Tag: Region: America

  • 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 Public Burning (1976)

    By Robert Coover

    In the opening pages of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, the narrator, Vice President Richard Nixon, insecure about his notoriously sinister jowls, thinks to himself, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” Set during the days immediately preceding the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Coover’s satire explodes the absurd ties that bind infotainment to politics, words to history, and images to morality. Nixon makes a suitable and surprisingly sympathetic anti-hero, then, for he was perhaps America’s first politician to be publicly made, broken, reborn, then destroyed, each act broadcast live on television. Coover assumes our familiarity with those images and puts them to effective use, deliberately sounding echoes of Nixon’s “I am not a crook” Watergate days while revisiting the glorious victory of his “Checkers” speech. Nixon is simultaneously the candidate on stage, sweat-soaked and scruffy beside Kennedy’s sheen, and the President-elect with arms raised, victorious, finally, in ’68.

    “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities—why did I keep forgetting that?” The fictional Nixon’s question is at the heart of Coover’s satire, and the heydays of the McCarthy Era give him ample fodder. It’s as if Coover is attempting to embody all of the complicated contradictions of the ’50s in a single novel, often to hilarious affect. Betty Crocker comes to life as the personification of idealized Eisenhower-era domesticity. Hollywood horror creatures walk the streets in 3D Technicolor, living projections of xenophobic hysteria. Walt Disney and Cecille B. DeMille elbow each other aside in their fight for marketing rights to the execution. Eisenhower morphs into Gary Cooper, strutting toward a potentially apocalyptic showdown at High Noon while uttering the lyric verse of Time Magazine (the nation’s Poet Laureate). And, most prominently, the irrational demands of the American populace become a walking, talking, cursing, spitting caricature in the person of Uncle Sam, who wants only to defeat his nebulous arch-villain, The Phantom, an enemy that most closely resembles communism, but is actually anything that might be labeled “un-American,” a loaded term, no doubt, in the early-’50s.

    Knowing something of The Public Burning‘s infamous reputation, I picked it up expecting to read a didactic denouncement of conservative hate-mongering built upon an equally didactic eulogy to the Rosenbergs, those most tragic and useable icons of the Old Left. What I got, instead, was something much more ambivalent and cynical: a satire with targets across the political spectrum. In an onanistic fantasy that would make Portnoy blush, Nixon attacks Ethel’s naïve devotion to an irrelevant idealism, voicing the questions that all on the Left have struggled to answer in post-WWII America: “What about Stalin’s purges? The death camps in Siberia? The massacres in Poland? What about Rudolph Slansky just last fall in Prague? Eh?” Her response is typical of the impotent liberalism that has characterized so much of the New Left. Coover captures this beautifully in an image of Julius and Ethel exchanging letters of praise for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that they root for despite their complete ignorance of baseball. Edith writes: “It is chiefly in their outstanding contribution to eradication of racial prejudice that they have covered themselves with glory.”

    The warden at Sing-Sing offers an interesting insight into the Rosenbergs: “the problem has been their habit of behaving in what they probably think of as, well, symbolic ways—you know, acting like they’re establishing historical models or precedents or something.” There’s a strange irony to the line, given its context within a novel that, even in its title, treats their execution as a sacrificial rite. As with much postmodern fiction of the ’70s, that irony is often so thick here that it becomes difficult to find a foundation. Are the Rosenbergs heroic martyrs or treasonous dupes? Both, Coover seems to say, and neither. Left and Right, right and wrong all collapse into an absurd political/social/moral quagmire that is put on ridiculous display in the novel’s final pages. At the site of the execution—fantastically transposed from Sing Sing to the middle of Times Square—Nixon appears with his pants around his ankles, fully erect, then brings the crowd to a riotous frenzy as history dissolves around them. Abolitionists, comanches, and redcoats stand shoulder to shoulder with the members of the Supreme Court, who roll around in the piles of shit left there by the Republican elephant. Uncle Sam appears in a flash of light, then bends Nixon over, sodomizing him. “You’re not the same as when I was a boy,” is all the Vice President can muster in reply. It ain’t a pretty scene, but neither is America, Coover screams.

  • Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

    Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

    Dir. by Max Ophuls

    Images: Ophuls’s influence on Kubrick is obvious here. His camera moves constantly, but always slowly and gracefully. It tracks forward and backward, from side to side, through the cramped rooms of Brand’s apartment, taking in, with almost novelistic detail, the impressively realized mise-en-scene. An important recurring motif is a dramatic crane shot that appears to float over the stairwell, looking down on Lisa.

    • • •

    An opening title card situates us in fin-de-siecle Vienna, where we are introduced to Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan), a graying, but distinguished looking aristocrat, who returns to his apartment late one night to begin preparations for his immediate departure. Brand has chosen to flee Vienna rather than confront the man who would duel him in three hours. His preparations are halted, though, by a letter delivered to him by his mute servant, John (Art Smith). The anonymous letter details the tragic fate of Lisa Berndl (Joan Fontaine) and begins: “By the time you read this letter, I may be dead. . . . If this reaches you, you will know how I became yours when you didn’t know who I was or even that I existed.” The remainder of the film dramatizes the story contained within Lisa’s letter, beginning nearly twenty years earlier, when the then teenage girl first developed her hopeless devotion to the handsome concert pianist who lived in the apartment across from hers.

    Letter essentially follows the trajectory of a Thomas Hardy novel: Lisa pines desperately, refuses the proposal of an honorable suitor, and abandons her parents — all sacrifices made to her absurd romantic delusions of a future happiness with Brand. When our hero and heroine are finally united, Ophuls stages it in the trademark style of his day — their faces are pressed together in a close-up; their passion is heightened by a swell of syrupy strings — but a sense of tragedy suffocates the seduction. Once Brand leaves for a brief concert tour, Ophuls elides the nine months of Lisa’s pregnancy before cutting again, this time to her comfortable life with her husband, Johann (Marcel Journet), and her young son. However, a chance reunion with Stefan soon precipitates Lisa’s ultimate fall, which culminates in the final lines of the letter, a note to Brand added by the nuns who tended Lisa’s deathbed.

    In reading over what little I could find online, I was surprised to find Letter described as a “classic three-tissue melodrama” and a “lush tearjerker par excellence.” I’m almost ashamed to admit my biases against such films, biases that reared their ugly heads at the first glimpse of the 31-year-old Fontaine playing the naïve, pubescent Lisa. But the combination of Ophuls’s camerawork and pacing, along with Howard Koch’s biting (and decidedly unromantic) script were more than enough to overcome my personal baggage. What few remaining reservations I may have harbored were wiped away during the following exchange between Lisa and Johann, who recognizes that his hopes of happiness have been dashed by Stefan’s return:

    Lisa: Johann, you don’t think I wanted this to happen.
    Johann: No. (Pause) What are you going to do?
    Lisa: I don’t know.
    Johann: Lisa, we have a marriage. Perhaps it’s not all you once hoped for, but you have a home, and your son, and people who care for you.
    Lisa: I know that, Johann. I’d do anything to avoid hurting you, but I can’t help it.
    Johann: And your son, you think you can avoid hurting him?
    Lisa: He won’t be harmed. I’ll see to that.
    Johann: There are such things as honor and decency.
    Lisa: I told myself that a hundred times this one evening.
    Johann: You talk as though it were out of your hands. It’s not Lisa. You have a will, you can do what’s right, what’s best for you, or you can throw away your life.
    Lisa: I’ve had no will but his, ever.
    Johann: That’s romantic nonsense.
    Lisa: Is it? Johann, I can’t help it. I can’t. You must believe that.
    Johann: What about him? Can’t he help himself either?
    Lisa: I know now that he needs me as much as I’ve always needed him.
    Johann: Isn’t it a little late for him to find out?

    Rather than a classic melodrama or lush tearjerker, Letter strikes me as their antithesis: an ironic critique of the romance genre (“nonsense,” Johann calls it). As in films like Terrence Malick’s Badlands, we are constantly forced to confront the friction between the harsh, indifferent world depicted on screen and the narrator’s deluded, socialized justification (or deliberate ignorance) of it. My favorite moment comes near the end when Stefan and Lisa are reunited. She returns to his old apartment, knowing that doing so necessarily sacrifices her marriage. Once inside, though, she finally recognizes how unworthy Stefan has been of her devotion, unmasking him for the pathetic, juvenile rake that he is. And yet, as her voice-over speaks the final lines of the letter, we hear her once again profess her undying love for him. That disconnect between the truth of her brutal experience and the fantasy to which she escapes is just fascinating, and it lends the film the same bleak tenor that characterizes O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. Actually, Lisa would fit in quite well with the fine folks at Harry’s: “The hell with the truth! It’s the lie of a pipedream that gives life.”

  • Benito Cereno (1855)

    Benito Cereno (1855)

    By Herman Melville

    Note: The following was written for a graduate seminar on the American Renaissance. It is an attempt to apply theories of cinema narrative to prose fiction.

    “That First Comprehensive Glance”: The Cinematic Suspense of Benito Cereno

    But that first comprehensive glance . . . rested but an instant upon them.
    — from Benito Cereno

    Once the body had been rendered immobile and attention had become focused upon the face or gaze, the law, desire and perversion made their way into the cinema.
    — Pascal Bonitzer (18)

    Abstract

    With the impressive body of literary scholarship generated by Formalist analysis and modern narratological studies at our disposal, the idea of applying film narrative theory to literature — particularly to a story like “Benito Cereno,” written forty years before Thomas Edison first screened moving pictures for an American audience — might seem unfounded at best. The influence of the cinema on artists of the twentieth century has been obvious and well-documented, but, as Mike Frank has recently asked, “What might narratology look like if we were to take cinema — particularly ‘classical Hollywood cinema’ — as the paradigmatic instance of storytelling?” [1] In the strange, and often contentious, case of “Benito Cereno,” film theory offers, I will argue, the ideal framework and vocabulary for explaining exactly how Melville’s narrative functions. Mine is only the latest in the long line of such inquiries, but it will reveal that — as has often been the case for readers trapped in “Benito Cereno”‘s world — previous scholars, hoping for answers, have been forced to look in the wrong direction.

    Survey of Scholarship

    In September 1856, a reviewer for Knickerbocker described “Benito Cereno” as “painfully interesting,” concluding: “in reading it we became nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves.” This sentiment is echoed by many of Melville’s contemporary reviewers, who frequently characterize The Piazza Tales as an enjoyable read and as a welcomed return to form after the “unfortunate” and “morbid” appearance of Pierre. [2] The appeal of “Benito Cereno” can be attributed largely to its much-discussed narrative structure, one that implicates the reader in its mysteries, forcing a suspense-filled and continuous process of mis- and re-interpretation. The form of “Benito Cereno” is, in fact, uniquely and inextricably bound to its content. In a story about ambiguously shifting perceptions, the manner by which we view the action is as significant as the action itself. Critics, both formalists and nonformalists alike, have been universally intrigued by Melville’s precise manipulation of point of view, an interest piqued, no doubt, by the obvious fallibility of its “center of perception,” Amaso Delano, and by the text’s unusual moments of objective narration (Seelye 104). While much of “Benito Cereno” is viewed only as it is reflected through the unreliable and subjective gaze of the American captain, an objective narrator does occasionally intrude upon the narrative, revealing its self-reflexive frame: we are told that the text we are reading is, in fact, some unknown third party’s written narrative and that the events depicted within have been confused by memory, told “retrospectively,” and “irregularly given” (255). That “Benito Cereno” ends with an elided legal transcript — which ostensibly, at least, is intended to reveal the “whole truth” — has been of little comfort to those attempting to systematize Melville’s narrative strategy.

    Melville challenges astute readers of “Benito Cereno” to question the reliability of its sources from the opening paragraphs. In what is perhaps the story’s most often-cited passage, Captain Delano is described as:

    a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. (162)

    In the century and a half that have passed since the original publication of “Benito Cereno,” “the wise” have consistently judged Delano’s quickness and perception to be far less than ordinary. While some consensus has been reached concerning Delano’s role in Melville’s narrative structure — he is generally described as an “unreliable narrator” whose misperceptions drip with irony — critics have struggled to develop a vocabulary capable of explaining exactly how Delano’s point of view interacts with other narrative voices in the story.

    In one of the earliest formalist readings of “Benito Cereno,” “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville” (1953), Charles Hoffman accounts for only two of the story’s narrative voices: Delano’s subjective point of view and the objective trial deposition that follows. Hoffman praises the former in Aristotelian terms, claiming, “for dramatic intensity, concentrated action, and structural unity, no better choice could have been made” (426). Delano serves, for Hoffman, as the reader’s surrogate, the “innocent eye” who must make sense of the ambiguous impressions made upon him. This reading echoes through much of the scholarship that has followed. [3]Interestingly, Hoffman describes Delano as “brave and resourceful,” a misinterpretation symptomatic of a highly problematic article. Along with his failure to mention the story’s other narrative voice(s) in any terms, Hoffman skims too quickly over the deposition, calling it a simple rehash of the actual Delano’s original document, an attempt to “gain in verisimilitude,” and an aesthetic failure. “Melville,” he writes, “did not choose or else did not know how to make use of Delano’s point of view as an observer to reveal enough of the mystery so that he might dispense with the cumbersome method of the document” (428).

    Guy Cardwell rejects Hoffman’s overly-simplified reading, claiming that “Benito Cereno” is, ultimately, morally ambiguous, and that the complexity of Melville’s narrative is central to that ambiguity. In “Melville’s Gray Story” (1959), Cardwell criticizes those who have reduced “Benito Cereno” to the level of simple detective story, as if it were “a kind of television melodrama that divides its characters into unequivocally good guys and bad guys” (165). Instead, he sees the world of “Benito Cereno” as one where “optimism and despair are mixed in normal proportions” (164). Cardwell claims that Melville helps us toward this interpretation by “going behind” his characters on two (and only two) specific occasions: the first in the oft-cited description of Delano quoted above; the second just prior to the shaving scene, when Cereno’s assumed affection for Babo is compared to that of Johnson and Byron for their servants. While strangely focused on only two scenes, Cardwell’s discussion is the first to seriously consider a third narrative voice in the story. The consequence, he argues, is the temporary transport of the reader outside of the story, a jarring moment that forces the reader through irony to confront the moral implications of the events he or she is witnessing. “Captain Delano, then,” Cardwell writes, “is not simply the obtuse observer, a detective-story character who watches the plot unfold. He is in a serious sense the perceiving center, . . . With Delano as our guide we see that the world is not neatly dichotomized, does not fall neatly into a simple Manichean dualism” (164). For Cardwell, the deposition serves a similar purpose, pulling us out of a suspense-filled mystery and grounding us in the “real world,” where slavery, xenophobia, and economics are moral issues too complex to be described in black and white terms.

    Cardwell’s differentiation between Delano, as the “perceiving center,” and a separate narrative voice that is able to “go behind” characters is further developed by John Douglas Seelye in Melville: The Ironic Diagram (1970). Echoing earlier scholars, Seelye calls Delano “well-meaning but obtuse,” but then shifts his focus to the narrative voice who is actually directing our reading (104) [4]. “As in ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener,’” Seelye writes:

    the center of perception is inadequate, a seafaring version of the lawyer, but here detached from point of view by a delicate operation that allows a third “person” to interpose his wry perspective, shaping Delano’s simple optimism into a vehicle of facetiousness. We see things through the American’s eyes, but as through spectacles whose rose tints seem somehow discomforting. (104)

    By attributing human characteristics to this “third person” — he is “wry” and able to “shape” our understanding of events — Seelye raises an important question: if the “third person” is deliberately manipulating our perception, then what is his motivation for doing so? [5]

    In Melville’s Short Fiction: 1853-1856 (1977), William B. Dillingham ascribes similar agency to Seelye’s “third person.” Dillingham intends to correct the “common misconception” that “Benito Cereno” is told from only two narrative perspectives, and does so by identifying four distinct voices, which he labels the official, the individual, the authorial, and the reportorial (243). The “official” voice is that of the deposition section, which serves as the “legal stamp” that officially settles the affair. However, like Cardwell, Dillingham identifies Melville’s rhetorical use of irony here, claiming that he “transforms the deposition [into] . . . a commentary on the vanity and foolishness of ordinary mankind who cannot see or will not see the sameness of all”(244). The “individual” voice is Delano’s, distinguished from the others by its literalness and by its simplistic figures of speech. According to Dillingham, because Delano is blunt-thinking and incapable of irony, his perception is likewise limited, provoking juvenile similes like his description of the negresses as “unsophisticated as leopardesses; loving as doves” (198). Dillingham’s is a subtle, but important, distinction, as it necessarily attributes all of “Benito Cereno”‘s complex metaphoric language to the “authorial” voice. “Its style,” Dillingham writes, “is a metaphor for its message. . . . Melville depicts what Delano sees, but the terms of that depiction, that is, the figures of speech that make the correspondences necessary for the idea of similitude, are usually not Delano’s” (244-45). Instead, the story’s trademark irony — which deliberately targets Delano and, therefore, could not represent his own point of view — is clearly “authorial.” Finally, Dillingham identifies a fourth narrative voice, the “reportorial,” which is distinguished from the “authorial” by its neutral tone and informational function. Dillingham cites the story’s opening paragraph as an example of the “reportorial” voice: “It embodies no worldview or any character’s viewpoint. It furnishes facts and is nonevaluative” (243). Dillingham’s struggle to find (or, in fact, to create) a vocabulary for explaining Melville’s narrative strategy is obviously by no means unique. It is also far from effective, leading him to unnecessarily divide one voice — the narrator’s — into two, the “authorial” and “reportorial.”

    A New Vocabulary

    In my summary of existing scholarship I have intentionally remained faithful to the original authors’ language, a decision that has left this paper littered with sixteen different terms all used to describe the same thing. [6] I would like now to propose a terminology that will hopefully provide both a much-needed clarity and consistency and a better-suited entrance into film narrative theory. In forming this vocabulary I have relied heavily upon Seymour Chatman’s Coming to Terms, a book that builds upon Wayne Booth’s and David Bordwell’s work by examining side-by-side the rhetoric of narrative in fiction and film.

    Chatman would simply use the term narrator to describe Cardwell’s “voice that goes behind,” Seelye’s “third person,” and Dillingham’s “authorial” and “reportorial” voices. For Chatman, the most important distinction is between those within and those outside of the story world, those able to see the action and those able only to narrate it. “The narrator’s task,” Chatman writes, “is not to go strolling with the characters but to narrate what happens to them, whether by telling or showing” (120). Therefore, the narrator of “Benito Cereno” is that unidentified person who has constructed the tale from outside of the story world, who comments ironically on Delano’s “undistrustful good nature,” and who admittedly elides the deposition.

    Because of his distinction between the characters within the story world and the narrator who “tells” or “shows” them, Chatman finds fault with the overused term “point of view.” The very term implies seeing, an act from which the narrator is necessarily excluded because of his/her/its location outside of the story. Instead, Chatman proposes a terminological distinction between the narrator’s and a character’s “points of view.” Slant, for Chatman, captures the “psychological, sociological, and ideological ramifications of the narrator’s attitudes, which may range from neutral to highly charged” (143). Much recent study of “Benito Cereno,” then, has been concerned with uncovering those ramifications as they are revealed by the narrator’s slant. Why, for instance, does the narrator elide the deposition, thereby further silencing Babo? To describe a character’s “point of view,” Chatman settles on filter, a term that captures:

    something of the mediating function of a character’s consciousness-perception, cognition, emotion, reverie-as events are experienced from a space within the story world. . . . [Slant] catches the nuance of the choice made by the implied author about which among the character’s imaginable experiences would best enhance the narration-which areas of the story world the implied author wants to illuminate and which to keep obscure. (144)

    Filter seems a particularly appropriate term for describing Delano’s role in the narrative, as much of the story’s action is “filtered” through the lens of his gaze for obvious dramatic and ironic effect. This metaphor will be examined more closely in the final section of the paper.

    Finally, Chatman makes a useful distinction between the unreliable narrator — a term that for decades has been used interchangeably to describe the problematic “points of view” of both the narrator and characters — and the fallible filter, Chatman’s own term for “a character’s perceptions and conceptions of the story events, the traits of the other characters, and so on.” Unreliable narrator, then, is used only to describe those instances when the narration itself is problematic, “since the word presupposes that there somewhere exists a ‘reliable’ account” (149). Whereas fallible filter describes a character’s “inaccurate, misled, or self-serving perception” (150). For Chatman, “fallible” is a term preferable to “unreliable” because it attributes less culpability to the characters. Captain Delano, after all, does not ask to be a “perceiving center.” He is merely living the story, not representing it.

    Film Narrative and Cinematic Suspense

    The distinctions made above, though subtle, are absolutely vital for explaining the workings of “Benito Cereno,” a story that relies not only on a famously fallible filter, but also on a deceptively unreliable narrator. Simply fixing a single terminology and doing nothing more, however, does little but provide some much-needed clarity and consistency to the discussion (or add more unnecessary jargon to the pile, depending on your opinion). The real value of Chatman’s work (and hopefully, by association, this paper) can be found, instead, in its analysis of the interrelations that exist between fiction and film narrative. In the case of “Benito Cereno,” it is Chatman’s discussion of the latter that, in fact, best explains Melville’s strategy.

    In the early chapters of Coming to Terms, Chatman differentiates between Narrative, Argument, and Description, examining closely how each interacts with the other. To Chatman, Description is the most interesting of the “other text-types” because of the complexity of its relation to Narrative. As Gérard Genette writes, “description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state. . . . Description is quite naturally ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never-emancipated slave” (qtd. in Chatman 18). In classical Hollywood cinema, Description and Narrative interact in a different, though no less complex manner. [7] To aid in the discussion, Chatman differentiates between explicit and tacit Description, and offers a scene from Touch of Evil as an example. Detective Quinlan’s first appearance has been described in the published cutting continuity as:

    Very low angle M[edium]S[hot] of Quinlan slowly thrusting open the car door: a grossly corpulent figure in an overcoat, a huge cigar in the middle of his puffy face. (qtd. in Chatman 43)

    Here, in this prose description, the compound adjective “grossly corpulent” explicitly describes Quinlan, fixing a particular trait on him. As readers, we are left with little choice but to imagine him as explicitly “corpulent,” as opposed to “obese,” “heavy,” or only “slightly overweight.” In Touch of Evil, however, Quinlan is described tacitly: we see him thrust open the car door, but our focus is directed toward his actions, rather than his appearance. As Chatman writes, “The film shows only features; it is up to the audience to interpret them — that is, to assign them adjectival names” (43). To Chatman, the cinematic description could only be called explicit if Welles then cut to an extreme close-up of the folds of fat in Quinlan’s face. Even then, though, each viewer would still decide on his or her own if Quinlan were “grossly corpulent” or merely stout. The result, then, is an unavoidable ambiguity in cinematic Description. “Only words,” Chatman writes, “can fix descriptions conclusively” (44).

    That last statement, however, is repeatedly called into question by “Benito Cereno,” a story that consistently frustrates readers by its absolute refusal — excepting a few notable instances — to fix descriptions conclusively. Seelye was one of the first, for instance, to notice how precisely Melville uses diction to obscure description, pointing to the 115 conjectural expressions — ambivalent uses of words like seem, appear, perhaps, possibly, evidently, might, presume, conjecture, imputed, and thought — that appear in the story’s 97 pages. [8] “These phrases, instruments of style,” writes Seelye, “reflect the lamination of false appearances and unanswerable paradoxes that confound perception and inquiry, a fiction in which things are never as the ‘seem’” (105). A similar observation is made by Nancy Roundy in “Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” Roundy notes how the world of “Benito Cereno” becomes blurred by the story’s abundant use of metaphoric language. “A metaphor does not assert that something is,” she writes, “but only that it is like some other thing. Sharp boundaries, certainties, disappear and we are in a world of appearances” (347).

    Another method used by Melville to avoid fixing descriptions conclusively is the double negative, a sentence construction that describes what something is not, thereby forcing the reader to assign his or her own unique adjectival name to that thing that is being described. Examples of this practice occur with astounding regularity throughout the first two-thirds of the story, most notably in the narrator’s description of Delano’s “undistrustful good nature, [he was] not liable . . . to indulge in personal alarms.” But a particularly impressive display of double negatives describes (or, does not describe) Delano’s first impressions of Benito Cereno and Babo:

    But the good conduct of Babo, hardly more than the ill-behaviour of others, seemed to withdraw the half-lunatic Don Benito from his cloudy languor. Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniard on the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard’s individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship’s general affliction. Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito’s unfriendly indifference toward himself. The Spaniard’s manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise [my italics]. (169-70)

    That second sentence, in particular, deliberately resists fixing an explicit description on the scene, showing us only the precise impression that was not made on our filter. From the opening of “Benito Cereno” until the point when the scales drop from Delano’s eyes, the word “not” is used more than 170 times. In nearly half of those instances, it is used in a double-negative construction, such as, “not unlike,” “not unwilling,” or “not uncharacteristic.” [9]

    The cumulative effect of Melville”s diction is, as Roundy says, the creation of a “world of appearances.” But it’s a world where even appearance is blurred, a world almost completely devoid of explicit description. Chatman’s discussion of film description again offers an appropriate analogy: as with the diction of “Benito Cereno,” “Film gives us plenitude without specificity. Its descriptive offerings are at once visually rich and verbally impoverished” (39). Like film viewers forced to ascribe particular adjectival descriptions to Detective Quinlan, readers of “Benito Cereno” must actively create its story world with only confounding images as cues.

    But “Benito Cereno” is not completely free of explicit description. Several scholars have pointed to the story’s opening paragraphs as the work of an omniscient narrator who grounds the reader in a world of fact. [10] The narrator returns occasionally to this non-evaluative, non-ironic tone, notably in his description of the cuddy in the opening paragraphs of the shaving scene, and in those moments when we are shown things — such as the two black men who stare intently at Delano — that are “unperceived by the American” (224). There are countless examples of an equivalent narrative voice in film. The opening establishing shots of several Hitchcock films — Rear Window and Psycho, in particular — are frequently cited by narratologists, including Chatman. Rear Window, for instance, opens with a shot of window blinds being raised, followed by several complex extreme long shots, as the camera moves through the window and “randomly” examines the daily activities of the neighborhood. As Chatman notes, were the film to continue in this manner, it might be mistaken for a documentary on city life (46). We as viewers accept this nonhuman agent, this camera, and trust it in much the same way that we trust the narrator of “Benito Cereno.” Just as we believe that Rear Window begins on a hot (94 degrees according to a close-up of a thermometer) morning (we see the composer shaving, the childless couple waking to the sound of an alarm clock), we trust that “Benito Cereno” begins in 1799 and that Delano is from Duxbury, Massachusetts.

    But while many have examined the slant of “Benito Cereno”‘s narrator, few have questioned his reliability much beyond brief mentions of his “retrospective” and “irregularly given” narrating of the story. However, in one passage that has been conspicuously overlooked by previous scholars, the narrator, making manipulative use of his established credibility, deliberately deceives us. In the opening pages of “Benito Cereno,” Delano stands with Cereno and Babo, listening to the Spanish captain tell of his harrowing voyage. Overcome by coughing fits, Cereno has difficulty recounting his tale. Finally, the narrator steps in: “as this portion of the story was very brokenly delivered, the substance only will here be set down” (174). What follows is a long (321 words) paragraph written in the objective, nonironic style of the story’s opening paragraphs. While the passage is clearly marked as Cereno’s telling, the effect of the shift in diction and tone is unmistakable. Already immersed in a world of shifting visions and “modified” appearances, readers cling for stability to the explicit descriptions of the trusted narrator.

    At the time of the publication of Coming to Terms, Chatman had only one famous example with which to illustrate unreliable narration in film. [11] It serves, however, as a helpful analogy to the deceptive shift of tone in “Benito Cereno.” Stage Fright (1950) is another of Hitchcock’s experiments with suspense and cinematic narrative, a film in which the supposedly objective camera serves complicity in the crime. Stage Fright opens as Johnny and Eve speed to Eve’s father’s house. Johnny is telling Eve of his discovery of a murder committed by his lover, Charlotte. “I had to help her,” Johnny says. “Anybody would.” As he begins narrating his story to Eve, the frame dissolves into a “lying flashback,” in which we are shown Johnny’s version of what “really” happened. It is only later, when we learn of his criminal tendencies, that we begin to doubt Johnny’s story. What makes Stage Fright unique is that for the first half of the film, we are given absolutely no reason to question the validity of what the narrator is showing us. As film-goers, we have learned to accept the camera’s rendering of the world as truth, as if it were a binding contract. However, as in “Benito Cereno,” the narrator of Stage Fright has deliberately broken that contract, manipulating our trust for dramatic effect. Again, Chatman’s insights into film are suitably applicable to “Benito Cereno”: when the story’s narrator takes over from Cereno in the telling of his tale, “seeing is precisely not believing” (131).

    In “Benito Cereno,” however, it is not only the narrator who misleads us, a fact that has hardly gone unnoticed. Delano’s fallibility as a filter, as I’ve already shown, is the focus of many of the early analyses of the story. But the existing literature does little more than name Delano’s “unreliability” as such. It is in explaining Melville’s use of perceptual subjectivity that film theory offers its most useful insight into “Benito Cereno.” For while the filter in film still emerges from the perceptual consciousness of a character (as in prose), it does so using different methods, most notably the eyeline match and close-up. Rear Window again serves as a classic (and well-worn) example. After surveying the courtyard outside of the window, the camera then tracks back, revealing the film’s protagonist, Jimmy Stewart’s L. B. Jeffries. He is, we assume, asleep: he is lying, with eyes closed, in a wheelchair, one leg elevated in a hard cast. Hitchcock then elides time by fading-in to a medium shot of Jeffries, who is now sitting up and reaching to answer a telephone. As he speaks to a friend, Jeffries lifts his gaze from the phone to something out of frame, presumably to something behind the camera. Hitchcock then cuts, in an eyeline match, to the familiar long shot of the courtyard. [12] Now, however, it is Jeffries’s view of his neighbors that we see. Now, it is Jeffries who is watching Miss Torso stretch and the sun-bathers disrobe, not the objective narrator.

    The impact of the eyeline match has been of interest to filmmakers and film theorists since D. W. Griffith first began to experiment with the use of close-ups in his early shorts. Soviet filmmakers of the late-1910s pushed the technique even further in their explorations of the emotional impact of montage. Hitchcock, in an interview with Francois Truffaut, described the most famous of the Soviet experiments— that conducted by Kuleshov — and its impact on his own filmmaking:

    You see a close-up of the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine. This is followed immediately by a shot of a dead baby. Back to Mosjoukine again and you read compassion on his face. Then you take away the dead baby and you show a plate of soup, and now, when you go back to Mosjoukine, he looks hungry. Yet, in both cases, they used the same shot of the actor; his face was exactly the same.

    In the same way, let’s take a close-up of Stewart looking out of the window at a little dog that’s being lowered in a basket. Back to Stewart, who has a kindly smile. But in the place of the little dog you show a half-naked girl exercising in front of her open window, and you go back to a smiling Stewart again, this time he’s seen as a dirty old man! (215-16)

    This concept, long accepted in film theory, seems equally applicable to fiction, assuming that the text resists fixing conclusive descriptions. The above example would obviously fail if it were transcribed as, “Stewart looks at the half-naked girl with complete indifference.” But “Benito Cereno,” as I’ve already shown, does resist explicit description, and operates in a manner remarkably similar to a classical Hollywood suspense film. In “Hitchcockian Suspense,” Pascal Bonitzer writes, “The weight of death, murder and crime have meaning only though the proximity of a gaze. All Hitchcock has done in his films is to make the best possible use, where staging is concerned, of the function of the gaze laid bare by crime” (18). Just as Hitchcock filters our experience of Rear Window through Jeffries’s neutral gaze, so does Melville through Delano’s in “Benito Cereno.”

    Again, the opening pages of the story are a fitting example. After the narrator establishes several facts in the first three paragraphs, the narration shifts to Delano’s filter with the first sentence of the fourth paragraph: “To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors [my italics]” (161). While the similarities between Delano’s “glass” and Jeffries’s binoculars and telephoto lens are interesting to mention in passing, the significance of the sentence lies in the verb, viewed. Melville’s method for establishing and maintaining his filter is atypical. He does not simply change the tone or syntax of the narration as Joyce does in Dubliners, nor does he create a stream-of-consciousness like Woolf or Faulkner. Instead, he quite cinematically “cuts” between close-ups of Delano’s frustratingly neutral face and the mysterious images that bombard him.

    There is an almost limitless supply of examples with which to illustrate this point. Upon first seeing Cereno’s ship: “Captain Delano continued to watch her — a proceeding not much facilitated by the vapors partly mantling the hull, . . . It might have been but a deception of the vapors, but, the longer the stranger was watched the more singular appeared her manoeuvres [sic]” (162). Later, after being startled by something moving in the chains: “He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard” (200). Then, when he has become convinced of Cereno’s guilt: “Captain Delano glanced towards Don Benito. As he saw his meagre [sic] form in the act of recovering itself from reclining in the servant’s arms, . . . he could not but marvel at the panic by which himself had been surprised” (207).

    It is in the shaving scene, though, that Melville’s cinematic narrative is best illustrated. The cuddy is first glimpsed through the nonironic, nonevaluative lens of the narrator. The diction is simple and relatively free from metaphoric language. “The floor of the cuddy was matted,” the narrator informs us. “Overhead, four or five old muskets were stuck into horizontal holes along the beams. On one side was a claw-footed old table lashed to the deck” (211). The description here is explicit: there are no conjectural expressions; seems and appears are replaced with was and were. The narrator simply shows us the room, “randomly” describing the setting like Hitchcock’s camera randomly describes a New York neighborhood.

    In the first four paragraphs of the shaving scene, only once does the narrator’s tone shift. Two settees are described as “black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors’ racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber’s crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment” (211). This isolated sentence draws our attention both by the menacing nature of the similes employed and by the return of conjectural verbs. Again, this shift can be explained in cinematic terms. Bonitzer borrows Gilles Deleuze’s term stain to describe the inexplicable element which creates disorder in an otherwise orderly, natural world. “Hitchcockian narrative,” Bonitzer writes:

    obeys the law that the more a situation is somewhat a priori, familiar, or conventional, the more it is liable to become disturbing or uncanny, once one of its constituent elements begins to “turn against the wind”. . . . The staging and editing of the suspense serve to draw the audience’s attention to the perverse element. The film’s movement invariably proceeds from landscape to stain, from overall shot to close-up, and this movement invariably prepares the spectator for the event. (23)

    And this is, in fact, exactly how the shaving scene operates. After describing the relatively natural furnishings of the cuddy (his familiarity with rooms like it put Delano “at ease”), the narrator draws our attention to the stain — the torturous-looking settees that will soon feature prominently in the story’s most suspense-filled scene. After moving from landscape to stain, the narrator then cuts to a close-up of Delano, reestablishing his fallible filter: “Glancing towards the hammock as he entered, . . .” (211). The remainder of the scene, including the racist meditation on slavery and the terrifying shaving itself, is filtered through the “familiarly and humorously” benign nature of the American (213). Thus, as in Hitchcock’s films, suspense is achieved in “Benito Cereno” through editing and staging, a process that is “sustained by the gaze, itself evoked by a third element, a perverse object or stain” (Bonitzer 28).

    The penultimate instance of an eyeline match occurs at the emotional climax of “Benito Cereno,” when Delano finally realizes the tragic truth of the episode: “Captain Delano, now with scales dropped from his eyes, saw the negroes, not in misrule, not in tumult, not as if frantically concerned for Don Benito, but with mask torn away, flourishing hatchets and knives, in ferocious piratical revolt” (233). Until this point (only 72 pages), verbs synonymous with “to see” are used an astounding 244 times. [13] As Rohrberger has noted, Delano’s filter is necessary in order to fully involve the reader in the mystery of the story, but is quickly discarded once that mystery has been revealed. In the remainder of “Benito Cereno,” see verbs are used only four times: “there is no equivocation, no use of suggestive metaphor. Gone are the shadows and the vapors and the air of unreality” (545). Instead, the narrator’s objective slant returns to narrate the final events aboard the ships, to introduce and present the deposition, and to recount the final conversation between Delano and Cereno. [14]

    In the final two paragraphs of “Benito Cereno,” Melville cuts, for the first time, to close-ups of Cereno and Babo. In the former case, he deliberately avoids establishing the character as a filter. We are given one final shot of Cereno, but refused entrance into his subjectivity. Cereno steadfastly refuses to “look” at Babo, even fainting when pressed by the judges to do so. However, the final “gaze” we appropriate is that of Babo’s decapitated head, “that hive of subtlety” (258). That “subtlety” is mirrored in the diction of the 84-word final sentence. Although it is through Babo’s lifeless eyes that we meet the “gaze of the whites” and look upon St. Bartholomew’s church, our vision is once again blurred, preventing us from finally and conclusively unveiling the mystery of ‘The negro.’”

    — Presented at Florida State Film & Literature Conference
    January, 2002

    Footnotes

    [1] From Frank’s call-for-papers for the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, MLA Newsletter 32.1 (2000): 33. I realize that citing a call-for-papers is unorthodox, but Frank’s question has been very helpful as I’ve struggled to form my own position. [return]

    [2] See Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, American Critical Archives 6 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995). Criterion recommends The Piazza Tales for “a companion under the broad branches of an old elm in the hot summer days” (472). Churchman claims that The Piazza Tales “are destined to be read in many a pleasant country house, at watering-places, by the seashores, and among the mountains, during the coming summer heats” (475). And Transcripts predicts the collection will “be a favorite book at the watering places and in the rural districts this season” (476). Reviewers from both the Southern Literary Journal (472) and the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (474) praise The Piazza Tales in comparison to Pierre. [return]

    [3] See also Richard Harter Fogle, Melville’s Shorter Tales, (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960). Fogle, like Hoffman, mentions only Delano’s point-of-view, which he describes as a “struggle to comprehend” (120), and the deposition. Fogle also echoes Hoffman’s praise of the opening section’s structure, which he calls “simply projected in the unities of time, place, and action”(122). [return]

    [4] See also Robert Bruce Bickley, The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction (Durham: Duke UP, 1975). Bickley makes a similar distinction between Delano’s point-of-view and “a limited-omniscient narrator, one privileged to enter Delano’s mind alone, but also permitted to draw partially aside the masks that conceal the identities of Babo and Cereno” (101). [return]

    [5] This question is obviously too large to be adequately addressed here. Recently, the focus of narratological studies of “Benito Cereno,” like that of much of Melville criticism, has turned to Post-Colonial and materialist readings. In “Narrative Self-Justification: Melville and Amasa Delano,” Studies in American Fiction 23:1 (1995): 35-53, Richard McLamore argues that both Melville’s and Amasa Delano’s narratives are constructed so as to deflect the “naïve” reader’s attention from the American captain’s economic motivations. McLamore claims that by transforming Delano’s travel narrative into a “fantastic pirate suspense-story” Melville is, in fact, covertly satirizing “Delano’s evasive, contradictory, and greedily hypocritical narrative” (40, 35). [return]

    [6] point of view, center of perception, objective narration, subjective gaze, unreliable narrator, narrative voice, innocent eye, Melville’s narrative, going behind, perceiving center, third person, narrative perspective, the official, the individual, the reportorial, and the authorial. [return]

    [7] Film does, however, offer the unique opportunity for Descriptive emancipation. Christian Metz, in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford university Press, 1974), offers the example of a landscape described by “a tree, followed by a shot of a stream running next to the tree, followed by a view of a hill in the distance” (127-28). Chatman responds, “The shot sequence forms a narrative pause. The sign of the pause is precisely the temporally unmotivated shifting from tree to stream to hill” (42). [return]

    [8] See also Dillingham, 245, and Mary Rohrberger, “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions,” College English 27 (1965), 544. [return]

    [9] With this knowledge, the “knot” of the story takes on an even greater symbolic significance. Some form of “knot” or “knotter” appears 29 times in the same span of pages. [return]

    [10] See Rohrberger, 542-43. She counts twenty-five facts in the story’s first eight sentences. [return]

    [11] Along with the famous example of Robert Weine’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) operates in a similar manner. Verbal Kint, we learn at the end of the film, is a fallible filter. But the camera has also served as an unreliable narrator, describing the lying flashback from a supposedly objective and trustworthy distance. [return]

    [12] The eyeline match is one of five standard techniques in continuity editing of the classical Hollywood cinema. The others are the 180 degree rule, establishing shot/breakdown, shot/reverse shot, and match on action. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). [return]

    [13] “Benito Cereno,” in this light, reads like a thesaurus: appear, eye, gaze, glance, glare, glimpse, image, impress, look, mark, notice, observe, peer, perceive, regard, remark, scrutinize, see, sight, spectacle, spy, stare, survey, turn, view, watch, witness. [return]

    [14] Film theory might also offer a better explanation for the sudden drop of Delano’s filter and the shift to an objective slant. While the analogy is not perfect, it seems that the conclusion of Psycho operates in a very similar manner. When Lillian Crane discovers Mrs. Bates’ corpse in the fruit cellar and Norman emerges with the knife, the film suddenly drops Norman’s filter, as the mystery it has obscured has been suddenly revealed. The switch to the deposition in “Benito Cereno” is likewise similar to the psychiatrist’s analysis of Norman. See Christopher D. Morris, “Psycho’s Allegory of Seeing,” Literature Film Quarterly 24.1 (1996), 48. Finally, the return to Norman’s/Mother’s filter in the film’s final images mirrors the momentary return to subjectivity in the final paragraph of “Benito Cereno.” [return]

    Works Cited

    Bonitzer, Pascal. “Hitchcockian Suspense.” Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). Ed. Slavoj Zizek. London: Verso, 1992. 15-30.

    Cardwell, Guy A. “Melville’s Gray Story.” Bucknell Review 8.3 (1959): 154-67.

    Chatman, Syemour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

    Dillingham, William B. Melville’s Short fiction: 1853-1856. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977.

    Hoffman, Charles G. “The Shorter Fiction of Herman Melville.” South Atlantic Quarterly 52 (1953): 414-30.

    Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York, Penguin. 1986.

    Rohrberger, Mary. “Point of View in ‘Benito Cereno’: Machinations and Deceptions.” College English 27 (1965): 541-46.

    Roundy, Nancy. “Present Shadows: Epistemology in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’” Arizona Quarterly 34 (1978): 344-50.

    Seelye, John Douglas. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970. 104-11.

    Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

  • The Woman Warrior (1975)

    By Maxine Hong Kingston

    Reading The Woman Warrior now, twenty-five years after its original publication, I find it difficult to separate the actual text from the cultural milieu in which it was written. This is very much a book of the 1970s — a creative memoir that, even in its title, gives voice to feminist and multiculturalist concerns. It is equal parts bildungsroman, fable, journal, poem, and immigrant story. At times, it is also really, really good.

    Kingston’s main concern here is with language. Words and their power to construct meaning, history, and identity are at the heart of each of the five tales. Words become Kingston’s weapon for writing a disgraced aunt back into the family history. Words of vengeance are carved into a warrior’s back. Words of Chinese talk-stories serve as a bond between mother and daughter. And, finally, words become the means by which Kingston comes of age.

    It’s only fitting, then, that Kingston’s own use of words is so impressive. I enjoyed the language of The Woman Warrior for the same reason that I’m so enamored of Tarkovsky’s films: Kingston has a gift for capturing images that speak (quite poetically and eloquently) for themselves. In the first story, “No Name Woman,” she imagines the struggle for individuality that her aunt and other women like her must have fought daily in the fields and small towns of China. “Still there must have been a marvelous freeing of beauty,” she writes, “when a worker laid down her burden and stretched and arched.” Then, in “Shaman,” she recreates the moment when her mother first tasted independence. Her arrival at a medical school is like a scene straight from Virginia Woolf: “The women who had arrived early did not offer to help unpack, not wanting to interfere with the pleasure and the privacy of it. Not many women got to live out the daydream of women — to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself.”

    “No Name Woman” and “White Tigers” are the two sections most often anthologized and deservedly so. The third and fourth stories, which deal more specifically with Kingston’s own family, are less effective. The Woman Warrior is redeemed, though, in its final pages when Kingston melds two beautiful stories. One is an ancient tale of a Chinese woman held captive, who finally returns to her village and brings with her the songs of her captors. The second is the story of Kingston’s own coming of age. The juxtaposition of the two stories is handled brilliantly, reminding us of the value born from the fruitful blending of cultures.


    No Name Woman — the story of Kingston’s aunt, a woman who committed suicide after disgracing the family by having an illegitimate child (though she was likely raped). Kingston attempts to right the great tragedy of the story — the family’s decision to erase her from their collective memory. Kingston gives the “no name woman” depth – love, emotion, shame, pride — by rewriting her into history.

    White Tigers — The story of Fa Mu Lan, the famous Chinese swordswoman who was taken away as child to be trained as a warrior before returning home to take her father’s place in battle and leading an army to victory. Again, Kingston places emphasis on the power of words — the words of vengeance carved into her back, the words casually used by Chinese to dehumanize their daughters, the words of her mother’s talk-stories. Kingston then tries to imagine herself as a contemporary woman warrior in America.

    Shaman — The story of the life of Kingston’s mother, in both China and America. A nice portrait of that frustrating ambivalence we feel toward family, which makes us both proud and embarrassed, wanting to both cling to our heritage and to define ourselves apart from it.

    At the Western Plaza — Brave Orchid’ sister, Moon Orchid, arrives in America to confront the husband who never sent for her. When she does finally meet him, he refuses to allow her back into his life, having found a new life and a new wife in America. Moon Orchid is broken by the move and the betrayal, finally finding something like peace in an asylum.

    A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe — The title of this section comes from the short story that ends the novel. It’s the story of a Chinese woman captured by barbarians with whom she lives for twelve years. When she returns to the Chinese, she brings with her new songs that were formed from the blending of the two cultures. The story could likewise be applied to this entire novel. The final section is about Kingston’s struggle to find her own voice. At one point, she torments another young Chinese girl who absolutely refuses to speak. Kingston finds her voice in a furious outburst at the dinner table.

  • The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

    The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

    Dir. by Joel and Ethan Coen

    Images: Another beautifully shot film from Roger Deakins. They obviously enjoyed taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by shooting in B&W: Crane smokes constantly, lighting is often in stark contrast, all trademarks of noir. Favorite images: Crane sitting alone in exact middle of couch, Birdy backlit at the piano, and lawyer Riedenschneider bathed in light streaming in from prison window (a scene straight out of citizen Kane).

    • • •

    Joel and Ethan Coen have carved out an enviable niche for themselves. Working for nearly two decades now in relative independence from studio interference, they have written, directed, and produced a series of interesting, if not always successful (either commercially or artistically), films. In doing so, they have somehow managed to garner the affection of both the popular press and the Hollywood community, while simultaneously fostering a rabid, cult-like fan following: those who can quote Raising Arizona for any occasion and who laugh a bit too loud at theatrical showings. On more than one occasion I’ve heard the Coens described as the “saviors” of American film, a moniker that would, I’m sure, inspire quiet, ironic laughter from the men themselves.

    In a word, the Coens have become critic-proof: to criticize one of their films is to resign oneself to a place among the “unhip.” Which brings me to The Man Who Wasn’t There, a film I’m hesitant to describe as a disappointment, if only because, by doing so, I’m setting myself up to the inevitable and tired rebuttals: “The jokes on you. The Coens love to break the rules. They set you up, and you fell for it.” Actually, I do get it. I’m just beginning to lose interest. Or, more precisely, the Coens are failing to hold my interest. But more on that later . . .

    I’m also hesitant to label The Man a disappointment because so much of it is so good. Billy Bob Thornton is impressive in the title role, playing a barber named Ed Crane whose life is lived in futile routine — a mindless job, a loveless marriage. When he becomes embroiled in a messy murder, involving his wife (Frances McDormand), her lover (James Gandolfini), and a traveling businessman (Jon Polito), it appears that, with the excitement, he might also find some meaning in his life. But in typical noir fashion, the exact opposite occurs. In that sense, the conceit of the film is an interesting one: “Modern Man” (as his lawyer refers to him) fights back, becoming active for the first time in his life. But his action leads only to the destruction of everything he holds dear (if anyone is, in fact, capable of holding anything “dear” in a Coen film). Frank Norris would have loved it.

    The problem with The Man is that, perhaps for the first time, the Coens have invested a character with genuine pathos, but seem to have done so (much to my own personal annoyance) only in the interest of later undercutting it with their typical brand of cynical Nihilism. As a pure character study of Ed Crane, the film flirts with honesty and sincerity, which gives certain scenes a quiet grace unlike anything seen in earlier Coen films. For instance, at a Christmas party, Ed discovers a teen-age girl playing Beethoven at the piano. It’s a beautiful scene. Ed is obviously drawn to both the girl — her potential and innocence — and to the music, which seems to offer him some glimpse of beauty.

    But such things — truth, beauty, innocence — don’t exist in the Coen’s world, and any sad sap who believes that they do (like Ed Crane or me, for instance) is just being set up for ridicule. The relationship between Ed and the girl eventually becomes another Coen punchline: the two end up in a car accident after the “innocent” girl leans over to give Ed a blow job. I guess the joke worked. Several others in the theater laughed (a few too loudly).

    The Coens seem to have stepped into an interesting trap here. Never before have any of their films tried so hard to be about something — and, honestly, by the time Tony Shaloub’s lawyer began his speech about “the more you look at something the less chance there is of it making sense” I was just shaking my head — but, ultimately, The Man Who Wasn’t There is only about meaninglessness: the meaninglessness of our lives, the meaninglessness of our loves, and the meaninglessness of this film. I might be willing to buy it all if the Coens hadn’t offered glimpses of something much greater. But, in the end, their cynicism and this film just feel hollow.

  • Another Country (1962)

     

    By James Baldwin

    At its best, James Baldwin’s fiction is lyrical, intense, poetic, outrageous, improvisatory, brutal, and transcendent. The first time I read his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” I was sitting in one of those massive chain bookstores, drinking coffee and trying to block out the pabulum coming from the Muzak. Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself choking back tears. The last three pages of “Sonny’s Blues” are as good as it gets: Sonny breaks into a blistering piano solo, finally finding a voice for his repressed pain. Baldwin follows suit — capturing the rhythms, the longing, the give and take of the best jazz — in some of the most stunning prose I’ve encountered.

    Unfortunately, Another Country is not Baldwin at his best. In fact, it’s possibly the most frustrating novel I’ve ever read. Here, Baldwin is so determined to explode the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality — and judging by the variety of sexual relationships on display here, he must have plotted those intersections on graph paper before sitting down to write — that he makes a fatal mistake: instead of being particularly insightful or even shocking, Another Country is preachy, sentimental, and, worst of all, boring.

    Rufus Scott is a young black man who makes his living playing drums in Harlem jazz clubs. When we first meet Rufus, he is wandering the streets, suffering from guilt over his treatment of Leona, a woman we later meet through flashbacks. Leona’s and Rufus’s relationship is based on a shared self-loathing: he feels unworthy of the love of a white woman; she has known only brutal relationships, having come to New York after escaping from an abusive marriage in the South. Rufus’s brutality eventually sends her to an asylum, an event that plagues Rufus, leading him to jump from the George Washington bridge at the end of chapter one. The remainder of the novel charts the effects of Rufus’s suicide on the lives of those closest to him.

    The most interesting relationship is between Ida, Rufus’s younger sister, and Vivaldo, his best friend. Both are struggling artists: she a singer, he a novelist. In Baldwin’s hands, they become a platform for long discourses on the legacies of racism. Before meeting Ida, Vivaldo has known black women only as sexual objects — the cheap whores he frequented in Harlem. Ida has likewise known white men only as victimizers — the men who leered at her and who broke her brother’s spirit. At moments, Vivaldo and Ida come alive in Baldwin’s prose. The flashback to their first meeting, for instance, is handled gracefully. But too often they act as little more than mouthpieces, uttering sappy lines like, “How’s one going to get through it all? How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?” Baldwin wisely leaves their relationship in limbo at the end of the novel, offering some hope for reconciliation between the races, but promising nothing.

    Richard and Cass are another interesting couple. Married with children, they struggle to maintain their “traditional” roles amidst the sexual and social tumult (not to mention the heavy drinking) that surrounds them. Richard is also a novelist, but has “sold out,” making him a failure in his wife’s eyes. She escapes to an affair with Eric, an actor friend who has recently returned from Paris, but it brings her little comfort. “I’m beginning to think,” she gushes, “that growing just means learning more and more about anguish. That poison becomes your diet — you drink a little of it every day.” It’s perhaps in this relationship that Baldwin does the most moralizing. Near the very end of the novel he finally enters Richard’s point of view, giving voice to the character who, until this point, had been little more than a personification of failed artistic ambition. Richard’s pain, however, rings more true than that of others in the novel because Baldwin allows readers to experience it in the moment, instead of subjecting us to endless discussions of that pain.

    My frustration with this novel is fueled largely by its obvious, unrealized potential. Baldwin populates Another Country with artists of all sorts and provides them with fabulously romanticized lives in Greenwich Village and Paris. He sets out to deliberately create another “lost generation,” but never seems able to elevate his characters above the prescribed roles they play.

  • Broom of the System (1987)

     

    By David Foster Wallace

    Lenore Beadsman’s life is complicated. The 24 year old heir to the Beadsman baby food empire struggles to balance her career as a call center operator — where the lines of communication seem perpetually crossed — with her, um, complex relationship with her boss, Rick Vigorous, of Frequent and Vigorous Publishing. She also worries about her younger bother, who refers to himself as the Antichrist; her bird, Vlad the Impaler, which has a tendency to curse and prophesy; and her grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein who has suddenly gone missing from her retirement home.

    The majority of Broom of the System, first published in 1987, takes place in the future (1990, actually), which allows Wallace the freedom to distort the otherwise recognizable landscape of his northern Ohio. Here, popular culture has literally shaped life: an entire city has, in fact, been designed to resemble Jayne Mansfield from above. College students meet to watch Bob Newhart and play drinking games; others gather at a bar built around a Gilligan’s Island theme. Wallace, a former philosophy major, had obviously been reading Baudrillard, as he has great linguistic fun interrogating the simulacrum — the copies of copies of copies that have come to replace actual experience in contemporary American culture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a man-made blot intended to serve as “A point of reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love. A blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls. An Other for Ohio’s Self.”

    Wallace’s first novel, written as his MFA thesis, is obviously heavily indebted to (but not entirely derivative of) Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Both are detective stories of a Post-Modern, epistemological bent, more concerned with the language that constructs meaning — both in their stories and in the world — than with the literal “truth” that their heroines pursue. And both authors push the conceit to hilariously absurd ends. Wallace even one-ups Pynchon’s famous final scene — Oedipa Maas sits, waiting like we do, for the mystery to be revealed — by actually ending Broom of the System mid-sentence. It’s perhaps too easy of a trick, and one that must surely make the more mature Wallace cringe, but it feels perfectly appropriate here.

  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

    Zora Neale Hurston

    In the opening chapters of Their Eyes Were Watching God, an elderly African-American woman sits down with her granddaughter and explains the main lesson she has learned during her difficult life, one that has spanned from the final years of slavery to the more promising days of the twentieth century:

    Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nuthin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.

    When Zora Neale Hurston’s greatest novel was rediscovered in the mid-1970s, readers once again heard voices that for years had been silenced by neglect. Hurston, a college educated anthropologist, spent the early years of her adult life collecting stories from the South, “folklore” that she would then transform and elevate into art. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has written, Hurston has a “Negro way of saying.” By writing in the dialect of rural and often poor African-Americans, a device that for decades had been employed famously by white writers such as Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Hurston took ownership of that voice, made it authentic, and gave it poetry.

    Through the course of the novel, we watch that little girl, who once listened so attentively to her grandmother’s advice, grow into a woman capable of ideas and feelings beyond the elder’s realm of experience. Janie Crawford is a beautiful young woman of mixed race, who was startled to discover as a child that she was different from the white children with whom she was raised. Hurston frequently emphasizes Janie’s light skin and her long, soft hair that make her a constant object of desire by men, both black and white. And it’s through her relationships with those men that Hurston charts Janie’s coming of age.

    As a teen, Janie is married off to Logan Killicks, a much older white man who cares for his wife (in his own way), but realizes that he will never keep her. Their marriage is arranged by Janie’s grandmother, a former slave whose notions of happiness revolve around wealth and security. If the black woman is “de mule uh de world,” then the best she can hope for is some comfort among the toil. For Janie, who at first assumes that love is the inevitable product of marriage, her life with Killicks provides a brutal awakening. Hurston writes: “Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.”

    Janie leaves Killick to follow Jody Starks, a boisterous and ambitious young man, to Eatonville, where he plans to become mayor of the all black town. The couple spend twenty years together there, watching distantly as Jody’s dreams come to fruition. But despite their superficial success, Janie fails to find either love or contentment with Jodie, whose condescending treatment of her and the other townsfolk leave little distinction between himself and her first husband. Hurston transforms Janie’s dreams of a fuller life into a pear tree and a cool breeze: “Then one day she sat and watched the shadow of herself going about tending store and prostrating itself before Jody, while all the time she herself sat under a shady tree with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. Somebody near about making summertime out of lonesomeness.”

    After Jody’s death, Janie once again leaves, this time with a younger man named Vergible Woods. “Tea Cake” takes his new bride to the swamps of Florida, where they work the fields as migrant farmers. As some critics have noted, Janie’s path is, in some ways, a journey into “blackness,” a gradual move from white to black community. With Tea Cake and the other workers, Janie finally finds love, fellowship, and self-realization. Hurston’s description of their love-making — the only such description in the book — is passionate and beautiful: “He drifted into sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” Janie’s awakening is so wonderfully rendered that even Tea Cake’s sudden death, though undeniably moving, feels less tragic than would be expected. Janie returns to Eatonville, to its staring eyes and gossiping mouths, with remarkable grace.

    Of course, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a landmark novel because of its unsentimental exposure of a black woman’s inner life — and it’s probably the first and still the best American novel to do so — but what most amazes me about it is the beauty of it all. Hurston’s prose at times is awesome (I hesitate to use that adjective only because it has been tarnished by misuse). She writes:

    There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

    And later, when describing a hurricane:

    The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.

    For obvious reasons, I will never be able to fully understand the experience of an African-American woman. I can, however touch something of our shared experience through art like Hurston’s. What better reason do you need?

  • O Pioneers (1913)

    By Willa Cather

    Willa Cather was nearly 40 years old in 1913 when she published O Pioneers!, her second novel. It’s difficult, then, to overlook the obvious similarities between her own life and that of her heroine, Alexandra Bergson. At this point, both women had devoted their lives to a single pursuit, sacrificing personal relationships — or, at least those of a romantic nature — for the cause. As she left no autobiography, no memoir, and few letters, we can only speculate about Cather’s personal life. Some have postulated that she was a closeted lesbian, but, as with all such claims, it is only that: speculation. What we do know is that she never married or had children, and that she devoted the majority of her energies during her adult life to writing and to seeing those writings published. It was quite a feat: she left a legacy of 13 novels and more than 60 short stories, which have helped to secure her place now in the company of her more famous contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

    O Pioneers! is a wonderful novel and one that, I must admit, I have put off reading for years simply because its title has always reminded me of those sentimental prairie novels that twelve year old girls seem so fond of. That excuse, as unforgivably lame as it sounds, is not completely unjustified. Like much of Cather’s work, O Pioneers! is inspired by the years that she and her family spent in Nebraska, where she lived among Scandinavian, French, and Bohemain immigrants and where she witnessed first hand the back-breaking work of plains farming. What separates this novel from the pack, though, is Cather’s remarkable blend of lyricism and honest insight. O Pioneers! is an interesting transition piece, a novel caught between the Midwest naturalism of Hamlin Garland and the epistemological experiments of the modernists. While the fate of many of Cather’s characters are determined by forces beyond their control, the novelist holds on to some hope — a hope for real personal happiness and a more perfect future.

    The Bergsons are typical of the immigrant families Cather had known in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The mother and father are first-generation Americans who settled with the hope of owning land and of securing better lives for their children. John Bergson dies young, too soon to experience the fruits of his labors, but soon enough, for “he would not have had it again if he could, not he! He knew the end too well to wish to begin again. He knew where it all went to, what it all became.” His children, however, personify the American Dream. Alexandra, through hard work and ingenuity, breaks the land and watches it flourish. Lou and Oscar enjoy their wealth, marry well, and find success in business and politics. The youngest, Emil, graduates from college, sees the world, and welcomes opportunity and freedom, the dreams of every immigrant.

    Their lives, however, do not completely escape the suffering and alienation that so preoccupied artists at the turn of the century. Like Cather, Alexandra chooses to sacrifice her own love and happiness to a single-minded pursuit, in her case the education and unrealized potential of her brother, Emil. It is a “choice,” Cather argues, that many women are forced to make. She captures this plight in a beautiful image of Marie, the Berson’s young neighbor, whose loveless marriage and hopeless pining for Emil slowly destroys her vitality. The passage is typical of Cather’s preoccupation with the connection between her characters and the land they work:

    The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain, until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.

    It’s an ominous passage that prepares us for the tragic end to Emil’s and Marie’s love. Separated by the laws of their land and their churches, they die too soon, killed by Marie’s jealous husband. Cather describes their deaths in brutal detail, but refuses to cast blame. Here, Alexandra becomes a naturalist heroine and Cather’s surrogate: “Being what he was, she felt, [Marie’s husband] could not have acted otherwise.”

    But despite the novel’s tragedy, Cather distinguishes herself from Norris, Dreiser, and Crane by painting the conclusion of O Pioneers! with a tint of optimism. Broken and beaten by Emil’s death, whose fate seems to make her life’s efforts futile, Alexandra is restored by the return of Carl, the man she has loved since childhood. What I find most interesting about this turn is that their saving relationship is built on selfless love, a conceit that her more cynical and disillusioned contemporaries would have likely scoffed as a romantic fiction. It works here, though, saving the novel from the reductive determinism of so much naturalist fiction.

  • Attack! (1956)

    Attack! (1956)

    Dir. by Robert Aldrich

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

    • • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Washington/Hollywood Connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Independent Production and the Re-Birth of United Artists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Robert Aldrich’s Attack!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Critical and Public Reception

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

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

    THIS IS WHAT HELL IS LIKE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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

    Labels: ,

  • Buried Child (1978)

    By Sam Shepard

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)

    By David Rabe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • Fefu and Her Friends (1977)

    By Maria Irene Fornes

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

    Fefu

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

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

    Cindy

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

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

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

    Christina

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

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

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

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

    Julia

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

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

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

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