Long Pauses

Tag: Decade: 1990s

  • Good Men, Good Women (1995)

    Good Men, Good Women (1995)

    Dir. by Hou Hsiao-Hsien

    Images: Hou cuts constantly between scenes set in contemporary Taiwan, which are in full color, and scenes from the film-within-the-film, which are a tinted black and white. This allows the director to be more traditionally “cinematic” in the filmed footage — beautiful shots of trees, prison hallways, light fixtures. Favorite images: the self-reflexive shots of the actors in costume posing for photos; all of the moments that reveal the emotional intimacy between Liang and Ah Wei; the amazing move from black and white back to color in the penultimate shot.

    • • •

    The first cut in Good Men, Good Women establishes several dichotomies that, over the next 100 minutes, are beautifully dismantled for explicitly political purposes. The film opens with a long, static, black and white shot of an ancient mainland village. Toward us marches a small group of peasants (we are led to believe), who sing joyfully as they snake closer to the camera before finally exiting to the right of the frame. The sudden cut to a fluorescent apartment in contemporary Taiwan is made all the more jarring by the obnoxious sound of a clamoring telephone. A young woman rises slowly from her bed, retrieves the phone (no answer), sips from bottled water, then tears a sheet of paper from her fax machine. The remainder of the film rewrites the forgotten narratives that connect these seemingly opposed worlds: mainland China and Taiwan, the past and present, truth and fiction, the personal and political.

    The young woman, we eventually learn, is Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh), an actress who is preparing for her role as Chiang Bi-Yu in an upcoming film called, interestingly enough, Good Men, Good Women. This film within the film tells the true-life story of Chiang and her husband, Chung Hao-Tung (Giong Lim), who moved to the mainland in 1940 in order to join the anti-Japanese resistance movement. Chiang would eventually be forced to give up her children for the cause, and would be widowed by it as well. By cutting constantly between the “real world” of Liang’s life and black and white footage from the completed film, Hou blurs the boundaries that might otherwise separate Taiwan from its past, the actress from her role.

    And yet even that complex description is a gross oversimplification of Hou’s narrative, which further problematizes any simple notions of the “present” by adding to the mix sequences from Liang’s recent past. Five years earlier, she had been a promiscuous, drug-addicted bar maid, who had found solace only in her relationship with the surprisingly tender gangster, Ah Wei (Jack Kao). Liang is forced to revisit this period of her life when a stranger steals her diary and begins faxing pages of it to her. It’s a remarkable story-telling device, allowing Hou to sound echoes of Chiang’s experience through these various versions of the actress who plays her. The women (all played, of course, by Inoh) share so much in common — in particular, the timeless sorrow over lost lovers and children — but, as the film forces us to acknowledge, the selfless struggle of Chiang’s generation has been realized, tragically, in only the empty consumerism of Liang’s.

    In lesser hands, a film like Good Men, Good Women would likely collapse into either a turgid technical exercise or a vehicle for didactic moralizing, but Hou avoids both traps by investing his characters with recognizable life. The film’s most joyful moments emerge from Liang’s and Ah Wei’s lazy familiarity with one another. Like Godard thirty years before, Hou allows his camera to capture the Gangster and His Girl at their most ordinary — impromptu dances in their bedroom, everyday conversations about their future. When watching Flowers of Shanghai and Puppetmaster, I am often frustrated by Hou’s elliptical style, but here — perhaps because of the nonlinear narrative — I feel as though I am being granted brief glimpses into beautifully rich lives. Knowing that Liang’s happiness, like Chiang’s, will be short-lived makes her/their struggle all the more compelling.

    Good Men, Good Women would make a textbook study of aesthetic harmony in function and form. Unlike so many recent American films that have reordered the traditional narrative in service of empty excitements or trite analyses of “postmodern truth,” Hou’s cuts and splices history into a well-told tale, revealing those relationships between action and consequence that are so easily elided in our short-term, soundbite memories. Like fellow Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang’s Vive L’Amour, Good Men, Good Women concludes with a remarkable image of mourning, but here the scene is tempered by some promise of potential change. The film ends as it began: with the sight of those marchers, their identities now revealed to us, and with the joyful sound of their voices echoing through the mountains.

  • Grace, Too

    Grace, Too

    I have been following The Tragically Hip since becoming enamored of Atom Egoyan’s film, The Sweet Hereafter. His use of the Hip’s “Courage” is pitch perfect. Although I’ve never had a chance to see them in concert — the Canadian band seldom makes trips to the American South (and I don’t really blame them) — this version of “Grace, Too” just kills me. It has the ecstatic energy of the best live performances, but it’s something about that bass line and the way that Gord Downie unleashes the line, “Armed with will and determination / And grace, too,” that rips me up.

  • La Promesse (1996)

    La Promesse (1996)

    Dir. by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

    Images: Handheld camerawork is most affecting when it catches Igor and Assita in medium shots and (rare) close-ups. The Dardennes’ style reminds me of Dumont’s, though they don’t share his fondness for self-consciously “cinematic” long shots. Favorite images: Igor whitening his teeth in front of a mirror; Igor sobbing on Assita’s shoulder; the look on Igor’s face as he sits in a bar, drinking with Roger and two women; Roger stretching out his hand, asking for his glasses.

    • • •

    “How can you be guiltier than anyone in the eyes of all? There are murderers and brigands. What crimes have you committed to blame yourself more than everyone else?”

    “My dear mother, my deepest love, know that everyone is guilty in everyone’s eyes. I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel that is so, and it torments me.”

    Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne cite the above exchange from Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as the genesis of La Promesse, their first feature to garner much attention in America. Marcel’s guilt and torment is played out onscreen in the person of Igor (Jérémie Rénier), the fifteen-year-old son of a slumlord who traffics in illegal immigrants. When one of their tenants dies in an accident, Igor is forced to confront the consequences of his and his father’s actions while fulfilling “the promise” he makes to the dying man: protecting the man’s wife and infant son becomes for Igor both a burden and a vehicle for possible redemption.

    La Promesse is a wonderful film whose beauty is born from the Dardennes’ suffusion of honesty and moral complexity into standard narrative conventions: the simple two-act structure, Igor’s bildungsroman, the basic quest for human connection. It came as little surprise when I learned that the Dardennes had worked in documentaries for two decades before moving to narrative films. While watching La Promesse I was reminded most often of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Bruno Dumont, filmmakers whose careers traveled similar trajectories. Like theirs, the Dardennes’ cinematic language is composed of simple observations, deliberately eschewing the conventions of classic continuity editing. I can’t think of a single instance of a shot/reverse-shot, for instance. Instead, the handheld camera lingers at a distance, sometimes peering over shoulders and only rarely moving in for a close-up (and even then only on Igor and Assita, the widow who becomes Igor’s maternal surrogate).

    The performances are likewise completely natural—so much so, in fact, that I was surprised to discover such extensive filmographies for both Rénier and Olivier Gourmet, whose turn as Roger, Igor’s father, is utterly convincing. I had assumed that the Dardennes, like Dumont and Robert Bresson (who casts a long shadow here), had employed nonprofessional actors. One of my favorite scenes takes place in a bar, where after singing together, Igor and Roger sit down for drinks with two women. We have learned in an earlier scene that Igor is a virgin, but Rénier’s uncomfortable and self-conscious performance here makes such exposition unnecessary. So “real” is Igor, in fact, that I still find it difficult to believe that Rénier has become something of a teen idol.

    The combined force of the Dardennes’ cinematographic style and the natural performances can be felt most powerfully in a few key scenes. In the first, Igor lunges for Assita, who has rejected his help, understandably suspicious of his motives. Instead of fighting her, though, as I had expected, he clings fiercely to her, burying his face in her shoulder and sobbing. I can’t quite explain my response to the scene. I would slip inevitably into the banal if I launched into some discussion of maternal longing, and yet that basic, inarticulate desire for human communion (or comfort or sympathy or love or…) is precisely what the scene communicates. The same could be said of the requisite showdown between father and son, which is staged brilliantly and which generates more suspense than I would have expected from such a film. By crafting Roger and Igor with such care, the Dardennes are allowed to turn what is too often a black and white “coming of age” scene into a confrontation whose emotional and moral consequences must be felt by the viewers, despite our best efforts to avoid them. It’s no coincidence that for most of the scene our focus is directed toward Roger, the man who is being rejected and the man for whom we can still find sympathy despite his often despicable behavior.

    I had hoped that by this point in my response I would have “discovered” a solution to the enigmatic ending of La Promesse. Jonathon Rosenbaum apparently had the same problem, writing, “I find it impossible to imagine what transpires between Assita and Igor after the final shot.” I’m going to fall back on an old trick and say, “Well, maybe that’s the point.” The closest analogue I can find is in one of my favorite novels, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. (Am I really quoting myself?)

    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.

    Igor and Assita are likewise transformed by their experience, suddenly unsure of their roles, their futures, their relationship. I wanted so badly for the Dardennes to cut to a reaction shot of Assita so that I could somehow gauge her emotions, but that desire was rightly frustrated. Instead, they give us only a long shot of two people walking away from us: an African widow with child and the young man who she allows to carry her bag.

  • American Pastoral (1997)

    By Philip Roth

    Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth’s alter-ego for nearly four decades now, is settling uncomfortably into old age. Now a literary recluse like E.I. Lonoff, the mentor of his youth in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman has survived prostate cancer (though, given his notorious past, not without ironic complications), and, as the novel begins, has returned once more to his school days in Newark, New Jersey. The device here is a class reunion, a gathering of former athletes, beauties, and outsiders, transformed by time into uncanny snapshots of their own immigrant grandparents. Zuckerman is most surprised to find Jerry Levov there. Now a ruthless, four-times-married Miami surgeon, Jerry had once been important to Nathan only because of the access their friendship afforded him into the private world of Jerry’s older brother, Seymour “Swede” Levov, the finest athlete to ever walk the halls of Weequahic High and Nathan’s lifelong hero. From their brief conversation, Nathan learns that the Swede’s life was forever altered in 1968, when his teenage daughter, Merry, blew up the local post office, along with a local doctor, in protest of the Vietnam War. The rest of the story is left for Zuckerman’s telling.

    The form of American Pastoral is established in two early passages. After his encounter with Jerry, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with the Swede, locking himself away to restore life to his fallen idol. Typical of Roth, the moment is captured in mirror images: “Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day?” After pouring once more over the few “facts” at his disposal, Zuckerman/Roth retreats to fiction, adding, “anything more I wanted to know, I’d have to make up.” And he does just that. One-fifth of the way through the novel, Zuckerman disappears completely, surrendering his own voice to the Swede’s sorrowful lament.

    American Pastoral also finds its structural precedent in The Kid from Tomkinsville, a children’s book the young Nathan had once discovered on the Swede’s bookshelf. It tells the story of a baseball phenomenon whose life is marked equally by stunning success and heart-breaking tragedy. “I was ten and I had never read anything like it,” Nathan says. “The cruelty of life. The injustice of it.” It’s perhaps too literary—too easy—of a device for Roth, but the 400+ page story of the Swede’s fall follows a similar trajectory, as does, Roth implies, the story of America’s recent history. For the Swede is Roth’s finest personification of the post-war American Dream and all the complicated realities that frustrate it. “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.” The Swede’s longed-for American pastoral becomes its grotesque counterpart, “the indigenous American berserk.”

    What most fascinates me about this novel—along, of course, with Roth’s beautiful prose—is its inability, ultimately, to make any sense of the Swede’s tragedy. Those readers who turn to the final page, hoping to find resolution, answers, grace, will find, once again, only the question that haunts every preceding chapter: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” The Swede, though occasionally chastised for lacking requisite self-awareness, is a good man: hard-working, honorable, a loving father and husband, a good-hearted liberal opposed to Vietnam and actively involved in the fight for civil rights. And yet he is unable to escape the violence, the destruction of his family, the rape of his daughter—that rape that haunts him more than the deaths or the explosions or the decay. He is unable to escape the mysterious, inarticulate pain that has become his life. After a reunion with Merry, the Swede returns home to a dinner party, broken by the sight of his frail, filthy daughter, but unable to speak about it. “He was supposed to do this forever,” Roth writes. “However much he might crave to get out, he was to remain stopped dead in the moment in that box. Otherwise the world would explode.”

  • Black Water (1992)

    By Joyce Carol Oates

    On the opening page of Oates’s novella, Kelly Kelleher, an idealistic 26 year old woman, finds herself sitting beside a famous Senator, seat-belted into a car that is filling quickly with black water. “Am I going to die? — like this?” she asks. Kelly finds herself here after spending the day at a Fourth of July party on Greyling Island, just off the coast of Maine. The unnamed Senator is a friend of a friend, who surprises everyone by showing up at the party and by taking an instant interest in the beautiful Kelly, a Brown graduate too star-struck to admit to the Senator that he was the focus of her Senior Thesis, a paper titled, “Jeffersonian Idealism and ‘New Deal’ Pragmatism: Liberal Strategies in Crisis.” After spending much of the day flirting casually and exchanging a private kiss, the two set off in the Senator’s rented Toyota, bound for the privacy of his mainland hotel room. But then they find the water:

    The rented Toyota, driven with such impatient exuberance by The Senator, was speeding along the unpaved unnamed road, taking the turns in giddy skidding slides, and then, with no warning, somehow the car had gone off the road and had overturned in black rushing water, listing to its passenger’s side, rapidly sinking.

    Am I going to die? — like this?

    Any resemblance between this scene and the actual events of June 1969—when Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in the back seat of Ted Kenney’s car after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island—are, of course, completely intentional. However, while Oates demands that we return to that night in ’69 (and apparently she began taking notes for this novel when the news first broke), she refuses to treat it as an isolated historical event, that is, an occurrence of the past, over and done. Instead, she transposes the story to the early ’90s, making The Senator an amalgamation of Kennedy, Gary Hart, and any number of other prominent leaders who have abused their power for sexual gain.

    That so many of those prominent names belong to Democrats seems to be part of the tragedy at the heart of the novel. Like her heroine, Oates is concerned deeply with “Liberal Strategies in Crisis,” with a political and social present that is none the better for so much past promise. She views that past through a lens of ironic nostalgia (or nostalgic irony, I can’t decide): “Bobby Kennedy’s whirlwind campaign, heady nostalgic days of power, purpose, authority, hope, youth in the Democratic Party—when, disastrous as things were, in Vietnam, at home, you did not expect them to worsen.” But things have worsened. The fireworks displays of Kelly’s day are “lavish and explosive in brilliant Technicolor like the TV war in the Persian Gulf,” conservatism reigns victorious, and The Senator, a man whose “humanitarian ideals” were inspired by the same historical events that shaped Oates, has surrendered to the dominant force in American politics: “compromise.”

    But Black Water is first and foremost a novel about Kelly Kelleher and, by analogy, all other women who have been abused, exploited, and discarded by the powerful and by the media that report it. Black Water is so effective (and affecting) because Oates siphons every word of it through the fading consciousness of a dying woman, restoring life and value where both have been too easily forgotten. The last chapters, in particular, when Kelly fights for breath in the small air pocket that remains, when she realizes that The Senator has used her body as leverage so that he might swim to safety, when she clings to the hope that he will return for her, and when she listens helplessly to the short choppy waves “against the slanted roof of this room-snug and safe beneath the covers, Grandma’s crocheted quilt with the pandas around the border,” these last chapters force us to be rightly reoriented from the political to the personal. It’s an important move and an impressive feat from Oates and this stunning short novel.

  • The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

    The Scent of Green Papaya (1993)

    Dir. by Tran Anh Hung

    Images: Remarkably lush, sensuous images of natural world: palm fronds, ripened fruit, insects and frogs, rain. Instead of using traditional establishing shots, Tran often changes scenes by cutting to extreme close-ups that only become recognizable once the camera has pulled away. Another important visual motif is created by lateral tracking shots that follow characters from room to room, usually from a perspective outside of the building, peeking in through windows and open doorways.

    • • •

    When we first meet Mui (Lu Man San), she is ten years old and a recent transplant to Saigon, where she has come, alone, to support herself as a servant. She is welcomed into a home that seems incapable of escaping its own grief: the master’s mother is reconciled to a life of solitary prayer and mourning for a husband who died decades earlier; his photo is joined on the family shrine by that of the master’s daughter, who would have been Mui’s age had she survived a childhood disease. The master and his wife (Truong Thi Loc, in the film’s finest performance) are distant, both emotionally and physically, leading to his periodic escapes with the family’s money. For Mui, life settles quickly into a domestic routine, whose rites she inherits from Thi (Nguyen Anh Hoa), the family’s older servant.

    The heart of the film is Mui’s emotional development, a process mirrored by the film’s two-act structure. After the grandmother’s death, Tran cuts to a scene set within the same home a decade later. The father is now gone, one son is married, and Mui has grown into a beautiful young woman (now played by Tran Nu Yen-Khe), who remains confined to a life of servitude. When she is forced for financial reasons to leave the home, Mui is mourned by Truong, who behaves as if she were losing another daughter. It’s a touching scene: the mother hands to Mui the heirlooms that would have belonged to the young girl whom she has tragically replaced. The remainder of the film concerns Mui’s developing relationship with her new master, Khuyen (Vuong Hoa Hoi), a wealthy, young composer who spends his days at the piano.

    The Scent of Green Papaya is an impressive film, one most memorable for its remarkably sensuous imagery and elegant camera work. By deliberately slowing his pace, by cross-cutting images of the natural and civilized worlds, and by scoring the film largely with the sounds of nature, Tran immerses his viewers in a cinematic Walden, a space of near Transcendental harmony. Thoreau’s fascination with the battling ants outside of his window is even reenacted by a child in Mui’s home. There is something particularly beautiful in Mui’s graceful acceptance of her lot. Even as an adult, she finds a quiet joy in communion with nature, a joy we are allowed to share with her (if only artificially) in the very act of experiencing the film.

    Despite both my sincere fondness for it and my admiration for Tran’s skill, The Scent of Green Papaya strikes me as somewhat politically naïve (as does Walden, actually), particularly on two accounts. It is set in the early-1950s and 1960s, a period of French colonialism in Vietnam. Tran paints the era in nostalgic hues, though, seldom (if at all) questioning the destructive influence of Europe on native culture. Khuyen’s devotion and debt to Debussy, for instance, stands him in stark contrast to the father and brother who play traditional harmonies at the start of the film. That the father deserts his family while Khuyen acts as a Prince Charming to Mui’s Cinderella reflects a reductive privileging of Western practices.

    The same could be said of Tran’s ambivalent treatment of women, who, by in large, are relegated to domestic spheres. (I’m still trying to forgive him for burdening Mui with a caged pet, which was the most hackneyed of overt symbols even when Susan Glaspell used it in Trifles eighty years ago.) Tran undoubtedly cares deeply for the women — particularly for the mother, who evidences impressive strength throughout — but he seems deliberately unwilling to allow Mui a happy ending outside of maternal bliss. In the film’s most moving sequence, we hear the adult Mui’s voice for the first time as she reads to Khuyen. It’s a moment of potential self-realization, but one that, unfortunately, appears to go unrealized. The film soon ends, and we are prevented from hearing Mui express her own thoughts in her own words through her own voice. Instead, she remains barely distinguishable from the natural world that surrounds her: an object of sensuous beauty on which we project our desires. The film actually becomes more interesting to me if I imagine Mui in twenty years, her beauty faded, her husband gone, and her spirit empowered.

  • Vive L’Amour (1994)

    Vive L’Amour (1994)

    Dir. by Tsai Ming-Liang

    Images: Congested and noisy exteriors contrast sharply with starkly decorated (or empty) interiors. Very little dialogue — perhaps ten minutes total in two hour film, the majority of which is built from long takes, often shots of solitary characters suffering in silence. Favorite images: Hsiao-Kang carressing and kissing a melon; Ah-Jung sillhouted against a large apartment window overlooking Taipei; May Lin looking down a stairwell, where Hsiao-Kang hides unnoticed; Ah-Jung emerging slowly from underneath a bed on which May Lin is sleeping.

    • • •

    Vive L’Amour ends with two stunning sequences. In the penultimate scene, Hsiao-Kang (Lee Kang-sheng), a closeted and suicidal young man, crawls into bed with Ah-Jung (Chen Chao-jung), an acquaintance who is sleeping soundly. Tsai’s camera lingers on the two men for several minutes, allowing us to watch — trapped in a moment of almost Hitchcockian suspense — as Hsiao-Kang leans closer and closer, finally kissing the other man on the mouth without waking him. It’s a remarkable performance. Lee’s face is written with conflicted emotion: curiosity, terror, longing, shame, joy.

    Tsai then cuts to his heroine, May Lin (Yang Kuei Mei), who is now walking quickly and alone through a park that is muddied by construction. She wants only to put some distance between herself and Ah-Jung’s bed, from which she has recently escaped quietly after another night of anonymous sex. Lin finally rests at an outdoor amphitheater, where she sits and begins to cry. Typical of the director’s style, Tsai frames her in a medium close-up, then simply allows the camera to run. The scene lasts for five and a half minutes, during which May Lin struggles to find composure. But she is able to do so only temporarily before surrendering, again and again, to the sobs. As Dennis Lim has said of the scene, Tsai fades to black “just as you’ve convinced yourself she could go on weeping forever.”

    I recently read an essay by Walker Percy in which he characterizes (somewhat glibbly) the 20th century American novel as a recurring investigation of “the essential loneliness of man.” It’s hardly an original conceit, but I was reminded of it constantly yesterday as I watched Vive L’Amour, a film that represents the alienation of modern life as effectively as any of our great novels. Tsai’s Taipei borders Hemingway’s Paris — both are worlds populated by frightened individuals unable to connect meaningfully with anyone around them. So, instead, they turn to temporary, unfulfilling escapes. One of the most memorable scenes in Vive L’Amour comes just before the two described above. Hsiao-Kang, hiding beneath their bed, masturbates while May Lin and Ah-Jung have sex above him. Their act, though shared, is no less self-satsifying and empty than Hsiao-Kang’s. All three characters end the film as they began it: alone, homeless (literally or figuratively), and incapable of communication.

    This preoccupation with communication — or, more precisly, the failure of language — is another interesting affinity shared by Tsai and Hemingway. Someone (and it may have been Hemingway himself) compared the author’s dialogue to an iceberg: what we read is only 10% of the message; 90% is hidden beneath, left unspoken. His characters don’t communicate, they trade in banalities, because what they refuse to share is too personal, too painful, or too frightening. A reader who fails to seek that subtext is missing the point entirely. The same could be said of Vive L’Amour, a film that, when reduced to a simple plot synapsis — two homeless men move into a vacant apartment, where one of them shares romantic encounters with the apartment’s realtor — sounds like an episode of Red Shoe Diaries (and a really slow, unerotic episode at that). But in Tsai’s hands, the story serves a profound meditation on our inability to connect: May Lin and Ah-Jung sit beside one another, sharing glances, but never speaking; Hsiao-Kang hides at the bottom of a stairwell, unwilling to reveal himself to May Lin; Hsaio-Kang closes his door to Ah-Jung, refusing to answer the other’s questions.

    I now wish that I had seen Vive L’Amour before watching The Hole, Tsai’s most recent release. For whatever reason, I lacked patience for, and interest in, that film. But I now see the end of The Hole — when one of the two main characters quite literally reaches out to the other — as a moving portent of optimism and human triumph. Quite a step beyond May Lin’s endless tears.

  • L’Humanite (1999)

    L’Humanite (1999)

    Dir. by Bruno Dumont

    Images: Dumont’s style could perhaps be described as a more polished verite. He uses only diegetic sound and shoots non-professional actors in stunning compositions and with impressive grace. Most striking images are those that foreground the “fleshiness” of characters. For instance, we ocassionally enter Pharaon’s POV as he stares at the back of the inspector’s neck or at his mother’s hand. Later, the camera lingers on a close-up of Pharaon, forcing us to listen attentively to his breathing. The explicit and unsentimental staging of sex between Domino and Joseph serves a similar purpose.

    • • •

    What interests me is life, people, the small things. Cinema is for the body, for the emotions. It needs to be restored among the ordinary people, who don’t speak a lot, but who experience an incredible intensity of joy, emotion, suffering, sympathy in death. They don’t speak, speaking is not important. What’s important is the emotions. It is for the spectator to make these things conscious, it is not for me to do it. The spectator must think. He has a lot of work to do. The power of cinema lies in the return of man to the body, to the heart, to truth. The man of the people has a truth that the man of the city, the intellectual, has lost. [He] has something that I’ve lost, that I must find again, I don’t know what exactly. I find that our culture, our civilization, has failed politically, socially, morally.

    — Bruno Dumont

    Walt Whitman would be proud.

    It’s remarkable to hear echoes of Whitman in the voice of a contemporary filmmaker, but there he is, still singing the “body electric” and sounding his “barbaric yawp.” Like the poet before him, Dumont has turned to the arts in a Democratic spirit, celebrating the “common man” (for lack of a better term) in all of his rich complexity. Although I’ve always found the county/city dichotomy a bit reductive, I applaud Dumont’s devotion to it here, for it’s as radical a statement in cinema today as it was when Whitman staked his claim on verse with Leaves of Grass.

    Dumont is, of course, not totally without peer — Abbas Kiarostami is the closest kin to come to mind —but, in L’Humanite, he has made a landmark film that, ultimately, restores . . . well . . . humanity to the screen. In doing so, he has transcended the verite and dogme traditions. He has not simply turned a shaky camera on “real people” living “real lives,” a manipulative fiction now broadcast nightly on network television. He respects his characters, his form, and his audience too much to cheapen them in that way. Instead, like Whitman, he gives us stunning and occasionally shocking images of the body — here, a conflation of the body of flesh with the body politic — and requires us to respond genuinely to them.

    The cumulative effect of these images on the viewer is, at times, unnerving. L’Humanite slowly erodes the ironic detachment and cynicism that we’ve built as defenses, forcing us to actually feel something. It should come as little surprise that Dumont’s film was met by a chorus of jeers at Cannes, while Sam Mendes’ American Beauty — a film that, in many ways, adopts a similar humanist stance — won an Academy award. We seem to have surrendered our ability to recognize sincerity, opting instead for easy satire and emotional distance (not to mention “larger than life” performances over truthful ones). Ricky Fitts claims, in American Beauty, that “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart is going to cave in,” but the scene ultimately has less impact than a plastic bag. It’s a disposable image, like so many of our manufactured emotions. L’Humanite doesn’t let us off so easy.

    Dumont establishes the tone of L’Humanite in its opening scene, a static long shot of the French countryside, which lasts nearly a minute. Across the horizon, we see a small figure running from one edge of the frame to the other. Pharaon De Winter (Emmanuel Schotté) is a police superintendent in a small French town, who is called to investigate the rape and murder of an 11 year old girl. We learn little about Pharaon’s past, other than that he has “lost” his woman and his child. He seems to have only one friend, a woman named Domino (Séverine Caneele), who tolerates Pharaon’s idiosyncrasies, but who prefers the company of her bus driver boyfriend, Joseph (Philippe Tullier).

    As most critics have pointed out, L’Humanite is, on the surface, a police procedural that isn’t terribly concerned with the resolution of its mystery. By traditional standards, Pharaon is an incompetent detective, but it is, in fact, those very standards that Dumont is interrogating. Movie detectives are typical of most Western heroes: stoic, logical, and doggedly determined. Pharaon, instead, is a man who, perhaps for the first time in his life, is overwhelmed by an empathy of which very few of us are still capable. He longs desperately to connect with humanity — to feel it, touch it, smell it, taste it, kiss it — but is frustrated at every turn. Even Domino, who wants, at least on some level, to comfort him, is able to offer only her body (a too frequent substitute these days).

    The most powerful moment in L’Humanite comes when, while investigating the crime scene, Pharaon lets loose a long, wild scream. It is a moment of pure, inarticulate emotion unlike anything I have ever experienced from a film. That scream alone makes L’Humanite more real, more painful, and more affecting than any other film I’ve seen from the 90s. A barbaric yawp, indeed.

  • The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

    The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

    Dir. by Atom Egoyan

    Images: Beautiful compositions in 2.35:1. Notable images: close-up of infant Chloe’s face beside open knife blade; Nicole’s face with rotating Ferris wheel over her shoulder; Mitchell, wife, and child asleep together on mattress. Egoyan constantly returns to wide-angle shots of the sky and the Canadian landscape as a means of representing man’s insignificance in relation to nature. The images of snow-covered, tree-lined mountains, gray skies, and frozen lakes contrast beautifully with the warm interiors of the small town and the close-ups of its inhabitants. The flesh tones reflect their environment: soft and natural when inside, slightly blue when out.

    • • •

    There’s a scene in The Sweet Hereafter in which Mitchell Stephens — a big city ambulance chaser played to perfection by Ian Holm — sits in a cramped airplane seat, telling the passenger beside him a story from when his daughter, Chloe, was a child. The shot is framed with Holm’s face in a tight close-up, his companion to our left, her eyes fixed intently on his. During the entire, nearly six-minute monologue (there is only one brief interruption — a cutaway to a flashback), neither actor turns his or her head more than an inch. Holm’s eyes never look away from the back of the seat in front of him. And yet, it’s one of the most riveting moments from any film I’ve seen.

    And it exemplifies why Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter might be the best film of the 90’s. Stephens’ story is a step into an idyllic past. “It was a wonderful time in our lives,” he says. “We still thought we had a future together, the three of us.” Like Egoyan’s film, the lawyer’s story is an attempt to create a narrative from tragedy as a means of controlling and (hopefully) escaping its grief. The result is a film that is captivating despite — or perhaps because of — its preoccupation with sadness. Its very beauty is catharsis.

    Mitchell Stephens arrives in Sam Dent shortly after a school bus accident takes the lives of many of the small town’s children. Stephens’ goal is to unite several of the families in a class action lawsuit against the “deep pockets” who are to blame. For the parents, placing blame becomes a release, a means of turning their attention momentarily from loss and grief and reuniting the community. Many of Sam Dent’s residents are recognizable from Egoyan’s earlier films. Maury Chaykin and Alberta Watson play Wendell and Risa Walker, the proprietors of the town’s only motel and plaintiffs in the law suit. Bruce Greenwood (the lead in Exotica) is Billy Ansel, a widower who loses both of his children in the accident, but who refuses Stephens’ offer. Arsinee Khanjian (Egoyan’s wife) and Earl Pastko are Wanda and Hartley Otto, another couple grieving for their only child. And Gabrielle Rose plays Delores Driscoll, the bus driver who loses so many of “her children” in the accident.

    The acting is dynamic throughout. Of particular note is the performance of Sarah Polley (Exotica), who plays Nicole Burnell, a survivor paralyzed in the accident. The film demands that she strike a balance between the innocence of childhood and the pain of tragic experience (an important side plot reveals that the bus accident is not the only traumatic experience Nicole is forced to overcome). Polley’s approach is wonderfully subtle and understated. She has said of her performance: “The only way I feel I’m not faking it is to do nothing at all. I really don’t consider myself an actor, or a performer, but maybe as someone able to fill whatever void there is among actors who do too much.” As in Holm’s monologue, Polley is filmed almost entirely in close-ups and medium shots, directing our attention to her remarkably expressive eyes.

  • A Taste of Cherry (1997)

    A Taste of Cherry (1997)

    Abbas Kiarostami

    Images: Long, high-angle shots of Iranian landscapes, as Badii’s Range Rover climbs hills. The sky (until the final scenes) is rarely seen. Badii always remains outdoors, refusing to enter the taxidermist’s museum or the guard’s post. Only signs of civilization/technology are large machines that seem to be designed only for moving dirt and rock from one location to another.

    • • •

    Mr. Badii (played by Homayon Ershadi, an architect friend of Kiarostami) is a middle aged man who spends much of the film driving through the hill country surrounding Tehran, looking for someone to help him commit suicide. He plans to overdose on sleeping pills, then rest in a grave he has already dug for himself. He needs someone to come to the spot the next morning and either bury his body (if he has succeeded) or pull him from the hole (if he has not).

    The film can essentially be broken into three acts. In each, Mr. Badii explains his plan to a potential accomplice: the first, a young Kurdish soldier, who runs frightened from the car; the second, a 30-something Afghani seminarian, who objects to the plan on religious grounds; and the third, an older taxidermist, who agrees to help because he needs the money for a relative. The film ends without revealing Badii’s fate. Instead, we see him lying in his would-be grave, until Kiarostami cuts to high contrast video footage of the director and actors recording the sound of marching troops.

    A Taste of Cherry fits most easily, I think, into the Neo-Realist tradition of DeSica, Rossellini, and Ray, all of whom, like Kiarostami, employ non-professional performers, shoot largely in exteriors, and focus their cameras on “real” life, shunning sentiment in favor of objectivity. Kiarostami obviously adds a PostModern twist here, employing a bit of self-reflexivity to the film—his “it’s only a movie” coda. Some have criticized the move, but I agree with Rosenbaum:

    Kiarostami is representing life in all its rich complexity, reconfiguring elements from the preceding 80-odd minutes in video to clarify what’s real and what’s concocted. Far from affirming that Taste of Cherry is “only” a movie, this wonderful ending is saying, among other things, that it’s also a movie.

    In the interview included on Criterion’s DVD release, Kiarostami claims that he loves films that might cause viewers to doze, but that haunt them when they return home. I laughed out loud when he said this, because I have had that exact experience with A Taste of Cherry. I’ve been wrestling all morning with that old taxidermist. If Kiarostami is implying through him that life is worth living because of sensual pleasure (the taste of cherries) or because of human relationships (his family), then the film doesn’t really work for me. But hearing the taxidermist’s “tidy” story sandwiched between the conversation with the seminarian and the coda makes it all much more interesting and impressive. It’s that dialogue between faith, humanism, and (possibly) aesthetics that speaks to me personally.

  • Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

    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

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.