibility, and commitment meet narcissism, fantasy, and desire, the product of which is a mutually reaffirming masquerade: Fridolin and Albertine ultimately return to the comfortable roles of husband/father and wife/mother, denying all that would jeopardize their performances. Or, as Leonard has noted, “one performs masques because the alternative is to have no sense of destiny at all; one wears masks to keep intact the illusion that behind them one has a real face that must be protected” (5). Traumnovelle and Eyes Wide Shut rip away those masks, and force both the characters and the readers/viewers to confront the unsettling consequences of doing so.

Lacan’s Split Consciousness

Of course, Kubrick may also have been so taken by Traumnovelle because its plot turns on “one hell of a scene.”1 Like Gretta’s in “The Dead,” Albertine’s confession provokes the story’s epiphanic moment.2 Fridolin is horrified by his wife’s secret nature, but only as it affects the fictional unity of his own subjectivity. Disoriented by his own sudden fragmentation, Fridolin is forced to begin his journey of attempted recovery. It is a moment best explained in Lacanian terms. Jacques Lacan’s brand of post-Freudian psychoanalysis problematizes consciousness by claiming that the subject is decentered and self-alienated. Instead of being whole, as Freud posits, Lacan’s ego is torn in two, inciting a life-long dance of deception. Leonard explains:

The subject is split between a narcissistic, objectlike total being (moi) and a speaking subject (je) who tries to validate this (fictional) unity of being by seducing the objective world (the Other) into declaring it authentic. Thus the moi is inherently paranoid because its existence is dependent upon, and solicitous of, outside validation. The je is controlled more than it can afford to realize because the moi exerts constant pressure upon the je to complete the moi‘s story of self-sufficient autonomy. Beyond this split subject is the Real subject of the unconscious that cannot be represented in imagery or signified in language. It is the remainder (as well as the reminder) of the lack-in-being that the moi is intended to paper over with fantasies of autonomy that constitute what it perceives as reality. (6)

Thus, only when the je fails in its task of linguistic seduction is the subject able to glimpse “the terrifying fact that the moi, the subject’s truth, which it desires to serve, is fiction” (7).

The complex series of steps in this dance is best illustrated in the masculine/ feminine relationship. For Lacan, “the Phallus” is an imagined signifier that supposedly bestows unity upon the masculine subject: he is “all” because he has designated the feminine subject as “not all.” But while the penis is a biological fact, the Phallus is merely an ideological construct born of psychic necessity. “The sexual relation,” Leonard writes, “consists of two interrelated gender myths: the myth of psychic unity and coherence that is the masculine subject and the corresponding myth of the feminine subject as the site of the otherness and absence that guarantees the supposedly self-evident unity of man” (9). Woman, as Lacan has famously formulated, is a “symptom” for the man: “what constitutes the symptom — that something which dallies with the unconscious — is that one believes in it. . . . in the life of a man, a woman is something he believes in” (168). Lacan designates this construct — this fictional woman all men must “believe in” in order to maintain their supposed unity — as “The Woman,” for the feminine subject can never be “an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy (exactly The Woman)” (Rose, 48).

Again, “The Dead” serves as a fitting example. Gabriel Conroy confidently presents himself as one who knows all that he needs to know: he is highly opinionated and imagines himself the intellectual superior of all at the party. Yet his unease is repeatedly illustrated throughout the story, as he bumbles his way through social interactions, first with Lily, then with Molly Ivors and Gretta. With Lily, for instance, Gabriel strikes the familiar pose of master/teacher to her servant/student. They engage briefly in what Leonard calls “mutually affirming dialogue” — they discuss the weather as she removes his overcoat — until he casually asks her about marriage (296). It is a mistake, a very adult question for The Woman he has constructed as a servant/child. Her world-weary answer — “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” — interrupts their well-rehearsed performance and threatens his imagined subjective unity. His je attempts to seduce her once more, but with little affect. “Just . . . here’s a little . . .” he stammers, as he thrusts a coin into her hand. In order to stave off further fragmentation, Gabriel escapes, “almost trotting the stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation” (178).

Upon escaping from Lily (and later, from Miss Ivors), Gabriel finds comfort from fine-tuning his after-dinner speech, the ideal platform for the je to seduce Others into authenticating his subjective unity. But the speech is of little use when he and Gretta return to their hotel room that evening. Before leaving the party, Gabriel had paused briefly to observe his wife, who appeared lost in reverie while listening to a song. “At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart” (213). That joy quickly fades, however, when Gretta reveals to her husband that it was Michael Furey, a former love, who had inspired that reverie and not Gabriel. “What is it that women want? Lacan’s answer to Freud’s most famous question is that they simply want; and the man’s desire, what he wants, is to be what he imagines they want, hence the first question” (Leonard, 303). Gabriel’s epiphany is that he is not what Gretta desires. The Woman he has constructed as “his wife” disintegrates, revealing the fiction of the role he has been performing. The story ends as he catches a horrifying glimpse of “the pitious fatuable fellow” in the mirror and is seized by a “vague terror,” before “fading out into a grey impalpable world” (222, 225).

Eyes Wide Shut

Raphael claims that, when adapting Traumnovelle for the screen, he was repeatedly encouraged by Kubrick to “just follow Arthur [Schnitzler]. . . . Track Arthur. He knows how to tell a story” (105, 91). Eyes Wide Shut remains remarkably faithful to the source material; the most significant change is its movement from turn of the century Vienna to contemporary New York. Though the move was widely criticized in the popular press — many of whom claimed that the sexual moralizing of the film seemed better suited for the Victorian era — it fits Kubrick’s modus operandi. Except for his work as a “hired gun” on Spartacus (1960), Kubrick spent his entire career in relative independence, having established himself early on as a filmmaker whose work sparked critical interest, while coming in under budget and turning a profit. The consummate businessman, Kubrick knew that a contemporary vehicle with marquee stars — whom he found in husband and wife, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman — guaranteed significant opening week box office returns.

Of course, Kubrick’s decision to adapt Traumnovelle to a contemporary setting was made for more than purely commercial reasons. Like Gabriel Conroy and the other protagonists of Dubliners, Bill Harford is “a central everyman character” (Walzl, 18). Raphael claims, in fact, that Kubrick envisioned his hero as “Harrison Fordish” (hence the name change from Fridolin), and forbade any reference to the Jewish elements in Schnitzler’s story (59). Harford, like his counterparts in Traumnovelle and “The Dead,” is refused a past; his condition is (we are led to believe) timeless. He is essentially Man, Husband, Father, Doctor, a position which nicely serves the central psychological question of the film: How can the masculine subject survive when all that defines it is revealed to be fiction?

The opening frames of Eyes Wide Shut firmly establish Harford’s position in the ideal masculine role. He is young, attractive, and highly successful; his status is reflected by everything with which he surrounds himself, including his beautiful wife and child, and their ridiculously opulent apartment “on Central Park West.” The first image, in fact, is of his wife, Alice, slipping her flawless body out of a black evening dress. As they prepare to attend a Christmas party, both act as if performing a well-rehearsed domestic ritual. She applies the final strokes of make-up and asks him how she looks. He replies mechanically: “You always look beautiful” (6). Lacan would explain the meaninglessness of their conversation and the performativeness of their routine as a defense mechanism, a means by which each avoids confronting his or her own identity confusion. As Leonard says of the guests at the Morkans’ party in “The Dead,” “Much of what they say to one another in conversation is compulsively banal precisely because what they cannot know is so alarming. . . . Conversation is dangerous, as Gabriel learns, because it is always an attempted seduction of the Other, and one’s sense of self may be subverted as easily as it may be confirmed” (291).

Bill Harford is made painfully aware of this danger (and its consequences) when, on the following evening, he and Alice confront each other about their behavior at the Christmas party. As in Traumnovelle, both Bill and Alice had been separately propositioned by strangers before returning home to make love. In what has become the film’s signature image, Kubrick shows us only Bill’s and Alice’s foreplay: she stands naked before their bedroom mirror, while he approaches from behind and begins to kiss her. As the camera follows in a slow zoom, Bill closes his eyes. But Alice raises hers to the mirror, looking away from her husband as if her thoughts are with someone else. When they discuss the party 24 hours later, Bill is shocked to discover what we already know: like Gabriel Conroy, Bill has been guilty of misinterpreting his wife’s desires.

Their conversation begins as the age-old and cliche-ridden debate concerning male and female sexuality. As Alice bluntly puts it, “Millions of years of evolution, right? Right? Men have to stick it in every place they can, but for women . . . women it is just about security and commitment and whatever the fuck . . . else” (46). For Bill, this simple formulation is perfectly acceptable — “A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that,” he says. However, the tenor of their argument changes considerably when Alice begins to deconstruct those preconceptions. When Alice asks accusingly, “And why haven’t you ever been jealous about me?” his je attempts to paper over the frightening ramifications of her question by systematically describing the role of The Woman that he has written for her.

Bill: Well, I don’t know, Alice. Maybe because you’re my wife, maybe because you’re the mother of my child and I know you would never be unfaithful to me.

Alice: You are very, very sure of yourself, aren’t you?

Bill: No, I’m sure of you. (47-48)

His attempted seduction of the Other fails miserably, though. Alice falls to the floor in a fit of laughter and begins the confession that completely dismantles his imagined subjective unity. By the time she finishes her soliloquy, Bill’s je has been silenced. He sits on the bed completely motionless, staring at “[his] wife . . . the mother of [his] child” as if she were a stranger.

Bill’s nocturnal odyssey through the streets of New York can be best described as a series of failed attempts by the protagonist to seduce the Other and to recapture the subjective unity that has been revealed by Alice’s confession to be fiction. In each instance, he slips on a familiar role only to discover that it is inappropriate and/or ineffective. His first stop, for instance, is at the home of a recently deceased patient. He is greeted by the patient’s daughter, Marion, and quickly establishes himself as the “consoling doctor” to her “grieving loved one” by first offering his condolences — “I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry” — then, in a strangely rehearsed gesture, by placing his hand on the deceased’s forehead (53). But his words and gestures are lost on Marion, whose conflicted emotions are the product of her love for Harford rather than, as he incorrectly assumes, the sudden loss of her father. When she kisses him, Harford again stares ahead, motionless. The scene paradoxically serves as both a reinforcement and a refutation of his masculine subjectivity. Marion’s desire for Harford should authenticate his identity, but it fails to do so because she simultaneously exposes his failure, represented both by the presence of the body of the patient he was unable to save and by his “misdiagnosis” of Marion’s concern. This becomes a recurring theme throughout the film, as Harford repeatedly wields his Medical Board card and assures people, “I’m a doctor,” only to then fail in his attempts to comfort or save them.

Harford’s masculine subjectivity is further assaulted when he leaves Marion’s apartment. While walking through Greenwich Village, he is accosted by a group of male college students who, based on his appearance, accuse him of being a homosexual. The scene is echoed later in the film when a gay desk clerk flirts with him. As if to prove his possession of the Phallus, Harford then follows a young prostitute home, goaded on by her none-too-subtle offer to “come inside with me” (63). However, the scene — along with another that takes place soon after in the costume shop — serves only to further expose Harford’s continued failure in his attempts to recapture the fictional unity of his subjectivity. The events of the evening have rendered his je powerless, leaving him able to do little more than simply repeat the language that circulates around him. For instance, when the prostitute, Domino, asks him, “What do you wanna do?” he is unable to answer, instead placing himself totally “in [her] hands” (65). After they are interrupted by a phone call from Alice, Domino asks, “Do you have to go?” to which he is able only to respond by echoing her question, “Do I have to go? I think I do” (69). In Lacanian terms, Harford’s continued failure is inevitable. Leonard writes:

One is never so happy as when one is the triumphant hero of one’s own story, nor so desolate as when one is the suddenly vanquished hero of the other story that this same triumphant narrative left untold . . . Lacan posits that some degree of suffering might be alleviated in the human condition, but the ego itself is necessarily incurable because it papers over a lack-in-being that can be exposed or denied-but never satiated. Any sort of cure that a character in Joyce’s fiction imagines undergoing merely serves as a prelude for the next identity crisis. (7-8)

It is interesting to note that Leonard supports this claim by referring to Stephen Dedalus’s temporary victories in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. His first visit to a prostitute, which marks the end of section two and presages his religious conversion in section three, is remarkably similar to Harford’s experience with Domino. While, in the film, they do not physically consummate a sexual relationship, Harford is able to symbolically complete the exchange by paying her the agreed upon amount. The small victory, however, is necessarily temporary, as he is soon back on the streets, obsessing over Alice’s imagined affair with the Naval Officer, and confronting even greater danger.

As in Traumnovelle, the final stop of Harford’s odyssey is at a mysterious masked orgy. Kubrick turns the scene into an oddly gothic ritual, more grotesque than erotic. The pivotal moment of the scene occurs when Harford is singled out as an interloper and forced to remove his mask while the other participants look on. He, like Fridolin, is then threatened with physical harm before being “redeemed” by a Mysterious Woman who had earlier warned him of danger. Schnitzler writes of the scene, “It seemed to him a thousand times worse to stand there as the only one unmasked amid a host of masks, than to suddenly stand naked among those fully dressed” (228). “The pain of shame,” Michael Sperber writes, “and the inability of the ego’s defenses (typically, avoidance and denial) to neutralize it, explain its frequent conversion to guilt” (63). Harford’s odyssey has led him to a terrifying awareness of his own fragmentation. As she is led away and he is placed in a taxi, The Mysterious Woman has, in a sense, temporarily redeemed Harford by converting his shame into the guilt that motivates his actions for the remainder of the film.

Kubrick deviates most notably from Schnitzler’s blueprint in the final act of Eyes Wide Shut, in which Harford retraces the steps of his odyssey in hopes of uncovering the identity of the Mysterious Woman. Raphael claims that he and the director often argued about how (or if) they should lend more cohesion to the story. Raphael writes:

I remained convinced that there had, for instance, to be a link between the scene at the party at the beginning of the movie and the orgy and its consequences. Otherwise there would be a catenation of events, but neither progression nor effective closure. . . . Stanley jeered at my appetite for plotted neatness, but I returned to the charge. (119)

Eyes Wide Shut includes only two significant scenes that do not exist in any form in Traumnovelle: the first occurs at the pivotal Christmas party, when Bill is ushered upstairs to find the party’s host, Ziegler, standing over a naked, overdosed prostitute; the second comes near the end of the film, when Ziegler calls Bill back to his home, ostensibly to “cut the bullshit” and to reveal “what happened last night,” thereby tying up the story’s many loose ends. The latter scene, in particular, has been the subject of considerable debate, both for its pacing (many critics have even postulated that Kubrick would have trimmed the scene had he lived) and for the unsatisfying solutions it provides. Michael Herr, Kubrick’s screenwriting collaborator on Full Metal Jacket, has written, “I don’t even know what [the scene’s] supposed to be about, unless, as I suspect, it’s really just about the red pool table” (270).

The pool table scene, for Lacan, is about the impossibility of ever truly discovering the cohesion and closure that we desire to fix on our personal narratives. In “Passing Boldly into That Other World of (W)Holes: Narrativity and Subjectivity in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’” Sean Murphy defines the “masculine narrative” as the typical, linear narrative that moves toward an end in order to transform “the reader in some way, namely by illuminating the beginning and the middle and thereby unveiling the ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ inherent in the chains of signification constituting the story” (466). Murphy argues that readers of “The Dead” have forced a cohesion on Joyce’s story where none exists. “Because critics desire to symbolize their own lack,” Murphy writes:

they fall prey to Joyce’s seductive yet subversive use of the linear narrative paradigm in their readings of Gabriel and of the supposed epiphanic end of “The Dead.” Joyce’s text is seductive because it allows the reader to indulge in the fetishistic split between knowing and believing in unity and subversive because he does not provide an end, does not adhere to the law of linearity that demands an illuminative moment that makes sense of (totalizes) the fragmented discourse that precedes it. (469)

Murphy claims that the masculine narrative paradigm became popularized in the nineteenth century realistic novel and remains “the norm,” despite the invention of alternative forms by writers such as Joyce (466). Nowhere has the linear narrative maintained its grip more firmly than in the classical Hollywood cinema. In a 1987 interview, Kubrick told Jack Kroll that he wanted to “explode the narrative structure of movies,” a feat he finally accomplishes, with astonishing subtlety, in Eyes Wide Shut. The final line of the film (the other significant deviation from Traumnovelle) is ultimately unsatisfying, like the pool table scene, because it subverts our conditioned behavior as film viewers. Taught to expect pat answers and firm conclusions — particularly in an”erotic thriller,” as Warner Brothers marketed Eyes Wide Shut — Alice’s desire to “fuck” is jarring. We are left with considerable questions concerning both the happenings and consequences of Bill’s odyssey and the future of his and Alice’s relationship, questions that, despite Raphael’s best efforts, cannot be resolved. For Lacan, this ending is inevitable. Terrified by their brief glimpses of truth, Bill and Alice retreat to the familiar roles of husband/father and wife/mother so as to disguise their unity behind ideological masks. When they do fuck, it will simply be a return of jouissance, Lacan’s term for the pleasure we find in enjoying our symptoms. But that pleasure will necessarily be short-lived and unsatisfying. Like Gabriel Conroy, Bill Harford “will never achieve the unity that the linear narrative supposedly achieves at the end; he can never illuminate the entire beginning and middle of his consciousness via some epiphany because his subjectivity is forever split” (Murphy, 471).

Footnotes

1. Raphael recounts how Kubrick asked him if he thought a movie could be found in Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Kubrick says, “We wouldn’t have to change a thing. That’s one hell of a scene, so all we’d have to do is kinda . . . do it up to that point and then . . . get to the end” (76). [return]

2. Comparisons between Joyce and Schnitzler (or Joyce and Kubrick, for that matter) are purely conjectural. Richard Ellman informs us that Joyce’s Trieste library of 1920 included a 1906 edition of Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl (126), and Richard Brown speculates that Joyce would have been interested in Schnitzler’s narrative experimentation, as well as the theatrical scandal that surrounded La Ronde (150). Likewise, Swales comments on the stylistic affinities shared by both men (91). It is almost certain that Kubrick would have been familiar with “The Dead.” He was widely regarded as a voracious reader and researcher. He tells Gelmis, for instance, that in preparing Napoleon, he had read “several hundred books” and seen “every film that was ever made on the subject” (30). It is highly likely, then, that while preparing A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick would have read everything written by his collaborator, Anthony Burgess, including Here Comes Everybody, which includes a brief analysis of “The Dead.” Kubrick’s own interests in narrative experimentation would also have inevitably led him to Joyce’s fiction. [return]

Works Cited

Brown, Richard. James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Ellman, Richard. The Consciousness of Joyce. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1977.

Gelmis, Joseph. “Interview with Stanley Kubrick.” The Film Director as Superstar. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970. Rpt. in Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick. Ed. Mario Falsetto. New York: Hall, 1996. 26-47.

Herr, Michael. “Completely Miss Kubrick.” Vanity Fair Apr. 2000. 260-72.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Kroll, Jack. “Interview with Stanley Kubrick.” Newsweek 29 June 1987.

Kubrick, Stanley, and Frederick Raphael. Eyes Wide Shut: A Screenplay. New York: Warner, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.

Leonard, Garry. Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1993.

Murphy, Sean P. “Passing Boldly into That Other World of (W)Holes: Narrativity and Subjectivity in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32.3 (1995): 463-74.

Raphael, Frederick. Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Ballantine, 1999.

Rose, Jacqueline. “Introduction.” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: Norton, 1982.

Sperber, Michael, M.D. “Shame and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’” Literature and Psychology 37.1 (1991): 62-71.

Swales, Martin. Arthur Schnitzler: A Critical Study. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.

Walzl, Florence L. “Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce Quarterly 4.1 (1966): 17-31

Labels: American, Kubrick

April 25, 2000
Sculpting in Time

By Andrei Tarkovsky

My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

The Film Image

Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

Time, Rhythm and Editing

“Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

Scenario and Shooting Script

For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

The Film’s Graphic Realisation

This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

The Film Actor

Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

Music and Noises

Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

February 22, 2000
Sculpting in Time (1987)

By Andrei Tarkovsky

My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

The Film Image

Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

Time, Rhythm and Editing

“Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

Scenario and Shooting Script

For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

The Film’s Graphic Realisation

This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

The Film Actor

Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

Music and Noises

Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

February 7, 2000
New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

By Thomas Merton

Like “Making Peace,” the Denise Levertov poem that inspired this site, Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation is concerned with the destructive influences of greed, superficiality, and passivity on our hectic, disjointed lives. Levertov’s poem is a call to both the poet/artist — whose duty, she argues, is to inspire an “imagination of peace” — and to us, her readers. For making peace is active, a deliberate decision that each of us must make in order for us to affect change, first in our lives, then in the world. Although Levertov never explicitly identifies whose “voice from the dark” calls out, the humanist, the aesthete, and the Christian in me are all in perfect agreement: if that voice is not divine, then why should I listen?

For Merton, a 20th century American monk, making peace is a lifelong project through which we find perfect communion with God. Sanctification — or, “contemplation,” as he calls it — is the only source of genuine peace, for it is the only means by which we may escape our natural state of alienation. Merton actually sounds a bit like Lacan at times, critiquing Man for his futile attempts to “clothe his false self” in power and pleasures. The obvious difference, of course, is that Merton posits a solution, selfless submission to God’s will, where Lacan and other Post-Modern seekers of meaning can find only nihilism. “The real purpose of meditation,” Merton writes, “is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God” (217).

New Seeds of Contemplation is an impressive book, and one that has effected me more profoundly than any other contemporary theological study. In an age when “Christian literature” is sold in bulk at Sam’s Clubs, Merton’s book is refreshingly intelligent and devoid of the empty rhetoric that plagues so much of the dialogue in Christian America (and its churches) today. This deliberate move away from “old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations . . . hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion” is actually an important stage in every contemplative’s life, Merton claims, a step that can be quite unnerving. “The worst of it,” he writes:

is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.” In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.

I can picture the Christians who would recoil at such a suggestion, as they would at many of his other claims, including his equating of the work of the Church with an ideal communism and his belief that God may have blessed us with wealth in order that we “might find joy and perfection by giving it all away.” (I’ll be sure to look for that plank in the platform of the next politician who claims to be representing my Christian interests.) I would label Merton a radical if he weren’t simply reflecting the mission of the early Church as described in Acts.

But we’re Americans, and Americans don’t care for selflessness. To aid in this radical reordering of our priorities, Merton, like Levertov, points to our need for solitude (meditation or long pauses) as a temporary but necessary escape from the “social machine” in which we’re trapped. I love his description of this trap — it would have made a perfect epigraph for Don DeLillo’s White Noise:

The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés. . . . But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.

Every time I read that, I think of Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite, a film that erodes, quite uncomfortably at times, those layers of insulation and forces us to patiently experience the pain of another’s life. (Unfortunately, very few Christians in America will see L’Humanite, both because it is French and because of its explicit sexual content.) Of course, when I read Merton’s description, I am also struck by my own pain-free isolation. But that is precisely the point of this web site. I am learning, as Merton suggests, to “meditate on paper . . . to contemplate works of art.” I am trying to “keep still, and let Him do some work.”

This response has been a bit erratic, little more than a steady stream of quotations. As this is a site dedicated largely to the arts, I’ll finish with one more, then do my best to refrain from adding sarcastic comment:

A Catholic poet should be an apostle by being first of all a poet, not try to be a poet by being first of all an apostle. For if he presents himself to people as a poet, he is going to be judged by people as a poet and if he is not a good one his apostolate will be ridiculed.

Good advice. I wish I could name more Christian artists who follow it.

February 5, 2000
The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue (1994)

By Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie

Johnson’s and Petrie’s study is that extremely rare beast: an academic study that is informative, objective (or as close as anyone can get), and readable. They work from an interesting thesis:

Tarkovsky certainly saw himself as a martyr in his last years and . . . helped to foster a myth of his own persecution that was rather uncritically accepted at face value by well-meaning foreigners. . . . Yet, even if one must reject the more extreme claims of martyrdom, there is no reason not to acknowledge the very real struggles and sacrifices he made for his art.

I’m convinced. Unlike Annette Insdorf’s study of Kieslowski, this one is very much grounded in the particular context within which the director worked. In this case, Johnson and Petrie expose the inner workings of the Soviet film industry, though not in such unnecessary detail as to distract from their discussion of Tarkovsky himself. In doing so, they reveal him to be both the martyred artist he (often) claimed to be and a director allowed unprecedented creative freedom. As a Soviet “employee,” Tarkovsky was forced to maneuver considerable bureaucratic hurdles in pre- and post-production, but during filming he was given complete independence, allowing him to make difficult films free from the economic concerns experienced in the West. Johnson and Petrie wonder what Orson Welles might have accomplished had he been afforded the same budgets and freedom given to Tarkovsky while under the “yoke” of Communism.

The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky is divided into 14 chapters: the first three provide a fascinating overview of Tarkovsky’s persona, his aesthetics, and his working methods; the second section includes close studies of each of the eight films (including The Steamroller and the Violin); and the final four chapters examine recurring images and themes in Tarkovsky’s work. One note: the chapter-long studies of each film are very insightful and well-organized. Each provides a production history, an examination of the critical reception, and a formal analysis by the authors. Johnson and Petrie hold no punches, particularly when dealing with the mostly Western critics who they feel have misinterpreted Tarkovsky’s oeuvre due to ignorance of Soviet culture.

Johnson and Petrie are also quite rough with Tarkovsky, particularly in the chapters on Nostalghia and The Sacrifice. I have to agree with their main criticism. Although both films contain some striking imagery (I especially love the b&w apocalyptic vision in The Sacrifice), neither exactly breaks new ground for the director. In fact, The Sacrifice seems to contradict one of his main tenants — let the images do the talking.

February 3, 2000
Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (1999)

By Annette Insdorf

Insdorf’s is a terribly frustrating book. She seems the perfect candidate for the job of writing such an auteur study. As a professor in Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division and a personal translator and friend of Kieslowski, she has the experience, vocabulary, and intimate acquaintance necessary for successfully melding biography, research, and analysis.

She also sets out with the right questions in mind: How was Kieslowski’s body of work shaped by personal experience, particularly by his life under Communism? What other directors, artists, and thinkers shaped his aesthetic? What preoccupations, both ideological and stylistic, form the backbone of his work? What precipitated his move from documentary to narrative film, and how did each influence the other?

Unfortunately, in attempting to answer all of these questions (and in only 180 pages), Insdorf fails to address any of them adequately. My main beef with the book is that I can’t figure out who it was written for. It reads like Kieslowski for Dummies, but I find it difficult to imagine the “Dummies” audience investing the time and energy required of a work like, say, The Decalogue. I would imagine that those of us willing to wrestle with the complexities of Kieslowski’s films will typically study his life with a similar rigor.

One more (admittedly petty) complaint: Insdorf’s writing can be plain maddening at times. Lines like this just make me cringe:

For events unfolding in the present, theater is perhaps the most fitting artistic medium. And for a story told in the past, the novel is the perfect form. Motion pictures have certainly carved out a special niche for dealing with the future. (53)

My experience with Insdorf’s book has not been all bad, however. I would actually recommend it, in fact, for certain purposes. The majority of Double Lives, Second Chances is devoted to Insdorf’s own formal analysis of each film. While I find the latter chapters fairly useless, her discussion of his documentary work and early fiction is invaluable for the simple reason that those films are not available in America, nor are they likely to be any time soon. She provides a short summary and stylistic analysis of each film.

I guess I should also compliment Insdorf (in a back-handed way) for inspiring me to learn more about the film industry under Communism. She often refers casually to other Eastern European filmmakers who I am now curious to study. And her inclusion of some interesting quotes from Kieslowski reinforce what I suspected even before beginning the book. I pulled the wrong one from my shelf. I should have begun with Kieslowski on Kieslowski.

[The Calm] has nothing to do with politics. It simply tells the story of a man who wants very little and can’t get it. – Kieslowski

Addendum: I realize that I might have unfairly criticized Insdorf for simply not giving me the book that I wanted to read. I wanted a fairly objective study that interspersed more biographical and political context into the formal analysis. I wonder if Insdorf’s personal relationship with Kieslowski — she recounts a very touching story of his picking her and her mother up at the Warsaw airport and driving them two hours to visit Krakow — may have left her somewhat biased. She “sounds” at times like a big fan, unwilling to criticize him or his work when he perhaps deserves it. I imagine she would be wonderful to listen to, though, with wonderful stories to tell. She also translated for Truffaut at times.

February 1, 2000
Buried Child (1978)

By Sam Shepard

In his introduction to Seven Plays, Richard Gilman writes, “the real difficulty I share with many critics [who study Shepard] isn’t so much deciding what the work is as knowing how to write about what it is.” Two sentences into this response, and I’m already beginning to appreciate the precision of that distinction. And yet, despite the skill with which Gilman explores Shepard’s work (his introduction has that accessible insight that seems lacking in the voice of much academic writing), I don’t think he ever solves his original problem. As I read, I underlined sentences like, “[His plays] spill over, they leak. They change chameleon-like, in self-protection as we look at them,” and “Above all, it’s about performing, and here the relations between art and life become particularly close.” Gilman’s observations sound wonderful, poetic-almost, the type of critical writing I strive to produce. But I’m not sure if wielding “a critical vocabulary that won’t be composed of cliches and stock phrases” brings him any closer to Shepard. Perhaps it’s my own lack of experience with Shepard’s work. I don’t yet see him as a “dramatist who slips out of all the categories,” and am therefore unwilling to concede a need to “devise a strategy of discourse” specifically for him. Instead (and I realize that this has probably been done many times before, even, I think, by Gilman himself), it seems that Shepard’s plays, particularly a family drama like Buried Child, can be placed on a categorical timeline, one point in the evolution of a form. How far is it, really, from O’Neill’s Tyrone to Shepard’s Dodge?

Gilman admits that “the trevail of the family” is a theme central to many of Shepard’s plays. In Buried Child, Shepard updates the family drama, situating it amidst the cultural upheaval of late-70s America. As the curtain rises, we find Dodge, the family patriarch, staring blankly at a television, his face illuminated by only the blue flickering of the picture tube. For Shepard, TV seems to offer an alternative to real interaction and communication. When Halie questions Dodge from upstairs, he just continues staring, sitting silently in morose resignation and isolation. He is a chilling character, more an extension of the couch than a father. When Tilden arrives with the mysterious corn, Dodge exposes his own hopeless isolation. “I haven’t had trouble with neighbors here for fifty-seven years,” he screams. “I don’t even know who the neighbors are! And I don’t want to know!”When Dodge finally does respond to his wife’s repeated calls, their communication is hampered by distance. “Dodge, are you watching baseball?” she asks. “No.” “What?” she asks. This (“What?”) becomes a common refrain for Halie, revealing her inability to actually hear him (or perhaps her lack of desire to do so).

Dodge’s and Halie’s conversations (like many others in the play) are superficial and ritualistic, consisting mostly of trivial discussions of the weather and the children. Their roles seem well rehearsed. She asks him if he needs a pill; he says no. She tells him to keep an eye on Tilden; he says things will be fine. She leaves to meet Father Dewis; he takes another sip from his hidden whiskey bottle. Shepard does complicate their interaction, though, with strange (at times, almost absurdist) moments of tension. The first occurs when Halie mentions the man who took her to the New Year’s Day races. It is the first statement that elicits an emotional response from Dodge. “I bet he taught you a thing or two huh?” he says bitterly. “Gave you a good turn around the old stable.” As in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Shepard provides hints about his play’s sub-text early in the opening act. Dodge’s bitterness is, of course, later explained by Halie’s infidelities and the resulting pregnancy.

Another, and much stranger, cause of tension between Halie and Dodge is their debate over whether or not their son, Bradley, should be allowed to cut his father’s hair. It is scenes like this, I’m sure, that Gilman would say “spill over” and “leak,” complicating any simple reading. I’ll freely admit my difficulty with the scene, and with the one in which Bradley does, in fact, shave Dodge’s head, cutting him and drawing blood. It seems ripe for Freudian analysis, an Oedipal conflict realized in the threatening actions of a powerless son. It also reinforces the corporeal nature of Dodge’s body. Halie often mentions the stench of his decaying frame, and in their discussion, Dodge describes the last time she allowed Bradley to cut his hair, saying, “Time to dress up the corpse for company! Lower the ears a little! Put up a little front! . . . My appearance is out of his domain! It’s even out of mine! In fact, its’ disappeared! I’m an invisible man!” Once we learn the story of the buried child, Bradley’s violence against his father also becomes strangely justifiable, an act of outward concern (for his father’s appearance) and subconscious revenge.

Gilman mentions “the search for roots” as another central motif in Shepard’s work. This search is characterized in Buried Child by Tilden and Vincent, a father and son who both return to the family in hopes of creating meaning in their lives. Shepard first describes Tilden as “profoundly burned out and displaced.” He has recently returned home after getting in some trouble in New Mexico, but claims that his reason for returning was simply that he was lonely, “more lonely than I’ve ever been before.” But Tilden is hardly welcomed as a prodigal son. He is instead seen only as a disappointment, a shadow of his lost potential. He seems to take on a ghost-like quality throughout the play, particularly in its final scene, as he emerges with the decaying corpse of his murdered brother (his murdered child?) in his arms. He also seems to have the magical ability to produce vegetables from air, those strange buckets of corn and carrots that so preoccupy him during the first two acts. Like Bradley and his clippers, the scenes involving Tilden and his vegetables throw off simple explanation. In his introduction, Gilman acknowledges those supporters who claim that Shepard has one creative foot within avant-garde circles, that he isn’t “talking about anything but rather making something.” The images here, particularly that of Tilden burying his sleeping father in cornstalks, is fascinating and lasting. Obviously, Shepard designed that image as a challenge. But the image is laced with too many resonating elements—the “milking stool” with its inherent maternal overtones, the fertility of the backyard burial ground, the “roots” of the fruitful crop, the burial of Dodge under the product of that crop—to be explained away as simply a message to the eyes, rather than one to the mind (to use Gilman’s terminology).

Vince adds another level of difficulty to a reading of Buried Child. Like his father, Vince has also returned to Halie’s and Dodge’s home in hopes of uncovering his roots. What he finds instead is a family who has forgotten him. (“It’s much better not to know anything,” says Dodge.) Even his own father is unable to remember Vince. “I had a son once,” Tilden says, “but we buried him.” Vince actually spends little time on stage—his trip to fetch Dodge a bottle of whiskey becomes a night-long drive and drinking binge. Shepard instead shows us Vince’s perspective through an outsider’s point of view. Shelley is an interesting addition to the mix. She is the only character with “some kind of future”; she is a creature made of “faith” and “hope” (it seems that “love” is conspicuously absent, perhaps only from Dodge’s vocabulary). So when she describes Vince’s quest, it is one made of stops at drive-ins and football fields, a nostalgic trip through pleasant memories. His violent re-emergence, that crash through the screen door, is all the more shocking after Shelley’s quiet innocence. With his return, Vince takes on his legacy, the house itself and the secrets buried around and within it. He also takes on its pain, thereby sending Shelley away.

January 22, 2000
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)

By David Rabe

That’s just this whole damn army messin’ with me and it ain’t ever gonna end but in shit.
— Pavlo Hummel, before attempting suicide

I am in a world of shit.
— Private Pyle, before committing suicide in Full Metal Jacket

I began to think about Kubrick’s film long before I reached the end of the first act of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. I knew little about Rabe’s play, other than what I had picked up from reading his own introduction. Most notably, I knew that it was built in two sections: a first act that showed Hummel’s development from raw recruit to “Regular Army,” and a second that took place in Vietnam. It’s that same structure that so struck me the first time I saw Full Metal Jacket. By the time Hummel began equating his world with shit (seen most clearly in the drama’s finale), I found it difficult to ignore his connection to Pyle. There are other similarities as well—the “blanket party” both young men suffer, the “friend” who tries to help (Pierce in the play, Joker in the film), and, of course, the gruesome death that both men meet. Of more interest to me though, is that Pavlo Hummel, again like the film, is difficult to neatly classify into any one particular genre. In his introduction to the Viking edition of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Rabe responds to the label “antiwar” which has been frequently applied to his work:

I have written them to diagnose, as best I can, certain phenomena that went on in and around me. It seems presumptuous and pointless to call them “antiwar” plays . . . I think these labels [antifamily, antimarriage, antiyouth, and anticrime] do not exist because family, marriage, youth, and crime are all viewed as phenomena permanently a part of the eternal human pageant. I believe war to be an equally permanent part of that pageant. (xxv)

As is the case when I watch Full Metal Jacket, I find Pavlo Hummel much more interesting when viewed in this light—as an examination of “the eternal human pageant,” that constant process of interaction, performance, and construction.

Rabe bookends Pavlo Hummel with Hummel’s death scene. It’s an interesting device. I’ve read several novels (most recently Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies) and seen a few films (Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures and, of course, Citizen Kane) that use the structure to reinforce the development of a character, either by building a mystery (“Rosebud”) or by creating a suspenseful, and at times melodramatic, sense of inevitability. Pavlo Hummel, though, seems to do the exact opposite, pointing out how little its main character is capable of developing. As the play opens, Hummel is a loud-mouthed kid, boasting loudly of his own sexual prowess and jumping blindly to retrieve a live grenade. Two hours, and more than a hundred pages later, he is unchanged. It’s a great manipulation of our expectations. We come to the play expecting to see a green recruit, one stupid enough to volunteer for firemen duty, grow into manhood—a nice, typical bildungsroman. Instead, we watch his journey knowing that he will be blown to bits. “You had that thing in your hand, didn’t you?” asks Ardell in the opening scene. “What was you thinkin’ on, you had that thing in your hand?” Even after his “basic training” and a tour of combat duty, Hummel, still the green recruit, is capable of only jumping into action. He is oblivious to any causal relationship. “[I was thinkin’] About throwin’ it,” he replies, as if the explosion were in no way inevitable.

On one level then, the play does criticize the basic training, as seen in act one, as a failed means of constructing some cookie-cutter-like masculine identity. For Rabe, the training is nothing but hollow ritual. (Though Rabe throws off the label “antiwar,” the political ramifications of this, particularly when situated in early-70’s America, are obvious.) As the act closes, Hummel, reeling from his failed suicide attempt, is chastised by Ardell for consistently proving himself to be a fool. “What kinda shit this?” he yells, after seeing Hummel’s uniform lying on the floor. “Your poor ole Sarge see this, he sit down on the ground and he cry, man. Poor ole Sarge, he work himself like crazy tryin’ ta teach you so you can act like a man.” But the Sarge’s lessons are lost on Hummel. His attempts all end in failure—he drags his pants across the floor, oblivious to the dirt they collect. Finally, Pierce and the other men come to his aid. “All is ease now,” writes Rabe in the stage directions. “It is a ritual now: Pavlo must exert no effort whatsoever as he is transformed.” That passive verb is interesting. The act ends with Hummel in full dress uniform, complete with sunglasses, staring at himself in the mirror. “Who you see?” asks Ardell. “That ain’t no Pavlo Hummel. Noooo, man. That somebody else. An’ he somethin’ else.” But Hummel’s transformation has been passive. He has relied on others to define himself as “Regular Army,” just as before he had relied on lies, foolish boasting, and empty quips to define himself as a streetkid. As Rabe mentions in his “Author’s Note,” “real insight never comes [for Hummel] . . . he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where.”

Questions of masculinity inform nearly every scene in Pavlo Hummel. After Hummel’s transformation at the end of Act One, the play shifts dramatically, moving to the “real” world of Pavlo’s home. There he is united with his half-brother, Mickey, and the two share stories over drinks. Their conversation is littered with verbal attacks and retaliations. Mickey calls Hummel a “fuckin’ myth-maker” and a “goddamn cartoon.” Hummel protests, screaming, “I’m not an asshole anymore!” and “I don’t need you anymore.” But Hummel’s reliance upon his new-found identity as a soldier is unconvincing. He imagines himself part of a new fraternity, referring to his fellow soldiers as “real brothers.” But Mickey doesn’t allow Hummel any victory, calling him a bastard and their mother a whore, and playfully mentioning Joanna, thereby reminding Hummel of his virginity.

These questions of masculinity are only intensified once Hummel reaches Vietnam. The first scene “in country” is a disorienting collage of images:

Hummel and Brisbey. Brisbey has been literally emasculated—”got seventeen years in the army; no legs no more, no balls, one arm.” It’s only beside him that Hummel appears virile.

Hummel and Jones. Hummel is pure green compared to Jones, the man who brokers Hummel’s first sexual experience.

Hummel and Yen and Sgt. Tower. Yen undresses Hummel while Tower holds up an M-16 and chants, “You got to love this rifle, Gen’lmen, like it you pecker and you love to make love.” Rabe’s phallic imagery is none-too-subtle. (I can’t help thinking of the recruits in Full Metal Jacket who sing, “this is my rifle, this is my gun” as they marched, their hands grasping their M-16’s and their crotches.) It’s no surprise that Brisbey asks to hold a rifle or that Hummel describes his first lay as: “I just about blew this girl’s head off.”

Hummel and the Captain. Again, Hummel attempts to define himself by emulating the examples he sees around him. “I want to feel,” he says, “that I’m with a unit Victor Charlie considers valuable enough to want to get it.” The consequences of such a request are lost on him.

Hummel’s combat duty is further proof of his emptiness. He is injured repeatedly, but is so mesmerized by the idea of being a soldier that he passes up a chance to go home. “How many times you gonna let ’em hit you?” Ardell asks. “As many as they want,” Hummel replies. But he is never able to define himself in his own terms. I love that image of the men looking to the North Star to find their own place, their own direction. Ardell asks Hummel if he’s ever seen the North Star in his life and Hummel can only say, “I seen a lot of people pointin’.”

January 18, 2000
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1992)

By Tony Kushner

Note: These are my initial thoughts on Millennium Approaches, written as a journal assignment in the fall of 1998. I’m tempted to revise it or pull it down altogether, but I’ve decided to keep it up here as an artifact of sorts.

– – –

A copy of Perestroika is sitting within my reach. I refuse to open it until I finish this journal. In this first part of Angels in America, Tony Kushner offers a modern deconstruction of the American family drama, along with political/social commentary (and humor!), united perfectly in a crosshatch of formal realism and fantasy. Quite a feat. I’m not sure where to begin.

“I took the bus that I was told to take and I got off — well it was the very last stop, so I had to get off.” — Hannah

That Millennium Approaches references Tennessee Williams should not be a surprise. Kushner, a gay playwright whose work addresses issues of family, love, acceptance, and destruction, is obviously indebted to his predecessor. That his play so often references A Streetcar Named Desire specifically is of a bit more interest. The allusions are hardly subtle. In Harper, for instance, Kushner paints for us a portrait of what Blanche DuBois may have looked like while she still struggled for life at Belle Reeve. Like Blanche, Harper has genuinely fallen in love with a man whose homosexuality, admitted or not, has ruined both their relationship and her sanity. And also like Blanche and her desire for “magic,” Harper prefers “pretend-happy” to the ugly truth. “[It’s] better than nothing,” she tells Joe.

Near the end of Millennium Approaches‘ first act, Harper finally confronts Joe about his sexuality. Her words are biting, laced with religious condemnation. “I knew you . . .” she tells him before stopping herself. “It’s a sin, and it’s killing us both.” I can practically hear the strains of music drifting through Blanche’s mind, stopped suddenly by a gunshot. Although Joe does not end his own life (reflecting, I think, some social change in America over the last forty years — the gay man musn’t necessarily be punished), Harper’s accusations do effectively end their admittedly superficial marriage. For Harper, as was famously the case with Blanche, the truth is too difficult to face. So instead, she slips into the darkness, both literally and metaphorically.

Perhaps the most obvious allusion to Streetcar (aside from Prior’s and Belize’s quoting of it in Act 2, Scene 5) occurs near the beginning of Act 2. Joe returns to the apartment to find Harper “sitting at home, all alone, with no lights on. We can barely see her.” When Joe asks her why she sits in the dark and then turns on the light, Harper screams, “No,” and shuts them off again. By the end of Millennium Approaches, Harper, again like Blanche, has fled reality completely. It is only when she travels with Mr. Lies that Harper is able to survive in a “very white, cold place, with a brilliant blue sky above.”

“Eric? This is a Jewish name?” — Rabbi Chemelwitz

You’ve got to love any work that begins with a Rabbi eulogizing in a very Woody Allen/Mel Brooks kind of way, his sentiments alternating between moments of divine wisdom and hilarious asides. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud exposes the genealogy of the Jewish joke, noting its remarkably long and often self-critical history. The Jews, according to Freud, have developed such a rich comedic tradition as a response to centuries, millennia actually, of persecution and anti-Semitism. What better catharsis is there, he might say, than a good laugh?

In Millennium Approaches, Kushner uses jokes in a similar manner, expanding their range, however, to encompass not only issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish stereotypes, but also of homophobia. The result, I think, is the formation of living, breathing, and oft-suffering characters, as opposed to the two-dimensional cutouts who often inhabit Gay and Jewish roles. Kushner acknowledges stereotypes, then undercuts them. “My grandmother actually saw Emma Goldman speak. In Yiddish,” Louis tells Prior. “But all Grandma could remember was that she spoke well and wore a hat.” Henny Youngman would be proud. “It’s an old Jewish custom to express love,” continues Louis. “Here, Grandma, have a shovelful. Latecomers run the risk of finding the grave completely filled.” The lines echo with Borscht Belt rim-shots. But instead of allowing the jokes to flatten Louis into a stereotype, Kushner uses them to expose other forces which have contributed in varying degrees to the formation of his identity — Louis is not just gay, not just well-educated, not just a word processor. Being aware of his identification as a Jew helps us better understand the many conflicts in Louis’ life. Jews aren’t supposed to be gay. The importance of this conflict is, of course, echoed in Joe’s and Harper’s struggle. Mormons aren’t supposed to be gay either.

Jokes, I think, are used in a similar manner to humanize the homosexual characters in Millennium Approaches. Again, Kushner acknowledges stereotypes — Prior exposing Louis’ embarrassment about his sibilant S, for instance. But he also moves beyond those stereotypes and confronts the audience with casual, though often graphic, references to homosexual sex. “Oh and by the way, darling, cousin Doris is a dyke,” Prior tells Louis. “You don’t notice anything. If I hadn’t spent the last four years fellating you I’d swear you were straight.” The discomfort lines like this would cause in a large audience would, I’m sure, be lessened somewhat when relieved through laughter.

And that same laughter is also used to release the terrifying tension created by the play’s greatest threat: AIDS. During research for my thesis, I was surprised to learn that most within the Jewish-American community were unwilling to even mention the Holocaust until the mid-1960s. Much of that silence seems to have been broken by people like Mel Brooks, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for The Producers featured the notoriously hilarious “Springtime for Hitler” song and dance scene. Millennium Approaches must have had much the same impact. Nearly a decade after its original production, and I was still shocked to hear Prior’s light-hearted resignation:

K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death . . . I’m a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionairre’s disease . . . My troubles are lesion . . . Bad timing, funeral and all, but I figured as long as we’re on the subject of death . . .

I noticed that in the notes which accompany Perestroika, Kushner calls the play “a comedy,” distinguishing it from a “farce” and forbidding any amount of sentiment. Making a joke of “the subject of death,” I think, is this play’s greatest accomplishment, not because it makes light of a serious matter, but because it forces us to acknowledge — without the safe distance allowed by farce and sentimentality — the painful, human reality of that matter.

“You have all these secrets and lies” — Harper

I’m fascinated by the idea of trying to place Millennium Approaches in the tradition of the American family drama. It explores similar themes, particularly the destructive effects of secrets and the breakdown of communication. The obvious problem with this type of reading, however, is that, aside from Joe’s mother and Louis’ dead grandmother, there are few references to traditional, multi-generation families. But that, I think, is also the point. In writing the homosexual American experience, Kushner has, by necessity, thrown off common notions of family. Instead of the matriarchal “Mama” from A Raisin in the Sun, Kushner gives us Belize, a mothering drag queen, and Harper, a de-sexed woman who can only imagine fertility. Instead of offering unity within the biological family, Kushner shows us the isolated lives of gay men, first in Roy Cohn, then in the abandoned Prior. Instead of allowing an imagined familial bliss, Kushner exposes its failings. For some reason, I find the play’s saddest lines belong to Joe, who describes to Roy his inability to pass for someone “cheerful and strong.”

Those who love God with an open heart unclouded by secrets and struggles are cheerful; God’s easy simple love for them shows in how strong and happy they are . . . I wanted to be one of the elect, one of the Blessed. You feel you ought to be, that the blemishes are yours by choice, which of course they aren’t. Harper’s sorrow, that really deep sorrow, she didn’t choose that. But it’s hers.

As is often the case in American family dramas, the tragedy of Millennium Approaches stems from the inability of its characters to live honestly. Blanche DuBois’ husband committed suicide instead. Joe and Harper lived a loveless life together instead. Roy Cohn ignored the truth and sought power instead.

January 16, 2000
July’s People (1981)

By Nadine Gordimer

Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on Postcolonial literature, but, aside from the first few paragraphs, it is a fairly straight-forward reading of what might just be my favorite novel.

– – –

How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the sky! She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.
— Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Nadine Gordimer prefaces July’s People with a passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” The line serves as both a warning — preparing the reader for the disorienting journey he or she is about to begin — and as the thesis of the novel. In a 1987 interview, Gordimer addressed those readers whom she felt had “misread” her work. “People always say that July’s People is about what happens after revolution in South Africa. But it isn’t. . . . it is during. . . .it’s about a time of civil war” (Bazin, 294). July’s People inhabits a world where traditionally assumed roles and rules are in a state of flux, where relationships and stations have become undefined, where everything, even vocabulary and language, has come into question. The novel is rife with the “morbid symptoms” of post-colonial nationalism: miscommunication, alienation, anger, and, ultimately, violence.

In “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, Homi Bhabha discusses the Western nation as the “locality of culture”, which he describes as being “more around temporality than about historicity” (140). He contends that the space of the modern nation-people is never horizontal — a simple, linear sequence of determining events — and in doing so, he deconstructs political, social, and literary terminology. Bhabha’s representation of the nation as a temporal process assumes a form of living that is:

more complex than ‘community’; more symbolic than ‘society’; more connotative than ‘country’; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of State; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centered than citizen; more collective than the ‘subject’; more psychic than civility; more hybrid than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. (14)

Like Gramsci and Gordimer, Bhabha views people/nations as being constantly between the dying old and the new which cannot be born. He describes the struggle as a “contested conceptual territory” where people must be both “objects” of the past — stereotypes based on a nationalist pedagogy — and “subjects” of the present — proof of a nation’s vitality (145). “It is through this process of splitting,” writes Bhabha, “that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation” (146).

The ambivalence of the South Africa that Gordimer writes in July’s People is jarring. The first voice we hear belongs to July, a servant beginning his day “for them as his kind has always done for their kind” (1). However, the narrative does not allow us to settle comfortably into a world of established roles and easily recognizable caricatures. Instead, we are given four pages of unidentified pronouns, names without faces, and a setting that only slowly begins to come into focus. As if gradually waking us from a nightmare-filled sleep, the narrator forces us to struggle as we order our reality. Past and present. Here and there. Us and them. Binary oppositions are compressed, making us question their significance.

The first paragraph of the second chapter, a description of an automobile which sounds as if it were cut and pasted from a tourist’s South African Cultural Guide, grounds the reader in fact. It is in the second chapter that the narration provides some of the back story. We learn that Bam Smales, a successful white Johannesburg architect, his wife, Maureen, and their three children have been rescued from violent revolution by their servant of fifteen years, a black man named July. In order to escape the burning, looting, and killing in the city, the six huddled together inside the Smales’s “bakkie” and rode dirt roads into the bush. The journey, lasting three days and covering more than 600 kilometers, ended at July’s home, the home of his people, the home he had been allowed to visit only every other year.

Gordimer devotes most of July’s People‘s 160 pages to the development of the relationship between Maureen and July. Early in the novel, July comes to the Smales’s hut to fetch their clothes for his women to wash. The scene, which is the first to feature private interaction between July and Maureen, establishes the complexity of their association. Maureen, a woman who prides herself on her liberal beliefs and conscientious treatment of others, first responds by taking responsibility. “I can do it myself,” she says (27). July, a proud man who has served in order to provide for his family, denies her. Their conversation quickly becomes one of payment for services provided. A mutual, though unspoken, agreement is made: both will attempt to maintain their familiar roles. The result is an awkward moment when both realize July’s practicality and foresight, both understand that he is their savior. Despite her progressive politics, Maureen gives him the clothes, agrees to pay, and then seems surprised to find the villagers carrying their crumpled money with them; surprised, actually, to learn that they are “able to make the connection between the abstract and the concrete” (28).

The narration of July’s People speaks most often from Maureen’s perspective. As the novel begins, she imagines a bond between July and herself; “he and she understood each other well,” she thinks (13). But time in the bush strips away all certainties. Reading a novel, a past-time of hers, becomes impossible: “She was already not what she was. No fiction could compete” (29). She admits to looting (38). She chides herself for the superficiality of her experience: “Fangalo would have made more sense than ballet,” she tells Bam (45). Finally, Maureen rises one night, literally strips herself of all that belonged to her past, and stands nude in the rain. In this baptism, Maureen is described as being close to the night, her body the same temperature as the rain, as if she had been transformed into a living representation of South Africa’s confused present (48).

But like Bhabha’s deconstruction of terminology, Gordimer’s baptism reveals the complexities of the archetype. Maureen is transformed — made new — but she is not awarded the assumed salvation. Instead, she becomes only more aware of her past self. Soon after Maureen’s re-birth, the narration becomes one with her, offering the reader Maureen’s “humane creed” (64). “[It] depended on validities staked on a belief in the absolute nature of intimate relationships between human beings. If people don’t all experience emotional satisfaction and deprivation in the same way, what claim can there be for equality of need?” (64-65). This creed, however, is problematized by Maureen’s new awareness. “The absolute nature she and her kind were scrupulously just in granting to everybody,” she realizes, “was no more than the price of the master bedroom and the clandestine hotel tariff” (65). Her roles — wife, mother, master — are suddenly as arbitrary and predetermined as that which she had assigned to July.

It is interesting to note that Maureen’s thoughts about her creed are brought on by her preoccupation with July. She tries to imagine him. She wonders about his town woman, whether he loved her, whether he would have liked to have brought her to his home instead. Maureen’s thoughts are like those of a jealous lover. Although Maureen and July never literally share a sexual experience, the language depicting their private interaction is laced with a conscious eroticism. As Maureen stands nude in the rain, she sees and hears July. There is a “dimension between her and some element in the rain-hung darkness” and he is described as “savouring” and “burning” (48). When they meet to discuss who will hold the keys to the bakkie, an obvious symbol of power, they share the shame of their “affair.” “His chin was raised, trying to sense rather than see if Bam was in the hut behind. Her silence was the answer: not back; they both knew the third one had gone off” (69). Removed from the politically and socially accepted ideology which had governed her thoughts and actions, Maureen imagines herself as the peak of a triangle, her loyalties and desires torn between the blond man “back there” and her “frog prince, savior, July.”

Their conversation dissolves into mean-spirited insults. Again like lovers, Maureen and July seem to know exactly which words will strike deepest. July chastises her for her dehumanizing lack of trust. “You looking everywhere, see if everything it’s still all right. Myself, I’m not saying you’re not a good madam — but you don’t say you trust for me. — It was a command” (70). He throws “boy” at her, a term of contempt for them both, and again shifts the topic to money, “refusing to meet her on any but the lowest category of understanding” (71). Truly hurt, Maureen retaliates by mentioning Ellen, the town woman, a rival. In doing so, “they stepped across fifteen years of no-man’s land, her words shoved them and they were together, duellists who will feel each other’s breath before they turn away” (72). But again, Gordimer refuses to allow Maureen’s “triumph” to simplify their relationship. Although some ideological boundaries between the two have been blurred, others are drawn with each of Maureen’s awakenings. In a beautifully effective narrative shift, Gordimer shows Maureen — and us — the consequences of her transgression (I love this line): “A servant replied uninterestedly to a dutiful enquiry on the part of the good madam who knows better than to expose herself to an answer from the real facts of his life” (73).

The two separate, but Maureen again searches July out a few days later. She is drawn to him, leaving her husband behind. “Maureen felt it had been decided she had to come look for July; helpless before the circumstantial evidence that they were now alone, again” (95). Like reconciling lovers, they speak casually of mundane topics, both hoping to ignore all that had passed between them. But their civility is short lived. When July denies her any interaction with the women of the village, Maureen surprises them both with a venomous threat: “Are you afraid I’m going to tell her [your wife] something?” (98). Again Maureen fires back her knowledge of Ellen; again she is surprised by July’s response. “Before her,” Gordimer writes, “he brought his right fist down on his breast. She felt the thud as fear in her own” (98). It is the first time that Maureen ever fears a man. Her husband, “the architect lying on a bed in a mud hut,” is an anachronism, “a presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for” (98). But July threatens something within her, awakens another part of herself which she fears:

How was she to have known, until she came here, that the special consideration she had shown for his dignity as a man, while he was by definition a servant, would become his humiliation itself, the one thing that was to say between them that had any meaning.
Fifteen Years
your boy
you satisfy (98)

Gordimer emphasizes place and time. It is only here and now, “in this interregnum,” that it is possible for Maureen to recognize any of the complexities which make it impossible for her to ever really know July.

Maureen also recognizes that her interaction with July is effected greatly by language, by their inability to discuss “even the most commonplace of abstractions” (96). Gordimer describes July’s English as that which is “learned in kitchens, factories and mines. It was based on orders and responses, not the exchange of ideas and feelings” (96). In his discussion of the “national narrative,” Bhabha finds language to be the most appropriate analogy for the ambivalence of modern society. He cites at length the work of Claude Lefort:

The enigma of language — namely that it is both internal and external to the speaking subject, that there is an articulation of the self with others which marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control-is concealed by the representation of a place ‘outside’ — language from which it could be generated. (146)

Defined by a language external to his self and outside of his control, July is a construct, a patchwork of stereotypes and naïve assumptions. Conflicts arise in July’s People when Maureen becomes aware of her role in his construction, and when she realizes that her role is changing. Lefort acknowledges the contradiction inherent in his enigma. “Only the authority of the master allows the contradiction to be concealed, but he is himself an object of representation; presented as possessor of the rule, he allows the contradiction to appear through himself” (146-47). As Steven Clingman points out in The Novels of Nadine Gordimer, Maureen’s fear of July is simply the horrifying realization that even her language is a daily medium of his oppression (200). Removed from an ideology which has arbitrarily assigned power to her and those like her, Maureen is exposed, shown to be as much an “object of representation” as July.

The final meeting between July and Maureen is also the most poignant. By the end of the novel all authority and power, symbolized by the bakkie and the gun, have been transferred to July’s people. Bam weeps openly in front of his children. He and Maureen interact “as divorced people might” (140). Their relationship becomes one composed of indeterminate pronouns — “Her. Not ‘Maureen’. Not ‘His wife’” (105). Maureen goes to July and demands that he return the weapon. This time she approaches him as one conscious of a shared past that can never be reclaimed. She flings “back at him his uprightness, his moralizing — whatever the rigmarole of form he had always insisted on establishing between them” (149). But like dry ice that evaporates instantly when removed from its secure environment, their posturing dissolves quickly in the bush. Again, each becomes frustrated with the other. Clingman calls the language of the scene a battlefield — “as much a battlefield as the realm of private and political relations it helps both constitute and conceal” (200). Maureen accuses July of stealing rubbish from her home, then tells him of the shame she felt because of it. All he can manage in response is, “You” before slipping into the eloquence of his native tongue. Clingman aptly characterizes July’s furious venting as a “machine gun barrage” of words (200). July’s weapon hits its mark.

[Maureen] understood although she knew no word. Understood everything: what he had had to be, how she had covered up to herself for him, in order for him to be her idea of him. But for himself — to be intelligent, honest, dignified for her was nothing; his measure as a man was taken elsewhere and by others. She was not his mother, his wife, his sister, his friend, his people. (152)

Gordimer completes the scene by surrounding Maureen and July with the evening,”as if mistaking them for lovers” (153). Maureen strikes a grotesque pose against the hood of the bakkie, another message which means nothing to him. Defeated, she returns to Bam and asks, “Was it like this for him?” (154).

Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier is reborn as a new creature, “opening [her] eyes in a familiar world that [she] had never known before” (124). Her awakening comes as she begins her swim towards death. Maureen Smales’s final destination is slightly more ambiguous, but no more promising. July’s People ends when a helicopter of unknown origins flies over the village and lands nearby. Maureen, acting on instinct like an animal, runs toward the sound, although she is unaware “whether it holds saviours or murderers; and — even if she were to have identified the markings — for whom” (158). Gordimer has referred to the finale as a Pascalian wager, “Salvation exists or doesn’t it?” (Wagner, 112). Stripped of all certainties, removed from all roles and expectations, and armed with only a new self-awareness, Maureen flees both the old which is dead and the new which has just been born.

Works Cited

Bazin, Nancy Topping, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds. Conversations with Nadine Gordimer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening and Selected Stories. New York: Signet, 1976.

Clingman, Stephen. “The Subject of Revolution: Burger’s Daughter and July’s People.” The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986. 170-204.

Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People. New York: Penguin, 1982.

Wagner, Kathrin. Rereading Nadine Gordimer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

January 14, 2000
Fefu and Her Friends (1977)

By Maria Irene Fornes

To be quite honest, I don’t get Fornes’s play. But in this case (as opposed to a few other works I’ve read which have left me similarly perplexed), I feel somewhat driven to figure it out. I’ve decided to begin with the first clue Fornes gives us, the title. Following are my general impressions of Fefu and her friends:

Fefu

Fefu’s is the first voice we hear, and quite an opening line it is. “My husband married me,” she tells Cindy and Christina, “to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are.” This comment is very much at the heart of Fefu’s own conflict. In the opening act, she explains her fascination with revulsion, contrasting a “smooth and dry and clean” exterior with the slimy, fungal, worm-infested underside hidden beneath. Despite her attempts to disguise her own self-loathing — “Well, who is ready for lunch?” she asks, quickly changing the subject — it is the exposure of that dangerous underside that determines so much of the action in the play. Fefu describes this danger that she feels threatening her: “It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest . . . If you don’t recognize it . . . it eats you.” It’s in these moments of honest reflection that Fefu speaks most eloquently, as if Fornes is representing Fefu’s divided identity along linguistic lines. Her “smooth exterior” operates in the meaningless language of small talk — Did you have enough coffee? Did you find the sugar? Blah blah blah blah. But when admitting her own pain and fears, Fefu’s language takes on a noticeable mechanical formality — that which is exposed to the exterior. it comes forth with bitterness and it’s erratic. they can put themselves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. The ideas expressed here are almost too eloquently articulated to sound natural on stage, as if they had been carefully rehearsed again and again. This reveals, I think, Fefu’s internal preoccupation with her other “life.”

Fornes makes it clear, however, that Fefu’s conflict is not entirely internal. That double-barrel shotgun, described even in the opening stage direction, is a very real, violent presence throughout the play. It reappears periodically. Fefu fires it at Phillip, a man who, though never seen, is an important character. Cindy tells the story of how a similar gun put Julia in her wheelchair. And, of course, Fefu and Her Friends ends with Fefu’s killing of both a white rabbit and Julia with a single shot. The shotgun adds a terrifying inevitability to the play — “I feel danger lurking,” says Christina; “She’s been hiding all day,” answers Cindy. When Fefu fires the weapon at her husband, we are set on edge, waiting for it to be fired again, guessing who its target might be. And Fefu’s explanation of her and Phillip’s game only raises more questions: What is at the root of such violent “play”? Are those slugs real, blanks, or possibly strictly metaphoric? Does her firing of the gun help Fefu combat the danger of her hidden life? Fornes’s use of the shotgun, the play’s only step away from fairly strict realism, seems to reinforce the reality of the threat posed to women. Self-loathing. Self-Doubt. These traits which, at least in this play, are particular to women, are viewed by Fornes as the real danger, a danger worth combating at all cost.

Cindy

Cindy is the lone eyewitness to Julia’s accident. She is genuinely confused by the event, grounded as she is in reality (perhaps acting as a surrogate for us and our own confusion). She even asks Christina, “How do you know if a person is hit by a bullet?” in an attempt to explain away Julia’s suffering. Cindy has her only moment on center stage during the “In the Study” scene. There, she delivers a long, detailed description of a dream, one filled with powerful, authoritarian men who pursue and violate her. Finally, she finds the strength to scream at the men. “Stop and listen to me,” she yells, garnering the attention and “admiration” of those around her. But she is unable to maintain that strength:

Then, I said to him, “Restrain yourself.” I wanted to say respect me. I wasn’t sure whether the words coming out my mouth were what I wanted to say. I turned to ask my sister. The young man was bending over and trembling in mad rage. Another man told me to run before the young man tried to kill me.

Again, Fornes intertwines masculine violence and a woman’s inability to say what she wants to say, admit what she wants to be, or acknowledge how she really feels. Here, the uniqueness and brilliance of Fornes’s staging is on display. Rather than allowing Cindy and Christina to discuss the significance of the dream, Fornes interrupts them with Fefu’s false front. “Who’s for a game of croquet?” she asks. Cindy and Christina follow Fefu’s example, making a joke of the nightmare.

Christina

“We are made of putty. Aren’t we?” I’d love to hear Christina’s comment performed. So much of its meaning is tied to the actress’s inflection. Equal parts statement and question, Christina’s line can be read as a hopeless admission of an individual’s inability to shape herself. It can also be read as a sudden realization, as if the play’s events have awakened in Christina an understanding of the forces working against her. If “Aren’t we?” were stressed, the line might also offer the possibility of an exception, an opportunity to mold one’s self. I’m not even sure what to make of the “we” in both sentences. Is she referring to all of humanity? To women specifically? To only Cindy and herself? As with her line, I’ve had difficulty understanding Christina’s role. Throughout most of the play she operates as a plot device, a character whose main function is to elicit the comments of others and to advance the story. Even her longest speech tells us as much about Fefu as it does about herself. Her attempt to explain her impression of Fefu is punctuated with starts and stops, as if she is unable to even describe someone whose “mind is adventurous.” She is a “conformist,” perhaps simply a reflection of the status quo. Again, Fornes doesn’t allow her characters to move beyond their first impressions. When Christina finishes her speech, she asks Cindy if she understands. Cindy simply replies, “Yes, I do” and the subject is quickly changed.

This inability (unwillingness?) of the women to move beyond a superficial explanation of their feelings is emerging as a central theme of my reading. It has reminded me of one of Fefu’s opening speeches, a speech which until this moment I have been unable to explain:

[Men] are well together. Women are not . . . Women are restless with each other . . . either chattering to keep themselves from making eye contact, or else, if they don’t chatter, they avert their eyes . . . as if a god once said, “and if they recognize each other, the world will be blown apart.”

It’s interesting that Christina is the only character given an opportunity to respond to Fefu’s criticism of women. “I too have wished for that trust men have for each other,” she says. “I know I don’t have it.” Christina seems to be the character most willing to “avert her eyes,” to ignore her own problems and the problems of others. Fefu’s response to Christina’s sincere admission of an emptiness in her life is simply, “Hmm. Well, I have to see how my toilet is doing.”

Julia

Julia can perhaps best be described as a victim, a poor creature destroyed by forces beyond her control. Fornes seems to use her as a warning of what fate potentially awaits all women. It is in her depiction of Julia (closely tied as she is to the shotgun), that Fornes slips most comfortably into the surreal. One stage direction for “In the Bedroom” states, “there are dry leaves on the floor although the time is not fall.” Fornes offers no explanation, although the direction is laced with standard symbolic references — death, the end of a cycle, the inevitable result of life. Julia’s hallucinations offer a similar dream-like surrealism. The scene is like a battle between Julia and the gender messages she has received throughout life. “The human being is of the masculine gender,” she cries:

Woman is not a human being. She is: 1 — A mystery. 2 — Another species. 3 — As yet undefined. 4 — Unpredictable . . . Women’s spirit is sexual. That is why after coitus they dwell in nefarious feelings. Because that is their natural habitat . . . And [women] take those feelings with them to the afterlife where they corrupt the heavens, and they are sent to hell where through suffering they may shed those feelings and return to earth as a man.

Julia’s self-loathing becomes violent — her head moves as if she were slapped — and illustrates the similarities between her and Fefu.

Obviously, it would take me another five or six pages to discuss each character in depth (and I was really looking forward to doing Emma). So instead, I want to shift focus here to the play’s final scene. I’ve reread the final four pages several times, but am still having great difficulty reconciling everything. The finale begins with Julia’s and Fefu’s conversation. Fornes again reinforces the similarities between the two characters. Fefu tells Julia, “I think you know . . . I look into your eyes and I know what you see. It’s death.” Fornes alludes repeatedly to Fefu’s earlier comments about “averting eyes.” Fefu grabs Julia, forcing eye contact, but Julia just turns her head or closes her eyes. The scene becomes increasingly dramatic, Julia taking on the epic proportions of a martyr. And imbedded in their dialogue are comments about Fefu’s marriage to Phillip, about their problems, about her need for him. There seems to be some connection there — Fefu’s self-loathing is a product of her reliance on someone else to bring her happiness, to mold her. But that still doesn’t answer the bigger question, which is why shooting the rabbit saved Fefu and finished Julia. My only answer right now is that her action — her willingness to fight back, her desire to confront truth, her need to look Julia in the eye — is the key. Julia was perhaps destroyed by passivity. Dammit. I tried.

January 12, 2000
Man of Mode (1676)

By George Etherege

In the third act of Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Young Bellair is surprised to learn that Harriet has as little interest in him (her intended husband) as he has in her. “‘Tis not unnatural for you women to be a little angry, you miss a conquest,” Bellair says, “though you would slight the poor man were he in power.” His comment acknowledges a gender-based power struggle that drives much of the action in Restoration comedy. The conflict often takes the form of economics versus sexual favor—the men wielding the former and women the latter. In this case, upon first meeting his intended, Bellair seems capable of imagining Harriet only as a scheming tease, the stereo-typical Woman who uses her own sexuality—foregrounding, all the while, Man’s helpless subservience to it—as a means of manipulation. Harriet, likewise, views Bellair as only another in a long succession of dominant, patriarchal figures, a man who has simply purchased her future from Lady Woodvill, the woman who controlled her past.

When both Bellair and Harriet discover that their preconceptions about the other are unfounded, they are forced to improvise. They struggle to create a discourse, one free of sexual tension and power conflict, within which a young man and woman might converse openly and honestly. Harriet’s response to Bellair offers a glimpse into their dramatic solution. “There are some it may be have an eye like Bart’lomew, big enough for the whole fair,” she says, “but I am not of the number, and you may keep your gingerbread.” Harriet’s allusion to Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair becomes more significant as the scene continues, for it demonstrates both characters’ familiarity with the stage and with its nightly demonstrations of the performance of Love and courtship.

And it is, in fact, a performance that Harriet and Bellair act for their small audience, one consisting only of the two scheming parents. Both actors are well-studied in their roles; they move fluently through the gender-determined rituals. Harriet tells her ‘pretend’ lover, “I will lean against this wall, and look bashfully down upon my fan, while you like an amorous spark modishly entertain me.” Bellair responds with a slight tilt of his head, a nervous playing with his belt, and a “sparkish” smile. Their performance is a success, convincing its viewers of the players’ growing affections. Even Harriet and Bellair seem impressed with their new-found skill. After watching his partner fluctuate expertly between fits of laughter and moments of grave reserve, Young Bellair commends her, saying, “admirably well acted.” She responds with witty pride: “I think I am pretty apt at these matters!”

Harriet is a fascinating character. She possesses the abundant wit of a Restoration ‘rake,’ along with the beauty and wealth of its traditional heroine. Significantly, she is also an outsider in London; but she is hardly the naïve Country Wife. Instead, Etherege uses Harriet’s perspective to comment on the superficiality of ‘high’ social interaction. In the third scene of Act III, Harriet, referring to High Park, says, “I abominate the dull diversions there, the formal bows, the affected smiles, the silly by-words, and amorous tweers, in passing.” Throughout The Man of Mode, the laughs come at the expense of such affectations, a trademark of the Comedy of Manners. But by staging his characters in a play within the play and by forcing his audience to oberve other observers, Etherege extends the satire, commenting directly on the Restoration stage itself. When Dorimant claims, “‘Tis not likely a man should be fond of seeing a damned old play when there is a new one acted,” (IV, ii) his metaphor again reinforces the similarities between the performances on stage and in the bedroom. But it also, I think, raises the question of what part the theater plays in supporting, if not actually determining, the roles of men and women in social interaction. Ultimately, the prospect of a platonic relationship leaves Harriet and Young Bellair with no option but play-acting. They slip into the only roles they feel are available to them. By showing this directly on stage, Etherege makes his play self-reflective, forcing us to acknowledge the influence of popular images on our own daily performances.

January 8, 2000
Nervous Conditions (1988)

By Tsitsi Dangarembga

I can’t seem to get an image from Michelle Cliff’s “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” out of my mind. She tells a story from her school days of classmate who had a grand mal seizure during the morning singing of hymns. “While she flailed on the stone floor,” writes Cliff, “I wondered what the mistresses would do. We sang ‘Faith of Our Father,’ and watched our classmate as her eyes rolled back in her head.” The white mistresses offered only their typical response as aid: “keep singing.” The grotesque hypocrisy of these missionaries leaves me, as a Christian, frustrated and angry. Reading Nervous Conditions only makes me madder.

Early in the novel, Tambu tells the story of her Uncle Babamukuru’s rise to success. In doing so, she makes her message clear: “endure and obey, for there is no other way.” By twisting the words of the popular Christian hymn, Dangarembga gives the reader a glimpse of the colonized view of faith. Christian love is replaced with obedience, hope is abandoned for endurance, and redemption is more like punishment. In Postcolonial Representations, Francoise Lionnet writes of how the Christian era transformed traditional representations of the body (the Greco-Roman emphasis on health and beauty) to those that emphasize suffering and death (Christ being the ideal representation). “The body,” writes Lionnet, “thereby becomes a text on which pain can be read as a necessary physical step on the road to a moral state, a destiny, or a way of being” (88). Necessary? It repulses me to think so.

Yet throughout Nervous Conditions Lionnet’s thoughts are exemplified as Tambu, Babamukuru, and the other African characters are dehumanized by the whites. Baba is called a “good boy, cultivatable in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” (such a beautifully detestable metaphor). He is forced to take his family to England so that his position might not be given to “another promising young African.” And he is taught to breed “good African children.” Similarly, when Tambu receives the great honor of attending Sacred Heart (the Roman Catholic Church being the one which creates the most virtue), she is quickly relegated to a cramped room with the other Africans. Those professing to be servants of God, charitable workers, treat the Other collectively. There is no Tambu, Nyasha, Baba, or even Zimbabwean. There is only African.

The other snapshots of religion offered in Nervous Conditions are equally disturbing. Through Tambu we see a child’s image of God. She speaks of being caned on Monday mornings for not attending the previous day’s Sunday School class. She waits in line as she and the other Africans are inspected for missing buttons and dirty socks. She sees her beloved uncle chastise his daughter for the embarrassment she causes him at church. And worst of all, she accepts it.

Tambu (representative, obviously, of all colonized) is a character fighting to find her place in two worlds. She struggles to reconcile the traditional beliefs of the homestead with the teachings of the missionaries (and their contradictions). Her family says grace to begin a celebration then offers “much clapping of hands” and “praising of the gods for their providence.” When Tambu eats dinner with her aunt and cousin she only knows that their prayer has ended when she hears “Amen.” This white God, it appears, only hears the white language.

The results, unfortunately for the colonizer and colonized, are miscommunication, confusion, and damage. For Tambu, this means that she mistakes the message of the whites for the message of the Bible. (Actions, they say, speak louder than words.) It’s no wonder that she is unable to comprehend the stories of the Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene. Undeserved forgiveness is as alien to her as physical resurrection.

Trinh T. Minh-ha redefines anthropology as “gossiping,”—us talking about them. She criticizes anthropologists for their “prejudices as well as scientifical-professional-scholarly-careerist hypocrisy” and recommends that they(we) write “close to the other.” In my discussion of religion, this means (I think) that it is ridiculous for whites to plan ways of converting the natives (to use a cliché). They(we) should instead examine critically what they believe and live accordingly. It seems that this is what Tambu begins to do at the close of Nervous Conditions. A dramatic change occurs when Baba decides that Jeremiah and Mainini must marry: Tambu disagrees. She struggles with her opinions of Baba and her understanding of sin (“It had to be avoided because it was deadly, I could see it. It was definitely black, we were taught”—wow). She struggles with the notions of witch doctors and marriages. But she is persuaded by her family pride, by the thought of her parents made comic relief, by the absurdity of the idea. In one passage, Tambu examines her beliefs and begins to grow:

Babamukuru did not know how I had suffered over the question of that wedding. He did not know how my mind had raced and spun and ended up splitting into two disconnected entities that had long, frightening arguments with each other, very vocally, in my head, about what ought to be done, the one half maniacally insisting on going, the other half equally maniacally refusing to consider it. I knew it was not evil to have endured all that terror in order to be sure of my decision, so when Nyasha asked whether I would go, I was able to tell her clamly, ‘No.’ But I accepted that I had forfeited my right to Babamukuru’s charity.

January 6, 2000
In the Time of Butterflies (1994)

By Julia Alvarez

The film Heavenly Creatures begins with a terrifying scene of two young girls, both covered in scratches and blood, running through the woods screaming. “Help! It’s Mama!” one of the girls cries. I’m reminded of the film because, like In the Time of Butterflies, it manipulates its audience by introducing them to the tragedy of the story before developing its characters. As I sat, on the verge of tears, in the library finishing Alvarez’s novel, I was struck by how powerfully these two works had affected me. It would seem that by preparing the reader, or viewer, for the inevitable violence, that the blow would somehow be softened. “I saw the marks on Minerva’s throat,” recounts Dede, “fingerprints sure as day on Mate’s pale neck. They also clubbed them, I could see that when I went to cut their hair.” Only one paragraph is reserved for the murder. So why was I crying?

Heavenly Creatures cuts directly from the young girls screams to a typical day in a 1950s New Zealand school. We instantly recognize one of the students, although she is now combed and cleaned and properly attired in her school uniform. She (we learn her name is Pauline) is then introduced to a new student. Juliet is the daughter of a noted Oxford professor and, like Pauline, has a penchant for story telling and trouble making. The remainder of the film is a disturbing look at the development of their friendship. We are told the story through Pauline’s diaries, which we are informed are not only true but were also the most damning evidence in the trial against the two girls. Knowing their fate, knowing that they would be convicted of killing Pauline’s mother, changes our perceptions as viewers. Instead of laughing at the bizarre, imaginary world of their childish games, we are repulsed by the dysfunctional homes that drove them to it. Instead of being charmed by the innocent love shared by the two girls, we are disgusted by its overt sexuality. The film’s ultimate and inevitable violence rivals that of A Clockwork Orange for its abhorrent realism. We have been expecting it for 90 minutes, but we’re still unprepared.

“Why, they inevitably ask in one form or another, why are you the one who survived?” (page 5). Before meeting the sisters of In the Time of Butterflies, before even learning their names, we know that they have lived lives and died deaths worth telling. Then, through Dede’s stories and Mate’s journals, through Patria’s and Minerva’s voices, the women begin to take form. We see their home, their family. We hear them laugh and watch them play games. Each woman develops a unique personality, becomes an individual. There are jealousies and rivalries. There are volleyball games and graduations. Each woman loves and begins a family of her own, but their stories are tainted — “the one who survived.”

Anxiously awaiting their tragic deaths, I became much more aware of the injustices in the Mirabal sisters’ lives. Lina Lovaton’s fall seemed their destiny. History books with “you-know-who’s” face on them and the mandatory portraits of him in every home made me claustrophobic, made their plight seem inescapable. The SIM smoking cigarettes outside the Mirabal home. The political sermons in local churches. The black Volkswagens around every corner. Even Lio and Manolo troubled me. “Stay away from them,” I kept thinking to myself. “Why must you kill them with your revolutionary ideas?”

As an undergraduate, I took only the required Western Civ and geography classes. My interests rarely strayed from my own small world. Apathy, I guess. Boredom and comfort, as well. But I do believe that I was also driven away from world events by the lifelessness with which they were presented. Perhaps I’ve been desensitized to suffering (as many sociologists and politicians, I’m sure, would agree). But there seems to be a power in story telling which conquers that apathy. Though the Mirabal sisters are fictionalized, Alvarez’s one paragraph account of their brutal murders affected me more than countless hours of evening news coverage have. The piles of bodies and the weeping mothers become broadcast images from another world completely disconnected from my own. But Dede’s worry and hysteria and guilt become mine. Alvarez’s stories force me to confront the lives and deaths rather than switch the channel.

Trinh, T. Minh-ha mentions a tale by Leslie Marmon Silko of a witch who, while at a contest of witches, frightens her audience by simply telling a story. “It isn’t so funny. . . Take it back,” they ask. “It’s already turned loose / It’s already coming / It can’t be called back,” she answers. Trinh writes that a story is not just a story. “Once the forces have been aroused and set into motion, they can’t simply be stopped at someone’s request. Once told, the story is bound to circulate; humanized, it may have a temporary end, but its effects linger on and its end is never truly an end.” Humanized. The answer. The power to know someone, “to revive. . . the forgotten, dead-ended, turned-into-stone parts of ourselves.” The Mirabals have become friends lost to a struggle that I know nothing about. Their story is a voice that I had never heard. And they’ve left me asking questions.

January 2, 2000