Most memoirs by actors of some renown I find very dull, with their only anima the nimbus of fame that surrounds people involved in mildly amusing, if not dull, episodes. Peter Coyote’s Sleeping Where I Fall is a happy double exception, an interesting memoir by an actor and an unsentimental fresh look at a decade of hallucinogenic blur and napalm death. Coyote does not write of this period as if it were a roll of icons, or a series of exhibits in a museum, but his own journey through vivid, youthful life. His work in independent theater and independent communities of that strange time are given in details, rather than as manifestations of a larger thesis of the era, be it sentimental picturesque or toxic underworld. Each fascinating person is given their space, with no celebrity given exceptional status – someone will need to stay at someone’s house to give birth, and maybe the houseowner will be Janis Joplin. It is a memorable portrait in part because it does not attempt to be the exceptional, definitive, or all-encompassing look, but simply the memories of a man who often had an exceptional view of the rarer landscapes of an upset world, whose quakes still ripple, above and below the surface of our own ideological patchworld quilt, where sex and drugs are finally becoming an entirely private matter, while workers, like those at the very site where you might buy Coyote’s book, are treated like scum, cattle, dirt.
A good, quotable section is his view on a landmark film of the time, an insightful perspective of countercultural man on countercultural product. The Mime Troupe were an experimental theater group Coyote was involved in, while Dennis and Peter are the obvious suspects:
Despite good feelings for Dennis, Easy Rider remains a sore point with me. Peter and Dennis had seen and been excited by the Mime Troupe and suggested that I write and direct a scene with the company for inclusion in the film. I was excited by this prospect and pleased because it could funnel a little cash into the pockets of my fellow performers, who were still subsisting on a five-dollars-a-show salary.
Several months later, they called with an offer: twenty dollars a week and a place on Fonda’s couch for me, but nothing for my friends – “because this is a real low-budget thing, we’re doing it because we believe in it” (as if we did not behave that way daily). I wrote them off angrily as spoiled brats and refused to play. Even in the realm of low-budget independent films and even in 1968, twenty dollars a week was a beggar’s wage.
The finished film added insult to injury when the two protagonists visit a commune in the Southwest where sincere and drab hippies, the kind of nutless townfolk John Wayne might have protected in a corny western, are given the full Hollywood spin as “good people,” as if they were Franciscan monks who just happened to smoke dope and dress funny. The community entertains itself by watching a clutch of dodos clump through a mindless commedia-type stage play announced by a crudely lettered sign as “Gorilla Theater” – an obvious travesty of the Mime Troupe’s guerilla theater and a backhanded slap at the communards, who are less hip than the individualistic, wandering biker heroes.
This was an inaccurate, smug, and insulting reflection of the life my friends and I were creating out of hard labor, with minimal assets and comforts. It was galling to see our style and our intentions misunderstood and misrepresented to the vast cinematic audience. What elicited my enduring scorn, however, was the film’s ending, where the two “free spirits” are blown off their motorcycles by rednecks in a pickup truck. This ending was more than infuriating and dishonest; it was counterpropaganda that suggested that the cost of living free in America was death – so if you don’t want to die, boys and girls, stay home and be audiences; real adventures are for charismatic, handsome people like Hollywood actors. But in fact, people were living “free” all over the United States at that time, dealing with the tough issues of subsistence, making peace with their neighbors, and developing appropriate spiritual and community practices while this sorry-ass subtext was being promulgated by guys who were queasy about leaving their safe haunts in their own hometown! This was the status quo in hip drag, and I was disgusted with it. I did not see Dennis Hopper for many years after that. When I did, we had both been resurrected as actors and men, and the joy of seeing him healthy and well (and the clusters of memories we share) wiped away all my bitter associations as if they had been fog.
Years have gone by since that film made a fortune and introduced America to national treasure Jack Nicholson. Peter, Dennis, and I have grown and changed, and I have no desire to chain anyone to an identity they’ve since transcended. However, that slow-motion cinematic death still burns in my mind as a betrayal of the sensibilities it capitalized on. Far fewer people will read these words than have seen that film, I am sure, but at least I’ve marked my objections, and I can drop that chip from an overloaded shoulder, leaving it in the road behind me with those crushed bikes, sprawled actors, and fake blood.
This post, and recent others, are interim, idling points while in the middle of larger, more ambitious work. It was made a few days after the death of Roger Ebert, a man who was an old-fashioned newspaperman, a movie enthusiast, and a man whose struggle against a fierce illness demonstrated a strength that I would never claim without entering such struggle first. I place a remembrance by an acquaintance whose work he championed in a footnote rather than the main text1, because the eloquence is not mine, and because public mourning for a public figure so often seems intended as a focus of attention for the mourner, rather than the mourned. Included is a song, which, appropriately or not, connotes passage, but one well used in a movie that gave me temporary but great relief. This invocation of beautiful escape, so rare, and so often hoped for from the movies, perhaps makes it suitable for a fellow moviegoer.
Near the very end of The Pope of Greenwich Village:
CHARLIE puts out his best suit, his best shirt, and his dressiest shoes. He gets an expensive manicure, a shave, and a shoeshine. His face is never at ease, shows no joy, but is always solemn, no longer even fearful, but simply analyzing every point of the moment that will come next. He is dressed to the nines as he walks along the neighbourhood streets, but there’s no ease to the walk, absolutely no swagger, maybe even a little stiffness, as he moves closer and close to the gentleman’s club. He stops, takes an inhale from the cigarette like it’s oxygen and he’s about to dive deep into the ocean, then enters the establishment, a place whose streetfront glass is blocked by green felt, and marked with a simple small cursive: “Members Only”.
NUNZI and PETE sit at a table with some espressos, NUNZI has just finished lighting a cigar. PAULIE stands nearby, waiting any orders. They are the only ones in the front of the club.
NUNZI
This is a private club, pal.
CHARLIE
Well, I’d like to see Eddie Grant.
NUNZI looks to PETE, who gives a nod of assent. NUNZI puts down the cigar, gets up, and pats CHARLIE’s front down. With a rough move, he shifts CHARLIE to the side, so he can pat down his back. CHARLIE gives a contemptful smirk.
NUNZI
He’s in the back room.
CHARLIE takes an inhale from his cigarette, then slowly, and very deliberately, blows smoke directly in NUNZI’s face. PAULIE looks at this with a nervousness like they’re in the Vatican and CHARLIE just spat on a cross. CHARLIE makes his way to the back room, giving PETE a hard stare along the way.
The back room is an unassuming, shabby place. An unrepaired hole in the wall is off to the side, and the door squeaks. The only importance in the room is BEDBUG EDDIE, who begins speaking almost the moment CHARLIE enters.
EDDIE
You’re Charlie Moran? You’re one of the scumbags that robbed my money.
CHARLIE gives a non-commital small shake of his hands.
EDDIE
You were brought up around here, no?
CHARLIE
Carmine street.
Charlie moves into the room, and goes to sit down. We see more of this unimpressive throne room: a photo to the right of the door commemorating an important handshake between two men, a Last Supper above it, and a black and white pin-up to its left. Below the pin-up are some stacked cardboard boxes of glassware that probably fell off some truck.
EDDIE
Same thing. You know you owe the neighborhood some respect?
CHARLIE is now sitting at the non-descript wood table, across from EDDIE, CHARLIE’s hand on the table. EDDIE might want to kill CHARLIE, but his voice remains controlled, never changing in volume, staying at a level closer to mild exasperation, rather than murderous rage.
EDDIE
People steal from Eddie Grant it makes for a total breakdown. No one knows right or wrong. Before you know it, you got moulinyans2 moving in. What the hell brings you in here?
CHARLIE
A tape I took off a dead cop…that’ll hang you by your balls.
EDDIE gives a silent laugh out of the side of his mouth.
EDDIE
You walked in here to threaten me.
CHARLIE
You’re fucking right I walked in here to threaten you.
EDDIE now gives a quick, full, raspy laugh.
EDDIE
Last time somebody talked close to me like that was from the Village, too.
NUNZI and PETE, still at the table, are looking at what’s going on in the back room with nervousness. PAULIE looks on too, less with nervousness and more determined hatred.
EDDIE
I parcel-posted the scumbag home.
CHARLIE
He didn’t have the tape that could put you away for twenty.
EDDIE’s voice now drops lower in volume.
EDDIE
Okay. Let me give you some advice. You’re behaving like a mamalucco3, capise? You walk in here, you don’t show the club no respect. You’re acting like a real scumbag. You’re half-irish, so –
EDDIE cracks his knuckles, as if it’s CHARLIE’s very spine he’s breaking, and what’s said next is a pleasurable, loud exhale.
EDDIE
–I MAKE CONSIDERATIONS.
PAULIE nows looks on with nervousness. EDDIE’s pupils are dark and cold, like olives on a bed of ice.
EDDIE
I give you this for the tapes.
EDDIE makes the classic vaffanculo gesture, the fingers brushing against the underside of the chin.
EDDIE
I promised myself I’d wipe my ass with this hand…
EDDIE reaches out to grasp CHARLIE’s hand on the table. The emphatic part is said in a whisper.
EDDIE
…and nobody, nobody but the pope, could walk out of here with his hand.
We see through the door NUNZI get up from the table, but PETE blocks him with his arm from going any further.
CHARLIE struggles a little, but EDDIE has his hand tight in his grasp. CHARLIE leans close to say the next part.
CHARLIE
Mister…I am the pope. This might be your church, but right now, I’m the pope of Greenwich Village.
CHARLIE uses his free hand to give the clasping fist of EDDIE an emphatic tap.
CHARLIE
Because I got a tape, alright?
EDDIE lets CHARLIE’s hand go, but EDDIE’s eyes are dark, cold, and wild: he’s already picked out a place where this young man’s body will never be found. CHARLIE returns the stare, then gives a smirk.
EDDIE
I like you, you have balls. I don’t get too mad at that.
PAULIE comes to the door.
PAULIE
Coffee, Eddie?
Despite what EDDIE has said, his eyes remain in the same state: CHARLIE will probably never be seen alive again. CHARLIE gives a cold, unceasing look in return.
PAULIE enters, and puts down the espresso cups. EDDIE stares, CHARLIE stares back. The lethal energy between the two men could kill off every fly in the room.
CHARLIE briefly breaks his stare to look down at the espresso cups being put down on the table, and EDDIE gives a happy grin: of course he’s tougher than this prick.
PAULIE
Three sugars, Eddie?
CHARLIE returns to his old stare, however, unweakened. EDDIE is back to his mad, murderous state; his eyes are both cold and bulging out. PAULIE puts the sugar in EDDIE’s espresso.
PAULIE
I already put your sugar in, Charlie.
It’s now EDDIE who breaks the stare and looks off at PAULIE, and CHARLIE gives this break a cool acknowledgement: you sure you’re tougher than me?
EDDIE stirs his espresso, without looking down. He takes a grip of his espresso. CHARLIE turns to look at PAULIE, trying to read what’s going on in his strange friend: why does PAULIE stay fixed on the mafia chieftain, as if he’s waiting for something to happen? PAULIE realizes what he’s doing, and abruptly looks off into the distance. CHARLIE returns to the staring contest, but EDDIE has already taken this prolonged break as a victory. He lifts the cup to his mouth, eyes always locked on CHARLIE, drinks the espresso as if it’s CHARLIE’s blood, all in one gulp, then gives a pleasured HMMMM – before falling out of his chair in a sudden, violent movement, crashing against the floor.
FOOTNOTES
1 From the podcast “Day 6″, hosted by Brent Bambury:
WERNER HERZOG
What sticks out for me is that he was one of my earliest discoverers and defenders. Decades ago, when I came out with my film Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he put it on his list of the best ten of all time. And people started to listen…he was like an icebreaker for my films, and he always had the feeling that my films were something which made his life right, that he was working [for] in this field. I think we have lost someone who…with him, an epoch ends. The epoch was intelligent, deep discourse about cinema. And all this, in the last two decades has been lost…gradually, it has shifted over into celebrity news. Roger was much larger than life, in a way, and I don’t see the successor, but there’s a big cultural trend, and that’s beyond you and Roger and me, and that is a shift, cultural shift within audiences, and the reflection in that is that almost all print media have gotten rid of their film reviewers, and today they all write about celebrity news. So, it’s bigger than just the passing of Roger Ebert. An epoch, in a way, ends with him.
He sometimes would call me the good soldier of cinema, and I have to give it back to him. I would say to him, Roger, you are the real good soldier of cinema. You are holding out in an outpost that has been given up by all the others. You are the one who is afflicted now, you are the wounded soldier. He was the wounded soldier, he was afflicted, he was silenced – and just wouldn’t give up, and just plow on, and that gave me a lot of courage, to plow on.
“This Time Tomorrow” by The Kinks, from The Darjeeling Limited soundtrack:
2 A slur for african-americans; absent a better source, I guide those to the urban dictionary’s etymology, where there is division on whether or not it comes from the italian, melanzana, for eggplant.
From the Flop House podcast, “Episode #86 – The Happiest Millionaire”, the usual gang of Elliott Kalan, Dan McCoy, and Stuart Wellington have a discussion about interesting hypothetical millionaires which devolves into a moment of sexual tension and mononomina:
DAN
So, this is where we recommend something, in case you don’t want to watch three hours of a story about a singing millionaire.
ELLIOTT
I don’t know why you wouldn’t.
DAN
What’s something you might have seen?
ELLIOTT
He barely spent money on anything in this movie. You expect it to be like Arthur, or something like that. Where the guy’s spending the money stupidly on crazy things.
STUART
Yeah, he’s got a solid gold car, or-
ELLIOTT
Yeah, exactly. Or solid gold hat.
STUART
Plays tennis with a giant diamond, or something.
DAN
Or solid gold hits.
ELLIOTT
Yeah. Because it’s Quincy Jones. He’s the happiest millionaire.
DAN
Probably is. I mean, he got married to Peggy Lipton…
ELLIOTT
Heir to the Lipton Ice Teas fortune.
DAN
Yeah.
ELLIOTT
His daughter is a successful actress.
DAN
Lovely woman in her own right.
ELLIOTT
Don’t get creepy.
DAN
WHAT? She’s pretty. All I’m saying is-
ELLIOTT
Stop.
DAN
She’s physically-
ELLIOTT
Do not bring her butt up, okay?
DAN
I never-
ELLIOTT
Stuart, have you ever heard this before?
STUART
It’s kinda fucking creepy, right?
ELLIOTT
Of coure.
DAN
She’s a lovely woman, I-
STUART
Can we change the way we sit when we do this?
ELLIOTT
Yes. I want to be as far from Dan as possible.
STUART
And I don’t want him to see my bottom.
DAN
I’m not making any lewd suggestions about her…I’m just saying…
ELLIOTT
It’s all in your countenance. It’s in your countenance. It’s all lewd.
STUART
It’s in your timbre [pronounced tom-bra]…or whatever you said.
DAN
Stuart, you gonna recommend something?
STUART
I am gonna recommend something, Dan. First off, Steve…
DAN
You’re gonna recommend the name Steve.
STUART
No. You know the guy Steve?
ELLIOTT
Vergotis.
STUART
I want to say, you were right. I Saw the Devil was great. Thank you.
DAN
James was his actual name. “Steve” was the name you called him by.
An excerpt from the under-rated Pope of Greenwich Village, when Mrs. Ritter, an irish mother who’s as tough as a primeval rock, is mourning the death of her policeman son when she is visited by his corrupt colleagues, two detectives searching for tapes he may have made which will implicate them in graft and other criminal schemes.
MRS. RITTER, is dressed in mourning black, and she speaks with a first generation american irish accent. When she speaks without anger, it doesn’t feel as if the blade has been sheathed, but that she’s simply maneuvering it to a better stabbing position. The words she says with emphasis are spoken with her jaw clamped down low, and it’s as if her words pass through long and deadly fangs.
MRS. RITTER
Can I offer you a drink?
BURNS
We’re on duty.
MRS. RITTER
Hey.
MRS. RITTER CONT’D
‘Scuse me. You on duty too?
GARBER
Yeah.
BURNS
Just a few questions, Mrs. Ritter. Did Bunky…act peculiar the last few months or so? Different?
MRS. RITTER
What the hell has that got to do with some thief pushing him down the elevator shaft?
BURNS
He was wearing a tape recorder, Mrs. Ritter. (pause) You know anything about that?
MRS. RITTER
How the hell would I know? You’re the policeman.
BURNS
Did Bunky have a girlfriend?
MRS. RITTER shakes her head, no.
GARBER
Who were some of his friends?
MRS. RITTER
No one. He went to church a lot.
MRS. RITTER takes a drink.
MRS. RITTER
Sacred heart. Most of his free time spent there.
GARBER
He must have had some friends.
MRS. RITTER gives another shake of her head, blows out smoke.
BURNS It’s important…that we locate any tapes that Bunky may have had.
MRS. RITTER gives a nasty cackle.
MRS. RITTER
Yeah, I bet it’s important. I bet it’s very important to the two of yous.
BURNS gets an involuntary, nervous blink in his left eye.
MRS. RITTER
The internal affairs people were here hours ago. (her voice develops a nasty venom as it goes along the next sentence, but it’s gone by the sentence after that.) Two college educated little pricks. Acted like they was born and bred in Ohio.
MRS. RITTER knocks some cigarette ash out.
MRS. RITTER
I’m gonna tell you…what I told them. Walter…neither drank…nor gambled…he disapproved of the lottery. His spare time was spent making novinas, over at the Sacred Heart.
MRS. RITTER kisses her cross.
BURNS
Did they dig around in his room?
MRS. RITTER gives a quiet nod, no.
MRS. RITTER
I wouldn’t let them.
BURNS
We’re gonna have to. It’s important. Now, uh, which room is Bunky’s?
MRS. RITTER
You are not pokin around in Walter‘s room.
BURNS delivers the next line as if he were dealing with a gang chieftain resisting arrest.
BURNS
We’re going through this place, Madam. You obstruct me, and I’ll personally see that you never see a cent of his pension.
MRS. RITTER gives an ugly, dismissive laugh.
MRS. RITTER
Aha, get out. Get outta here, the two of yous. After you’re gone, I’m gonna tear this place upside down like a cyclone hit it. I’m gonna call the Daily News, to do a story on how the New York City police department treats the mother of a hero. My brother’s a priest. He is an old-fashioned, parish priest, with gray hair. The two of us could do a scene on the six o’clock news that would have the city in tears.
BURNS lets some fear show.
MRS. RITTER
My Walter…was as tough as a bar of IRON. And he didn’t get that from his father. Now. You wanna fight…OFFICER?
She punctuates this with an exhale of thick smoke, and it’s like the warning fumes of a dragon that can breathe a terrible and lethal flame.
MRS. RITTER
Or do you get the hell out of my house.
The detectives move to leave, and when they are gone, MRS. RITTER puts out her cigarette, and her demeanor changes entirely. She is overwhelmed with grief over the death of her son, and she kisses her rosaries, before shielding her eyes as she starts to shake from the onset of weeping.
An excerpt from the always entertaining “Flop House” podcast, where the hosts, Elliott Kalan, Dan McCoy, and Stuart Wellington, watch a bad or questionable movie, and then talk about it; what follows is from the podcast episode devoted to the Friday the 13th re-make. When the film’s teen heroes flee the legendary killer Jason Voorhees, they encounter some eccentric characters, and this conversational tangent is devoted to these characters’ nightly behavior.
ELLIOTT
Oh, and I didn’t even mention the weird masturbator they run into. There’s a guy they run into who owns a barn with a woodchipper in it, which comes up later. And he’s really boastful, and – there’s a weird streak of characters masturbating in this? That character looks at an issue of Hustler and then starts coming onto a mannequin? And then Jason kills him.
DAN
He also licks the issue of Hustler.
ELLIOTT
He licks the issue of Hustler, and then says “Do you like that?” to the magazine.
STUART
He did start smoking weed though, which is usually what I do when I smoke weed.
ELLIOTT
It’s just like the scene in Zapped! when the guy hallucinates from smoking weed. And then, later, one of the characters, the character who doesn’t have a girl to match up with and isn’t dead yet in the cabin, he gets high, and he’s like, “Well. Guess I’ll masturbate to something.” Pulls out a box of tissues, then picks up a J. Crew catalog, or a Land’s End catalog? And flips to an image of a woman in her mid to late thirties wearing a sweater and slacks. And goes, “Alright. This is it.”
DAN
I found this very interesting. Because, apparently, one has to believe that he masturbates every night at 10:30, exactly. Because it wasn’t like there was something that turned him on, there’s no one around, I guess what I’m gonna do…he’s like “Oh well, geez. Gotta masturbate. Whatta we got here? Oh, well. J. Crew.”
STUART
I gotta take my insulin and masturbate. That’s what he’s saying. The thing that’s concerning for me about this character is you’d think he’d have more stuff stored up in the spank bank?
DAN mmm-hmmms.
DAN
He can’t just fantasize about something in his head.
ELLIOTT
He was just watching a girl writhe around to music in very short shorts…and some kind of tight top.
STUART
I would think he’d be able to think back to…”I remember that night I was watching Big Saussage Pizza clips for four hours.”
DAN sighs.
DAN
Ah, god. We should really get some money from that web site. Because we’ve mentioned it three times now.
ELLIOTT
Just the clips. He’s just watching Brazzers previews all night.
STUART
He knocks a quick one out, then his friend shows up, and he helps him kill Jason. Now, he runs around with a boner on.
ELLIOTT
It’s a trenchant message on the lack of imagination in today’s youth.
STUART
I agree.
DAN
And the sexiness of LL Bean catalogs.
ELLIOTT
They’ve been desensitized by the media and the images they’re bombarded with.
DAN
Well, apparently not, if he can get it up for a picture of a woman in a sweater.
STUART
Well, it’s that he’s so bored with everything else he’s seen, he’s like…
ELLIOTT
Yeah, he’s seen too much.
STUART
He’s like, finally, a woman that’s fully clothed…
DAN (weary)
Alright.
STUART
…turns me on.
ELLIOTT
“You know what turns me on about this? The class.” This woman’s sheer tastefulness.
(This post contains spoilers for Perfect Blue, Black Swan, Taxi Driver and Fight Club. Black Swan is touched on only in comparison to Perfect; a post where its entirety is devoted to the film is Black Swan: Traumanovelle. Some of the stills featured in this post from Perfect Blue contain very graphic violence and gore.)
The first full-length film of Satoshi Kon, part of an impressive oeuvre that was produced so quickly, and ended too soon. A movie about doubles, and not just doubles, but quadruples; by the film’s end, we realize that the heroine is in fact a projected figure, one of four, imagined by one of the supporting characters. I heard of it, as many do, as the supposed genesis for Black Swan. I present the association in discrete, polite terms, while a post at Cracked states it in ruder, eye catching ones: “7 Classic Movies You Didn’t Know Were Rip-Offs”. The pre-eminent literary form of our time is the listicle, just as in another time and place it might have been the western. All the western requires is a horse, a cattle thief, some guns, and a cowboy; all else is incidental. Since they primarily written for an audience without familiarity with the milieu, all they require is verisimiltude, the appearance of truth, and whether the details are truthful is inconsequential. All that the listicle requires is a number of items of information; the items, and the concept of the list itself, are designed for provocation and succinct reading, with, again, only the appearance of truth necessary, and actual truth of secondary or no importance. Where a dime western benefits from a Chicago reader’s utter ignorance in horse breaking or cattle thievery, giving the writer license in this area, this listicle benefits from its reader’s ignorance of a somehwat obscure japanese movie – but anyone who has seen both films will most likely consider the charge ridiculous, reckless, and malicious.
The allegation here of plagiarism is based on the most commonplace and mundane details, removed from any meaningful context. We might look at a youtube video laying out the case1 to see the speciousness of the charges: Swan wins the lead role in a ballet; Mima gets a bit role on a TV show. Mima is applauded by the TV crew; Nina is applauded by her fellow dancers. Mima rides a subway and sees in the glass of the door, her double; Nina’s reflection turns towards her. Mima curls up in her bathtub; Nina lies in the water of her bathtub2. Rather than go through these comparisons exhaustively, I list them all in the previous footnote. None of the images that I think are truly disturbing and memorable from Swan, Nina in the bath suddenly seeing her own malevolent self above the water, Nina walking on a stage dark except for a single light, Nina briefly becoming someone very different as she cuts her in nails before a mirror, Nina passing a vampish vision of herself3 – are anywhere in Perfect. If footage which shares the theme of a woman applauded or a woman in a bath constitutes plagiarism, then the movies which plagiarize Perfect, and which Perfect has plagiarized, are innumerable.
More crucially, when people accuse Swan of thieving the underlying themes of Perfect, it suggests something else: that these viewers, among whom are rabid anime and Satoshi Kon partisans, either do know not Perfect that well, or have let their paristanship get the best of them, like a child with unlike puzzle pieces, who forces a fit by disregarding the distinctions of their respective shapes. To disagree with the charge of plagiarism, and to condemn it, is not the same as championing one movie over the other: I think they’re both very good. To say that both are alike is to do both a disservice, rendering them both into something more generic, so that they may be said to be alike. There are countless movies and books involving male doubles, whether it be The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”, Raising Cain, Fight Club, the list is properly endless – that someone is entirely us, but acts how we truly yearn to act, without code or restraint, is an eternal subject, and will still be there after this writer and any readers have left the earth. There is the obvious note that male doubles seem to always revolve around violence, a physically timid and an agressive type, while female doubles always seem to involve carnality, a chaste and a more sexually experienced one. And there is another, more germane observation to be made. When something like Fight Club can be considered a distinct story from Jekyll, while Swan is an immediate transgression on the established territory of Perfect, it suggests a perhaps unintended and ridiculous idea: men have many lives, and so their stories may be told over and over, while women have only one, so any story devoted to them risks redundancy.
The detail always brought up when discussing these two movies is the following, taken from the always reliable IMDB, and often cited as evidence that Swan is an uncredited re-make of Perfect:
Darren Aronofsky owns the American filming rights to this movie, which he purchased for $59,000, just so he could film the now infamous “bath scene” with Jennifer Connelly in his own film Requiem for a Dream. The staged rape scene in Perfect Blue also inspired a scene toward the end of Aronofsky’s film in which a group of perverted men circle around and cheer on a vulgar sexual event.
There is no citation for this information, and though this detail is repeated throughout the internet, I can find no reporting such as purchase records or interviews with any of the key parties which confirms it.
It is a strange declaration, which can be legitimately questioned on two points. The two shots of the bathtub scenes are very similar, and I don’t think it is any great statement to say that one influenced the other4. However, you don’t need to buy the re-make rights of a movie for such simple, short quotes. The end of Boogie Nights is a very clear reprise of the end scene of Raging Bull; Luke Skywalker witnessing his burning home is a quote of Ethan Edwards seeing his own home burn in The Searchers; the opening of the titular relic of Raiders of the Lost Ark quotes from the scene where a lethal briefcase is opened in Kiss Me Deadly. These are only a handful of countless examples, not to mention comedies such as High Anxiety, Airplane!, The Naked Gun series, and others, which quote other movies in order to satirize them. None of these pictures need to buy “remake rights” of the movies they referenced in order to do so, and were they required to do so, it would make something like Airplane!, chock full of such gags, prohibitively expensive. Were a studio able to enforce a copyright on such simple, short images, those with extensive libraries could extort fees from any producer for using images from Hitchcock, Welles, or The Wizard of Oz that have become so ubiquitous as to go unnoticed as quoting, but are accepted as common as punctuation marks.
So, there’s the obvious problem that Darren Aronofsky would not have to pay for re-make rights to simply have an overhead shot of a woman in a bathtub, followed by her underwater, letting out an angry scream. The other problem is that $59 000 is very, very low to pay for such rights. This isn’t a literary property, where it’s uncertain how successful it will be as a movie – this was already a movie that has been a critical and commercial success. It had grossed over $100 000 – in very, very limited distribution – in the United States alone5. Wouldn’t the pricing floor for re-make rights be at least what it grossed in the principal market for that re-make? There is the other problem that, unless this was an exceptional situation, the production company, in this case Mad House, would own all rights associated with the production, not Kon. They may well want a quality production, but they also will want to sell it to someone who has the wherewithal – easy access to resources and investment money – to get it made, and so they would most likely sell it to a studio or a very successful producer. Even without any cut in the re-make’s gross, the original studio benefits from a re-make being very successful because it brings about renewed interest in the original property. Selling the re-make rights to a high profile, very powerful studio is exactly what Mad House did when they sold the rights to the anime Ninja Scroll to Warner Brothers6. Before that deal, Mad House had been actively involved in other deals with american studios, collaborating with Warner Brothers on the Matrix animated series, The Animatrix7, and selling the North American distribution rights for Millenium Actress to Dreamworks8. I cannot definitively say who owns the re-make rights to Perfect, but: does it not seem strange at all that in the midst of these deals with well-connected studios, Mad House would sell the live action rights of a prestigious and award-heavy property to a director who had only one major film credit at that time – a major critical success, but no financial blockbuster – for an amount that was less than half the movie’s North American gross? Those are my skeptical notes about this supposed purchase, and I move on.
Perfect is a movie veiled in dreams and fantasy, with its true character and plot somewhat obscured behind a veil. It is easy to discern without much difficulty, but some effort must be made to discern it. The underlying theme of Swan is open to question; it might be about aesthetic commitment (“Performance Anxiety”, by Richard Brody), a young girl abused by her mother (“Black Swan: Movie about Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse”), or, my preferred one, a young girl who has been sexually abused by her father (“Black Swan: Traumanovelle”). It’s unnecessary to adopt one theory over another in order to find Swan, conceptually, a very distinct creature from Perfect, as its very outward details, the very doubles employed, make its focus, despite the shared plot point of doubles, very different.
Perfect is the story of Takakura Yoko, who looks exactly like, and appears in the dream storyline as, Mima’s agent, Hidaka Rumi – this is the heroine of the movie, not Mima, who is a projection, a double, of Yoko’s. This woman has led a tragic, difficult life, where she often felt herself to be unattractive, certainly less attractive than her beautiful, glamorous model sister, Takakura Rika, a woman who looked much like Mima. After she was gang raped by a group of men in a strip club, she developed a hostility towards all men, and a hatred for her sister, a woman who had an ease in life because of her beauty that she, Yoko, lacked. She murdered her sister. She ran over a man in the street, simply because he was a man. She killed a number of men, targeting them for how they looked at her, the central fact that they were men: she gouged out their eyes and stabbed them in the genitals. She is eventually caught, and placed in an asylum. She remains entirely mad, disassociating herself from her rape, which was only a scene in a movie which took place with someone else, and her killings; the murders took place on a TV show, and they were committed by a repulsive outcast. The time she ran over a man, the man who is the disfigured outcast of her fantasy, becomes instead her own martyrdom, as she is almost run over, again and again. The movie ends with her in the asylum, her disassociative fantasy still at work, as she becomes, yet again, the idol Mima who looks just like her sister, visiting her at the hospital, a beautiful woman with greater freedom than her, who freely leaves. The last moment is of this projection, Mima, entering her car and seeing in the rearview mirror another, separate projection, the saccharine ideal that’s always haunted her: the always happy, always innocent girl singer.
Much of the preceding is explained by the character of Dr. Toko Asamiya, the police psychiatrist.
YAMASHIRO
You mean…the murderer is an illusion she created?
TOKO ASAMIYA
Yes. She fears an imaginary security guard…and then doubles that figure with the serial murderer of top models.
YAMASHIRO
But illusions don’t kill.
TOKO
But…what if that illusion found someone to possess?
YAMASHIRO
Possess?? Then…all those men who got murdered?
TOKO
Were those who were no longer of any use to her.
YAMASHIRO
She thinks she’s a new young actress named Kirigoe Mima.
TOKO
Dissociative Identity Disorder. In other words, “multiple personality syndrome.” All those crimes took place when she was some other persona.
DETECTIVE
So where’s the persona of the original Yoko?
TOKO
Takakura Yoko, the original persona, is nothing more than a character in a drama for her. Being a “normal” girl…how she was raped in a strip club…everything happened as part of her drama series. By doing so, she salvaged her heart. The original persona, Takakura Yoko, no longer exists. By killing, and later becoming, her sister the top-model, she salvaged her heart.
The movie opens with a re-creation of her being visited by detectives after she has killed her older sister, the top model.
YAMASHIRO
The younger sister of Rika, the murder victim, is here. Would you like to see her?
TOKO
Yamashiro-kun. Do you know why the culprit pulls the skin off his victims?
YAMASHIRO
I assume he gets sexual stimulation from such activities…
TOKO
He wants to become one.
YAMASHIRO
Become…what?
TOKO
A woman…or…
Whether Yoko actually did anything like this, or killed any women other than her sister, is unknown, since it isn’t recreated for us on the TV series. In the conversation between the detectives, it is left unsaid why the killer might tear off the skin of the victims, but an obvious answer is there in the context of how Yoko feels about herself. She already is a woman, but there is something distinct and beautiful about the skin of a top model, and she wishes to become a beautiful woman like this. She does indeed become such a woman, in her mad fantasy, taking over the role of her own sister.
We see the crime scene of one dead top-model, and this is most likely a memory of the aftermath of her own sister’s murder:
That Yoko looks like Rumi, fantasizing that she is her sister, Rika, a woman who looks like Mima, is there in one of the last scenes, right before Rumi and Mima fight.
Yoko hates herself, doesn’t want to be herself, so she is Mima, defeating Rumi, the woman who looks like Yoko. Yoko killed her older sister, ran over a man in a hit and run, but Yoko does not want to have done these things, so instead she is Mima who saves the older woman.
That Yoko looks like Rumi, plays the part of Rumi, but continues to project herself in the made-up figure of Mima is there in the surreal last scene at the asylum. Remember, the detectives make clear that Kirigoe Mima doesn’t exist, that Yoko’s delusion is her belief that she’s this woman. We have Yoko, who looks exactly like Rumi, gaze into a mirror, and staring back is Mima as innocent teen idol. It is then that the scene gets stranger, because we are still very much in Yoko’s mad world. We move outside the asylum ward as the doctor explains that Yoko still sees herself as Rumi, and he is explaining it to Yoko’s made-up singer, Kirigoe Mima. There is an intended double meaning when Mima says to the doctor, “thanks to her, I am who I am today.” This is a movie about illusions that are more vivid, more satisfying than reality, and Mima is the figment of a lunatic woman’s mind who is given the movie’s last line, “I’m real!” Swan has been accused of quoting from Perfect, but Perfect‘s last one shot itself feels like a quote from one of the final shots of Taxi Driver: Travis Bickle catches himself looking in his rear-view mirror, and this confirms that he is still mad. Mima looks in the rear view mirror and sees the saccharine singer Mima looking back, and it’s confirmed that we’re still trapped in Yoko’s lunatic world. It is unknown to me whether Mad House owns the remake rights to Taxi Driver.
DOCTOR
I didn’t know you were visiting. You must be very busy lately.
MIMA
Oh, no.
DOCTOR
Once in a while, she returns to her Rumi-San persona, but…
MIMA
I know I’ll never see HER ever again.
MIMA CONT’D
But, thanks to her, I am who I am today.
NURSES
You’re lying! There’s no way Kirigoe Mima would be HERE of all places!
Yoko is a woman who feels unattractive, who sees herself as ugly, views ugliness as stigmatic, and associates ugliness with villainy. So, the person who is actually committing the murders is at first not Mima, but a disfigured security guard. His very disfigurement marks him as evil, and his first appearance is as Kingburg, the adversary of Powertron in the opening sketch:
This man haunts Mima, and he haunts Yoko as well, for he may be based on someone from her past, a past victim, just as Mima is a re-creation of her sister. This security guard acts out what Yoko wants, killing those she wants killed, like the boy who disrupts the concert that the guard later runs over9. This is one more crime that Yoko herself committed, yet she makes herself into the martyr, rather than the perpetrator. The guard nearly runs her over in his truck and later, the guard tries to kill her. Yoko killed her older sister, but it is Mima who saves the life of Rumi when she pushes her out of the way of an on-coming truck. Yoko creates a fantasy life for Mima, yet it is not her creating the fantasy life, but this villain, the security guard who constructs a virtual life for the idol.
I think it would be morbid and unnecessary to spend much time on the scene of Mima’s rape, which is a re-enactment of Yoko’s own rape. In this movie where Mima and Rumi are often together, bonded like sisters, where Mima goes through many of Yoko’s experiences, an image binds these two after this ordeal; first Rumi weeps tears, then Mima weeps tears, both in the same manner.
The men that are targeted in the movie are all those who are involved in the degradation of Mima: the show’s writer, the photographer, her agent. When they are killed, the eyes of all these men are stabbed. Yoko considers the male gaze always something suspect, that there is a hidden predatory hunger always involved. A man on a train stares at Mima, then quickly moves his eyes away when she catches him. After Mima kills the security guard, the eye over which his hair always falls, the hidden gaze, is the one torn out. When the photographer is killed, his genitals are stabbed as well.
Mima is Yoko’s own ideal, but she also embodies all of Yoko’s own anxieties; she may be an ideal, but she can never be ideal enough. The singer Mima, who always projects happiness, confidence, and innocence, is a vision that haunts this woman. She attempts to match this image by being a figure of blind optimism, yet she cannot sustain this, and she collapses into fatigue and sadness. Her managers debate how she can best be used10. The decision to go with the rape scene depends on her agency, not her figurative personal agency, but her literal one.
PRODUCER
Hey, hey, hey! I saw next week’s script, Shibuya-chan! You’re wonderful! I didn’t think it would come to this!
SHIBUYA
To tell the truth, I have an even more drastic idea.
PRODUCER
Fantastic!
SHIBUYA
But…I wonder if it would be alright for Mima…or rather, her agency.
She is incidental to her own image, which is the actual product. This is a movie that ends with the illusion overcoming the real, and it begins with children preferring the virtual warriors on TV to the same characters in tangible form on stage. Her image is her and not her, but it is certainly not her own. During Mima’s opening performance, the security guard holds her in the palm of his hand11. This same man creates the “Mima’s Room” website which uncannily captures some of the events of her day, while dictating her very thoughts. She starts to have doubts over what took place in her day – if a fan site says she went to Harajuku (Tokyo’s shopping district), she must have gone to Harajuku. This is part of the movie’s larger theme of women feeling their own image is dictated by others, but also the nature of celebrity and fandom, specifically the often hyper-obsessive asian pop fandom12. Who you actually are is of less relevance to how you are seen, and how others want to see you.
When Mima takes off her clothes, when she is raped in a TV series, she loses fans because these things tarnish her image of innocence. The one person to take her side is the security guard, and he does so that he can save her13. Even this, however, has a shameful, aggressive aspect beneath its veneer: this same man who worships her, who supposedly wants to protect her, ends up trying to rape her. Because of Yoko’s rape, and because it is Yoko’s story, sex in Perfect is always exploitive, always brutal, always public, always anonymous. The group of men who assault Mima dissolve into a crowd of men roaring for Mima the singer; it is the same mob feeling transmuted from one focus to another. The stage lights of the auditorium are like the lights of the strip club, which are like the lights of an oncoming truck about to kill her. The cameras that click and flash for her nude photo session are like the cameras of the paparazzi; the cameras at a fashion show cut to the police photographer taking pictures of her dead sister. This is the movie’s only vision of sex, with none other offered. There is Mima chaste, and Mima exploited. Yoko dearly wants to be more like the pure Mima singer, the ever present, nettlesome ghost, not because it is a role that provides her any greater benefit or opportunity, but because it carries no stigma.
There are countless differences between Swan and Perfect, but the difference in the conception behind these doubles is central. Nina may be chaste, but she dearly wants to be more like the strong, sexually confident Lily. There is no stigma, weakness, or exploitation associated with Lily’s sexuality. Nina’s earrings are always soft and rounded, while Lily’s are almost always sharp and elongated, like small swords; it is Nina who is the vulnerable one, not Lily. When Nina passes a vision of herself as a seductress with a devastating gaze, there is nothing of corruption or decay in this double; Nina doesn’t envy innocence, she envies the sexual power of this mirror self. There may be reasons for why she fears it as well – whether because of past abuse or something else – but there is no question that Lily is presented sympathetically, and that the whole film is about Nina trying to be more like Lily, culminating in her playing the black swan. Were the second movie to be a rip-off of the first, it would have to be about Lily, a Lily damaged because of her sexual experience, who wanted to be more like the chaste Nina. This movie would be such a polar reflection of the one we have now, that it would have to be called White Swan.
Yoko desires to be more like Mima, not because it is something she herself wants, but because Mima is closer to a public ideal. She does not want to be thinner, more beautiful, more virginal, to attract any specific man, but in order to please a crowd of men, the entirety of men. She wishes to be this ideal, but she hates it as well. This is always Yoko’s vision, and we see hints of how she may have wanted to be her model sister, but resented her as well. Mima goes to play her part, and she gives Rumi her coat to hold. When Rumi comments that it’s only one line Mima has to say, it’s a barbed comment on what Yoko saw as her sister’s self-importance and intellectual vacancy14. When Rumi tries to teach Mima how the internet works (the movie takes place in the mid-nineties), Mima comes across as an ignorant child15. Yoko sees herself as Rumi, and though she dearly wants to be Mima, this scene makes clear her own ambivalence: why do men want me to be more like this fool?
Nina does not aspire to any public ideal, but an aesthetic one. It’s never clear whether Mima has any ability as a singer or a dancer, but Nina is playing a coveted lead, probably the most coveted part in ballet. She does not train endlessly for hours because she wishes to conform to the images of some advertising campaign, but because this is a necessary part of being a great dancer. It can be argued whether something else is subsumed in this endless practice, but what can be taken off the table is that she does this to be more attractive to men. Where Mima and Rumi are seen as entirely alone, Nina attracts Leroy, she attracts the boys in the club, Tom and Andy16, she attracts Lily. The focus of Perfect is about the constrained image a woman must conform to, as well as how it dovetails with fame and celebrity. Nina’s training is not about conforming to any such appearance, but achievement. It is analogous to movies about male athletes who must suffer equally stressful rigors in order to achieve some trophy or belt. Whether Nina’s constant cutting and scratching, in conjunction with her regimen, expresses a hatred of her own body is another question. I think it does, and there is a definition tension between her remaining this chaste type, and becoming more like Lily. She wants to remain virginal, while at the same time not wanting this at all: she throws out her toys, she rebels against her mother, she goes clubbing. Lily, the woman she wants to be, is more carnal, more curvaceous, and eats whatever she wants. When the audience applauds Mima, it is for her image as the chaste singer; the crowning triumph for Nina, the achievement that receives its own roaring applause and what she sacrifices everything for, is her dance as the black swan. The roar is for a dancer’s achievement, not her playing the part of a beautiful innocent.
These are two movies that feature heroines of heartbreaking pathos, but characters whose best efforts at happiness are overwhelmed by tragedy are not uncommon in fiction, nor, unfortunately, in life. That they share this same pathos does not make them identical or even alike, whether in character or crisis they face. The differences between the two women are so essential, and so central to both films, that in not seeing them, or willfully ignoring them, a writer diminishes two great movies, transforming exotica into featureless banality: a woman in trouble.
(As usual, there are some rough patches in this post, which will be fixed with subsequent edits over the next few days. Many changes and corrections were made on March 24th.)
2 In Perfect, they want Mima for a bit part in a TV series where she has one line in the first episode:
In Swan, Nina wins the coveted lead that every dancer would want to play:
Mima receives a fax, which says “Traitor” over and over again. Duly noted:
Someone writes WHORE on a bathroom mirror. The reason why Mima receives the fax is because her fans think she’s betraying her former image; the word is scrawled on the mirror because they think Nina got the part after she slept with the director.
Mima is distracted from the breaks in her fantasy that she forgets her lines:
Leroy asks Nina to do a take, again and again:
Mima is asked to act in a rape scene:
Leroy suggests that Nina get into character by masturbating:
Mima poses for nude photos:
In bed, Nina masturbates:
Mima is on a train and sees her double reflected back, who talks to her:
Nina’s mirror reflection turns towards her:
Mima, angry over having agreed to the strip club scene, throws her toys and furnishings about:
Nina, gradually becoming someone else, gathers up all her toys to throw them out:
Mima throws a pillow at her double, a reflection in the mirror:
Nina’s double, Lily, suddenly becomes Nina herself, who suffocates her with a pillow:
Mima is in a bathtub:
A bathtub, with Nina:
The pictures of Mima give comfort and approval to the monstrous security guard:
Various pictures by Erica, Nina’s mother, distort bizarrely and aggressively turn on Nina:
Mima sees a ghostly vision of herself, still with her old band:
Nina sees Lily practicing for the understudy role of her part:
After a very tense Mima breaks a glass, her hands bleed from the shards:
Nina suffers from a bleeding back rash:
Mima and her double fight:
In the dressing room, there is a fight between the two women:
When Rumi loses her wig, she loses some crucial element that defines her as Mima. She moves down to pick it up, and ends up stabbing herself on a shard of glass:
Nina stabs Lily with a mirror piece:
After Mima stabs the photographer to death, she sees the pizza outfit covered in blood. She puts it further back in her closet.
Nina uses a blanket to stop the flow of blood from the closet in which Lily’s body is hidden:
Mima is applauded for her film take by the crew, as the camera swirls in a three sixty:
Her fellow dancers gather around Nina and applaud at the end of the performance:
Japanese animation studio Madhouse has sold live-action remake rights to cult anime title Ninja Scroll to Warner Bros Pictures.
Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, the film sold more than 1 million DVD copies in the US and had a successful theatrical run in its home market. The remake deal with Warner Bros was brokered by CAA’s John Levin.
Japanese animation studio Madhouse has sold live-action remake rights to cult anime title Ninja Scroll to Warner Bros Pictures.
Directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, the film sold more than 1 million DVD copies in the US and had a successful theatrical run in its home market. The remake deal with Warner Bros was brokered by CAA’s John Levin.
The two companies previously worked together on The Matrix animated direct-to-video spin-off The Animatrix.
Perfect Blue garnered a handful of international awards, including the prize for Best Asian Film at Montreal’s Fant-Asia Film Festival. And Kon’s follow-up, Millennium Actress, a lyrical life story of a fictional movie star, so impressed U.S.-based DreamWorks that it bought the North American distribution rights and released it in theaters this fall.
9 With my poor ability at facial recognition, I originally thought the security guard and the man in the poster were one and the same. In some ways, I prefer this interpretation. The footnoted paragraph read originally as follows:
He haunts Mima, and he haunts Yoko as well, because this is the man who she killed in a hit and run. She steps into an elevator, and in a moment that seems to serve no purpose, sees a notice in the paper of a young man dead in such an accident. She turns away from the notice, and we see the security guard, a damaged ghoul, staring and smiling at her. When she re-plays this incident, she is the victim, or the hero. It is she who is run down by the truck driven by the guard, or she who saves Rumi from being hit.
10 During the meeting after the top model’s body is discovered:
TADOKORO
On record sales we make practically nothing! But I do wish that they’d use her a little bit more…
12 John Seabrook’s very good “Factory Girls”, goes into some of the details of various K-Pop bands, including the obsessive behaviour of fans. He asks members of Girls’ Generation about dealing with this obsessiveness:
Do netizens chronicle their movements on the Internet?
“Yeah, that’s true,” Jessica said. “I’ll be at a restaurant and it will be on Twitter in, like, ten minutes.”
“What’s it like living with that?” I asked.
“I think we’ve been brought up to be really careful and to take responsibility in our actions, in order to be in this position,” Tiffany said. She added, “We always stay at home.”
I mentioned a news item I had seen about how the Girls tried to disguise themselves in the streets of Seoul but that their limbs alone—the shape of their arms and legs—gave them away. Was that true?
“It is,” Tiffany said, shooting an accusatory glance at her arm. “It’s just so . . .” she paused, searching for the right thing to say. “Freakishly cool!”
(SPOILERS for, obviously, The Master, but also Hard Eight / Sydney. However: it’s assumed that any reader has seen both The Master and Hard Eight, knows their plots, with plot points cited without any attempt to give synopsis. This post’s subtitle comes from the chorus of the great song by Kasey Chambers, “The Captain”. The movie differs substantially from the script submitted to the guild, available here; therefore, all dialogue excerpts from the movie are from the subtitles, unless something is explicitly cited as a screenplay excerpt.)
A movie about intimacy and authority. The qualities most noticed of the film, the astonishing cinematography and its slow, unyielding pace, are intertwined with its subject, Freddie Quell, and not chosen for the purpose of self-aggrandizing grandeur. “Well,” begins David Thomson’s disappointed review, “at least it’s pretentious, and that’s a start in an age when too many films are hardly trying.”1 Rich Juzwiak makes what I think is an equally wrongful indictment, while at the same time acknowledging its creator’s talents: “The Master is so emptily ponderous, so happy to take its time to say not very much at all and, on top of all that, so bursting with craft that I got the sense that it, too, is aware of its own importance.” He contrasts the movie with his enjoyment of Anderson’s earlier work: “Its sideways recounting of (some of) history reminded me of Boogie Nights, an abstract of the porno chic era where all the names and several of the dates were changed. But at least that movie was fun, at least its script had momentum, at least some of its characters’ motivations were clear.”
The movie’s rhythms are slow and difficult, not out of the director’s selfish purpose that the audience bears witness to the diamond finery of his images, but because this is Freddie Quell’s movie, a movie where he is entirely the focus and in almost every scene, and the rhythms are his own. This is a man for whom life has become a cryptic, unlivable place, without handhold or foothold. The movie doesn’t have the kinetic rhythms of Boogie Nights because those embodied the sexual excitement of its own hero, and his eagerness to jump into life. This movie properly feels like a glacial, unanswered mystery, because that is what life is for Quell. The Master has the setting and scale of an epic, without the substance of one, and this is Quell’s life as well. He has had his epic, his Illiad, and now he returns to a place which will never have the intensity of what he just faced, and he stumbles upon a ridiculous man who styles himself as the hero of his own great quest, though his life is comparably mundane: his one great adventure involves digging up from the mountains an unreadable book that he himself has buried. Where other movies of the past are often shot with a slightly blurry scrim, to convey the sense of distance, of half-remembered memory, the images of this film are crystalline clear, more vivid and detailed than the movies set in the present. This reflects Quell’s perspective again, a man for whom reality is piercingly, frighteningly ever present, an invasion which never lets up, unless it’s finally shut down by his own toxic brews. It perhaps also reflects something else: this movie is not just about the distant past, but about the United States, now.
Though the film is willfully, necessarily, mysterious, there are perhaps some who see mysteries where there are none. Perhaps the best way of exploring the movie and unraveling some of it is by following Quell, in proper chronology, and his overwhelming drive. Quell has been described as man who is sex obsessed, and this, I think is wrong: he refuses sex at least twice. This is a man who hungers for, who wants and does not want, intimacy.
Quell has had sex, wants sex, but he looks at sex as tainted, and sex as something which taints an ideal woman. He might view sex as corrupt because of what took place with his aunt2, or because of something else. The genesis for this idea is unimportant; what is critical to the story is that this attitude was the conventional thinking of the time. That Freddie looks at sex as something that corrupts a woman, something only bad girls do, is mainstream thought3. His problem, from society’s perspective, is not this attitude, but his lust itself. More important is that he wishes to continue to believe this, that there is a convenience to believing this: because emotional intimacy often accompanies physical intimacy. Sleeping with a woman he felt some kinship for, not simply a prostitute he could walk away from, would mean that he would end up being more open with her, and this is something he both desperately wants, and avoids with cold fear.
A key, often overlooked, point of Freddie is his relationship with Doris – it is strange that it is so often passed over, because Quell stresses during his process session with Dodd that this woman is the most important person in his world. Doris is often written about with confusion, and her own details often wrongly stated. The often insightful Dana Stevens writes of her as Quell’s “war-time sweetheart” – she isn’t4. Quell is a man familiar with sex – one of his first lines is a joke about getting rid of crabs – but he did not have anything like a romantic relationship with Doris before the war, and she would have anyway been too young. During the war, she serves as a beacon of untainted innocence, a young girl in her mid-teens who writes to him because she is the sister of one of his friends.
This information on Doris is all there, explicit, in Quell’s interview sessions at the veterans hospital. Much of what takes place in the hospital section is a re-working of material from the John Huston documentary Let There Be Light (which is in the public domain and available in the usual place). This is not a kleptic revelation – it is not the same material, and Anderson has been open about the influence of the film on The Master, doing a Q&A after a screening of Light and Huston’s San Pietro5.
A good first example of how material is taken from Light, and re-worked, is the Rorscharch session, where one of the same blots is used, but where the patient’s answer in Light might discretely imply a sexual quality, Quell’s answer is explicitly, crudely sexual.
Light, from 17:35 to 18:02:
NARRATOR
The things that the patient sees in these cards, gives significant clues to his personality make-up.
PATIENT
This looks…sort-of like a drawing of two women…standing on a rock. And waving their hands.
The Master:
DOCTOR
Tell me what you see, Freddie.
FREDDIE
That looks like…
FREDDIE CONT’D
That’s just like a cock, actually, upside down.
DOCTOR
Thank you.
Quell’s interview material is taken from two interviews in Light. Given the stigma surrounding PTSD, then and now, the interviewees were left unnamed. These interviews run from 8:15-11:05 in the documentary. The first contains the seeds of Quell’s own answers about Doris:
DOCTOR
It says here in your record from overseas that you had headaches and had crying spells.
PATIENT
I believe in your profession it’s called nostalgia.
DOCTOR
In other words, home-sickness.
PATIENT
Yes sir.
DOCTOR hmmms.
PATIENT
It was induced, shortly before the war, I received a picture of my sweetheart.
PATIENT breaks down crying, and leaves the session.
DOCTOR
That’s alright.
After a short while.
DOCTOR
Come on and sit down. Now…this display of emotion is alright. Display of emotion is sometimes very helpful. You wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be returned, as a patient, if there wasn’t something upsetting you. Now you say you received a letter from-
PATIENT
Not a letter, a photograph.
DOCTOR
Well, what about that now?
PATIENT
To be perfectly honest with you, I’m very much in love with my sweetheart. She has been the one person, who gave me a sense of importance. Through her co-operation with me, we were able to surmount so many obstacles.
The second carries some of what later shows up in Quell’s answers about the dream of his family:
PATIENT
During the time…I got word, that my brother…was killed…in Guadalcanal.
DOCTOR
What was he, a marine?
PATIENT gives a quiet yeah.
DOCTOR
Now I notice in this history here, that you saw a vision of your brother…tell me something about that, what happened?
PATIENT
I guess it was a dream, or something.
DOCTOR
Describe the dream, what did you see?
PATIENT
I dreamt that I was home. My brother was home. Me other brother was home. We all was home.
DOCTOR
All of you were home.
PATIENT
Sitting around the table, everybody was happy. We were laughing. Talking. Just admiring each other…
DOCTOR
And you could see these images clearly.
PATIENT
Yeah, it was like in a dream, see.
The change to Quell’s interview is instructive – he receives a letter, not a photo, which might have a more tangible erotic quality, and not from his sweetheart, but a girl he has not been intimate with, or might have the possibility of being intimate with – their relationship must begin through words, rather than a shared look or carress.
The Master:
DOCTOR
And what’s this about a crying episode?
FREDDIE
What crying episode?
DOCTOR
It says here you had a severe headache, and a crying spell.
FREDDIE
I didn’t have a crying spell.
FREDDIE CONT’D
It was brought on by a letter I received from a girl I knew once. I think I…I believe I suffered what, in your profession, you call nostalgia. It was nostalgia that was brought on by a letter I received.
DOCTOR
From your sweetheart?
FREDDIE
No, sir, not my sweetheart. The kid sister of a girl…The kid sister of a friend of mine I knew from back home. I received this letter, and…I received a letter and I read it.
DOCTOR
According to the history here, I notice that you say you saw a vision of your mother.
FREDDIE
Now, it wasn’t a vision. It was a dream.
DOCTOR
Well, tell me about the dream.
FREDDIE
Why?
DOCTOR
I need to know.
FREDDIE
Why do you need to know?
DOCTOR
This will help in your treatment.
FREDDIE
You can’t help in my treatment, you don’t even know…Well, it was my mother and my father and me…back home. We were sitting around a table…having drinks. Laughing – And it just sort of ended there.
FREDDIE CONT’D
Thanks for the help.
Though I resolved to do this in chronological order, I deliberately skipped over one of the first, and most important images, because it ties in with Freddie’s perspective on women, and societal perspective on Freddie. This image is, of course, of a woman made of sand, who Quell vigorously fucks. A woman made entirely out of sand can always be re-shaped into something else, and a woman who remains only an image, only a beacon, like Doris, without actually being known, known in the manner that is physical and transcends the physical, can be re-formed into whatever image one wants.
This is also something of how society sees Freddie and other soldiers: a man that can be tossed into war, then brought back, and re-shaped into a civilian without difficulty or great work. Yet something has gone very wrong with this man – he hunches over, like his center has been broken: his center has been broken. Quell himself knows this, knows that something has gone wrong, and the efforts to help are too half-hearted and small – his answers in his interview are far more hostile and sarcastic than those of the original Light material. One of the closing bits of narration of Light, about the return to civilian life, is re-done here, but not over soldiers returned to form, but the blank, unhealed faces of damaged men.
Light, from 43:55 to 44:40:
NARRATOR
The weeks pass, the therapy begins to show its effect. The shock and stress of war are starting to wear off. For these men are blessed with the natural regenerative powers of youth. Now they are living less in the past, and more in the present. Sometimes, they think of the future. The war years must be put aside, and the responsibilities of peace must be considered. A man might open a filling station, or a hardware store. Or he can buy a few acres of land, and raise some chickens. He might even go back to school.
From 46:50-47:40, a doctor’s speech to patients:
DOCTOR
Undoubtedly, there will be people outside who won’t have any understanding of the condition…who may think of it as being a rather shameful condition. That’s why we’re having an educational program, trying to educate the public into understanding. Unfortunately, most of you fellas have gone through some very severe stresses in the army. Stresses that civilians are rarely subjected to. In civilian life, you can avoid serious stresses. If a civilian, the average civilian, were subjected to similar stresses, he would undoubtedly have developed the same kind of nervous condition that most of you fellows developed. All of us, have our so-called breaking point.
Master:
DOCTOR V.O.
You men are blessed with the rejuvenating powers of youth. The responsibilities of peacetime must now be considered. You can start a business: filling station, grocery or hardware store. Get a few acres of land and raise some chickens…go back to school. Undoubtedly, there will be people on the outside who will not understand the condition you men have, or will think it a rather shameful condition. If the average civilian had been through the same stresses that you have been through, undoubtedly they too would have developed the same nervous conditions.
After Freddie has returned state-side, he meets up with Doris. That he is so much older than her in these scenes serves a proper intent: these memories are of extraordinary importance to him, they are a lodestone to which he is drawn and longs to return, so he casts himself in these memories as he is now, as if he is the same man, when they are years ago. These very memories which are so important to him may well have little or no importance to Doris, who has since moved on, gotten married, and had kids.
I quote one writer, Forrest Wickman, to convey some of the viewer confusion over these scenes6:
WICKMAN
I was very confused about when they take place. It’s all about this girlfriend Doris, and we see her at sixteen, and then we see her again at twenty-three, and I’m not sure when the sixteen moment takes place, and I’m not sure exactly when the twenty three moment takes place. It seems like the second time is sometime in the 1950s.
We see Doris only in the past, at sixteen, though Freddie returns to try and find her seven years later – he speaks to her mother. The first meeting between him and Doris is after the war, after he received the letter – his emotional reaction is not over a past affair with this girl, but this girl as conveyed in the letter itself.
Here is their first scene together, recalled from the processing session:
DORIS
What made you come and see me?
FREDDIE
I thought about you. I thought about you when I was away.
FREDDIE CONT’D
I got your letter. They have you write to soldiers at school?
DORIS
I wrote to you. How come you didn’t write me back?
FREDDIE
I don’t know. I did. I just… never sent it.
FREDDIE CONT’D
Are you going to Briar Cliff?
DORIS
I’m not in college.
FREDDIE
What are you, a senior? Junior?
DORIS
No.
FREDDIE
You’re not a freshman.
DORIS
I’m a sophomore.
FREDDIE
So how old does that make you?
DORIS
Sixteen.
DORIS CONT’D
Did you think I was older?
FREDDIE
I don’t really remember.
The scene then ends, in a way that is, I think, critical to understanding Freddie. Because this man who is supposedly driven by lust, does not initiate anything with this girl, instead, Doris initiates something physical with him. Even more important, he does not reply to her kiss, but turns away: he badly wants this, but does not want this. He does not want to taint this girl with sex.
DORIS
Can I kiss you?
They then have another scene together, where she tells him she is going to Norway. This time, the scene ends as she, once again, moves towards Freddie to kiss him – and while such a kiss should be a savored memory for this man, instead it cuts away just as her lips touch his, as if her kissing him is something he doesn’t want to remember.
It is after this that he abruptly signs up for the merchant marine, so abruptly that he has to wake up Doris the same day he leaves, to let her know he is going abroad. No reason is given for why Freddie suddenly chooses to leave again, so we’re left with our own guesses; that Doris is leaving for Norway, that she has no problem with taking the initiative when she kisses him, and this will mean she’ll want to have sex before she leaves. It is not Doris who keeps this affair from going any further, but Freddie – he leaves before this can take place, because he looks at sex as something corrupting, and he does not want to corrupt this woman. Before he leaves, he kisses her, and for the first time, we see them fully kiss, and for the first time, he is the one who moves to kiss her. He does so with such hunger that it is clear that he feels a lust for this girl as strong as anything she feels for him, but which he keeps himself from acting on.
When he returns from the merchant marine, he gets work as a photographer, creating the images of unironic normalcy that we think of as encompassing the america of the fifties, when they don’t: Freddie Quell is a man who desperately wants to be part of the very normal world of these images, but feels forever excluded. We see a series of these photos taken, then the focus moves to a salesgirl, Martha, who sells a coat by walking around the store sporting it. She is supposed to demonstrate how wearing this coat gives you confidence and glamour, yet every dismissal by a customer takes something out of her, causes her to lower her eyes as if the dismissal of the coat is a dismissal of her; she ends up moving towards Freddie, who, off-screen, has kept his eyes on her the whole time – he doesn’t dismiss her at all. These are two people who we might assume to be contained and comfortable in the homogenity of the fifties, but who don’t feel anything like this security. I also see something like a metaphor for the entertainment industry: the very people who create the images of convention, of normality, the people who strike the poses which are so coveted, are not people who belong to the world they portray, but are instead often marginal, lonely, deeply dysfunctional types. This woman has a drink with Freddie, Freddie has no problem caressing this woman as he had with Doris, but the closeness that accompanies this physical intimacy frightens him deeply: at their dinner date, he is passed out.
When Freddie gets into a fight with a man at the store, it is not out of envy that this man has a happy wedded life, or that this man has wealth that he lacks, but this man’s easy, assured belonging. It is the same pose all his photo subjects share, and which Freddie cannot assume. Some critics have found fault with Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as one that is too ostentatious, when I think it is nothing of the kind. The nervous, attention-getting gestures are not those of the actor, but of this man, visible tics to make others know that he exists, that something in him is unresolved and very wrong. This outbreak of violence, one of several by Quell, is one such expression of an anger, an anger that he can’t articulate, an anger at many things, but right now an anger at having to wish to be part of society again, in the way this man belongs with such unthinking, effortless ease. There is nothing alien in Freddie Quell’s actions, nothing of behaviour seen on-stage and only on-stage – a man like this can be easily found in every city and town of the United States, now.
This man’s inability to re-integrate into society is a problem that should fall to some responsible party, either a group of family and friends, or some long-term psychiatric institution which might allow him to slowly re-enter life. There is nothing of the kind to help Quell, so he falls through the cracks, and becomes prey for the kind of group which thrives on people who fall through the cracks, the Master and his Cause. They have a proper and noble purpose, of helping and repairing broken people, yet they do so for reasons that are ultimately self-aggrandizing, so that a guru with a sham medical degree might have his incompetent theories and his self-inflated stature validated. It is not the proper socialization that might have taken place in a family – but Quell’s home is a broken one – or through the proper medical care maintained by society – but the state has tossed Quell away – and it is now the only help there is.
Before going in-depth on the relationship between the Master and Quell, I make a brief, inevitable detour. A good focus of much of the coverage of this movie has been to the extent to which it is a Scientology exposé. Any casual look-through of the first unauthorized L. Ron Hubbard biography, Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, would reveal that The Master is chock full of telling details, small and large, which would confirm its subject. Many of the questions asked during the process session – have you ever had intercourse with a member of your family?, have you ever killed anyone?, have you ever had unkind thoughts about Master Peggy? – are all taken from Scientology security questions7. Racing on a motorcycle to a pointed location was an old game of Hubbard’s8. Hubbard had pretend expertise in nuclear physics, and the Master has such pretend expertise as well9. After a fraud scandal, Hubbard left for Phoenix, where he founded a school and published a strange, lengthy book, and the Master does the same10. The Split Saber is both this published work, The History of Man, and Excalibur, Hubbard’s legendary unpublished religious text; the hyped details surrounding this latter book, such as it being so unsettling that those who read it went insane, are left out of the movie, but they are in The Master‘s screenplay11. Fake degrees litter the front page of Saber, including the entirely made up M.O.C., Master of Ceremonies, while Hubbard relied on a degree mill for a PhD, a made-up “Doctorate in Divinity”, and a made-up “Doctorate in Science”12. Peggy Dodd has all the fierceness, cruelty, and drive of L. Ron Hubbard’s last wife, Mary Sue13, and in the original screenplay, Peggy is not named Peggy, but the slightly less veiled name of…Mary Sue. These details, and others, are obvious to long-time observers of the group, and are brought up in “The Master Screenplay: Scientology History from Several Different Eras Skillfully Woven Together” and “Scientology and The Master”, both by Tony Ortega, and “Is ‘The Master’ Based on Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard?” by former Scientologist Marc Headley.
Though these markers are sufficient to make clear that it is taken from the life material of the notorious movement and its infamous founder, the movie has frustrated some by not being more direct and more scathing. It is not, in my opinion, anywhere near as biting as, say, Wild Palms, which was utterly merciless in its depiction of key movement figures, blows so direct yet so veiled, that outsiders had no idea how crushing the blows were, like hits that leave no bruises but turn a person’s insides into smoosh (I write about this now forgotten mini-series and its satire of Scientology at my usual tiresome length in “Bruce Wagner’s Wild Palms”). By not making the movement its focus, but rather, staying with Quell, with his interactions with the cult leader a small part of Quell’s larger story, the movie’s subject becomes something more than just Scientology, but instead the need of so many outsiders for such a group. For Scientology is only one of the latest, and most prominent, of semi-religious and religious movements answering the needs of such men and women. The value of a guru, real or fake, who might help the forgotten is well pinpointed in Alan Watts’ “The Trickster Guru”:
It must be understood from the start that the trickster guru fills a real need and performs a genuine public service. Millions of people are searching desperately for a true father-Magician, especially at a time when the clergy and the psychiatrists are making rather a poor show, and do not seem to have the courage of their convictions or of their fantasies. Perhaps they have lost nerve through too high a valuation of the virtue of honesty – as if a painter felt bound to give his landscapes the fidelity of photographs. To fulfil his compassionate vocation, the trickster guru must above all have nerve.
Though I think Philip Jenkins’ Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History is a book fatally flawed by a too sympathetic treatment of non-traditional religious movements of the United States (rather than demonize such groups, Jenkins commits the polar mistake of treating every criticism and action against every such group, even Scientology and the Unification Church, as a persecutorial tactic), it does provide a thorough, and often too little known, historical context of groups such as Scientology. Hubbard supposedly started his religion as a way of making money14, and it is not difficult to see many of its elements borrowed from other, earlier groups, many of whom had borrowed these same elements from others.
I give lengthy excerpt to Jenkins’ description of the Psychiana movement, which should feel like an uncanny precedent of Hubbard’s later organization:
Psychiana, the New Scientific Religion, taught readers to follow the inner God-Law, in order to find “health, wealth, and happiness,” a phrase repeated so often in the lessons as to become a mantra. Prayer consisted of visualizing those things the believer sought, in such a way that they would actually come true. Psychiana obviously drew on New Thought, and it foreshadowed The Power of Positive Thinking. In later years, Robinson drew more heavily on Theosophy and described himself as an adept.
Psychiana was a gold mine. The basic twenty-lesson course cost $28 ($8 off for cash), and three advanced courses went for $10, $40, and
$100, respectively, with a money-back-if-not-entirely-satisfied guarantee, of the sort not offered by competing religions. The adherent
could also buy extra books, emblems, and records. Robinson pursued a clever marketing strategy from his base in Idaho, advertising in magazines whose audiences might be interested in his readily accessible form of popular mysticism: at the height of his business, he was advertising in two hundred publications. As he boasted, the orthodox might dismiss their rivals as lunatics, crackpots, and racketeers, but “we lunatics have more than we can do. I don’t print application blanks by the tens of thousands, I print them by the 500,000. I buy envelopes by the five million lot.” In the first nine months of 1933, Psychiana took in revenues of over $130,000, with expenses at $80,000, and Robinson lived in luxury. At its height in the Depression, Psychiana reached hundreds of thousands of Americans, perhaps millions. Robinson also boasted highly placed followers, including Idaho’s U.S. Senator William Borah, who was able to save him from deportation (Mussolini was also said to admire the movement). However, Psychiana was in decline by the Second World War, with large debts from unpaid bills for correspondence courses, and the movement staggered on for only a few years after Robinson’s death in 1948. Predictably, Psychiana’s critics presented the “Moscow Jesus” as peddling “lunatic,” “crackpot” ideas to the gullible masses.
Robinson could have drawn his commercial approach from any one of a number of contemporary models. He had surely noted how the Ku Klux Klan had persuaded millions of Americans to join a pseudomystical order, and in these same years Aimee Semple McPherson was triumphantly developing her Foursquare Gospel mission. Other striking parallels are found in Unity, the first religion to apply modern mass-advertising techniques, and Alice Bailey’s booming Arcane School, which at its height employed 130 secretaries to serve the scattered faithful. Psychiana was an attempt to cash in on a separate but equally large potential public. In turn, Psychiana inspired other mailorder esoteric schools, including the Mayan Temple, which flourished from the mid-1950s into the early 1960s. Despite its name, this San Antonio-based group offered a hodgepodge of Qabalism, Buddhism, reincarnation, and esoteric Christianity, and it allowed the home-based student to rise through successive grades of adeptship by means of correspondence courses and examinations. Initiates received the most arcane secrets of “Mayanry” by means of a simple cipher, which was intended to guard against profane inquiry.
The I AM cult had other similarities, and had similar roots in eastern religions and cultures imported into the U.S.15, whose features were often altered and strip mined for movements built around a guru offering self-improvement through mental discipline and training16. The well-known and oft ridiculed aspect of Scientology which posits a world where humans are pawns in a larger alien struggle is not sui generis either, but part of a long tradition in american cults, where such figures as Atlanteans or Lemurians toy with humans for their own ends17.
The Master’s very name, Lancaster Dodd, I read as a very obvious hat tip to the great actor Burt Lancaster, whose charlatan priest Elmer Gantry provided comfort to the same group of disaffected that Dodd caters to. The interrogation which is an “audit” under Scientology, and a “process” in the Cause, by which adepts ascend through the ranks of the movement, was so common as to be mocked in Watts’ “Trickster Guru”:
To carry this through, you must work out a whole series of unusual exercises, both psychological and physical. Some must be rather difficult tricks which can actually be accomplished, to give your student the sense of real progress.
Others must be virtually impossible – such as to think of the words yes and no at the same instant, repeatedly for five minutes, or with a pencil in each hand, to try to hit the opposite hand – which is equally trying to defend itself and hit the other. Don’t give all your students the same exercises but, because people love to be types, sort them into groups according to their astrological sun signs or according to your own private classifications, which must be given such odd names as grubers, jongers, milers, and trovers.
A judidous use of hypnosis – avoiding all the common tricks of hand-raising, staring at lights, or saying “Relax. Relax, while I count up to ten” will produce pleasant changes of feeling and the impression of attaining higher states of consciousness.
That such a movement provides a focus, a direction, a belonging without which the adept is lost, the very thing that is so central to a movement’s appeal that The Master ends with Dodd warning Quell that he cannot survive without it, is what sustained so many of such groups. This existential crisis, and its possible relief, are the basis for the very question on which Watts ends his essay. How will you deal with the barren loneliness of human existence without embracing some form of God’s grace?
I am proposing this problem as a kind of Zen koan, like “Beyond positive and negative, what is reality?” How will you avoid being either a fool or a fooler? How will you get rid of the ego-illusion without either trying or not trying? If you need God’s grace to be saved, how will you get the grace to get grace? Who will answer these questions if yourself is itself an illusion? Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.
It is helpful to see the thought cure which Quell undertakes in this larger context of the longer history of movements and their thought cures, and it also helpful to see this attempt to integrate a lost man into larger society in the context of Anderson’s first movie, Hard Eight. Others have placed Master as part of a broader theme in the director’s work, of surrogate fathers and surrogate sons, mentors and pupils – though Anderson himself rejects this, arguing that the relationship between Dodd and Quell is closer to something homo-erotic18. I do not think this is a case of either-or, and I don’t attempt to place this movie as part of any larger directorial theme, but instead make a specific comparison to Eight, which helpfully demonstrates what is absent in Dodd’s therapy and Dodd as teacher.
A small connection, first, between Sydney of Eight and Dodd of Master. Dodd is the commander of a ship, a kind of captain:
FREDDIE
Is this your ship?
THE MASTER
I am its commander, yes.
This is Sydney in conversation with Clementine:
SYDNEY
Do you remember my name?
CLEMENTINE
Sydney.
SYDNEY
Then why do you call me “Captain”?
CLEMENTINE
Because you seem like the captain of a ship to me. I see the way John follows you and worships you…like you’re his captain.
Sydney takes it upon himself to act as a mentor first for John, then Clementine, trying to implement in them a proper social code and perspective. The movie opens with him offering help and guidance to John, and we are then given a similar setting as he offers similar support to the waitress:
There is something half-finished about these two, not simply because of their youth, but because there is something that feels halted in their development. Dodd tries to change Quell for his own purposes of self-aggrandizement, and Sydney’s work here is not entirely selfless either. If John is an unfinished man, it is in part because his father died when he was young, and Sydney is the one who killed him. He instructs this man in the proper attitude and perspective in life, that you cannot demand that the world appear as you wish it, but must surrender to how it is. Sydney is arrogant, but it is a different arrogance from that of Dodd: he thinks he can make up in a few short years for this man’s lacking a father most of his life.
This experiment ends, of course, in failure. Nothing has been built up in Clementine, she constantly feels herself on the verge of falling apart, so when a man refuses to pay her money after he sleeps with her, she must have the money, not for the money itself, but for her own sense of status. That this man can sleep with her and not pay is to concede too much power to a man, and she doesn’t allow it. John, despite Sydney’s lessons, refuses to submit to the world as it is now, and he kidnaps the man. When Sydney arrives on the scene, he is exasperated at their childish attitude and reckless actions. When he calls upon Clementine to “humble yourself!”, it is not a demand for obeisance to him, but to be humble before the state of the world, of the small things we can change, and the many things we cannot.
CLEMENTINE
You don’t have to help us.
SYDNEY
I sure as hell don’t.
CLEMENTINE
Then get the fuck out of here!
JOHN
Oh, good.
SYDNEY
You got yourself in this situation. I did not get you here. So you humble yourself. You humble yourself!
Sydney knows that the very humility he asks of these two, he has not practiced. He asks of these two that they see reality clearly, yet he doesn’t quite perceive all the difficulties of Clementine’s life. He shows her a gracious respect, but he has no sense of how this woman who is forced to humble herself before the world every day, in all the indignities of life as a waitress and prostitute, cannot humble herself in this moment, not because she is incapable of humility, but because there is only so much humility she can take.
Were Sydney to truly practice the humility he asks of others, he would not attempt to re-form these two so late in life, in the belief that somehow he can make them into better people. That he makes this attempt, however, is not an ignoble failure, but a noble one. After Jimmy, a friend of John’s, extorts money from Sydney, threatening to tell John of his part in his father’s murder, the movie ends with Sydney in the dark of this man’s house, with a gun drawn as he waits for him to return, and this is not the usual victory through violence, but a loss. Sydney has attempted to school two people in a better life, but he knows that he has shown the same impatience they did, and that he did not gain his position by submitting to the world, but by asking the world to submit to him, and killing those who stood in the way. In his youth, he was closer to this man he hates, Jimmy, who gets ahead not through humble compliance but through half a dozen schemes, than to John and Clementine. Where those two end up in dangerous circumstances, Jimmy has deliberately brought them about by threatening others, and in this, too, Sydney is very much like this man, and perhaps this only makes him hate Jimmy more. Sydney has tried to be something more than what he once was, someone productive and helpful, but he has ended up back as the man he always has been, perhaps doing the only thing he is really good at, waiting in the dark and destroying a life. The film ends with Sydney focusing on a bloodstain on his shirtsleeve, and this is not just Jimmy’s blood, but all the blood of the past, that will always be there and never go away.
Though he badly needs help, Freddie is not drawn into the Cause out of any intellectual or spiritual curiosity. Where the cosmogony and the therapeutic process of this movement might be examined by another neophyte, with their skepticism eventually overcome, Freddie shows no interest in either area. If he still has the intellectual wherewithal to examine such things, he doesn’t bother to exercise it. The initial appeal of the Cause is the simple fact that it lets him in, without qualifier. His first day on the boat is the day of the wedding, and Freddie is invited and welcomed as if he were any other guest. The belonging he sought in the outside world, he now feels here. This is an unacknowledged aspect of this movement, as well as many other non-traditional movements, and some of the basis for their appeal. They can be far more egalitarian and open than the country which contains them.
For instance, it is perhaps my giving weight to the wrong thing, or an example of historical amnesia on the part of others, but I think an important, unstated fact is that a man like Clark, with his olive skin and curly hair would be asked something like a two-fold question in many parts of the United States in 1950, were he to marry a girl who looked like Elizabeth Dodd: “a) are you white?, and b) how white are you?” There is no suggestion that the Dodds, whatever their other failings, ever raise such a question. Clark is brought into the family as any other upstanding young man might be.
Jenkins, again in Mystics, makes the important point that female led neo-religious movements would often show up in eras when women achieved greater political equality and power, such as in the 1920s and 1960s19. He does not, however, make the other obvious point, one made very clear in this film: that such non-traditional religious movements gave women the possibility of power and influence they could not achieve easily in the corporate or political world, and certainly not in traditional religious institutions. The Cause survives because of the funding of Mildred Drummond, and later, Helen Sullivan. The éminence grise of the group, the power behind the throne, is, of course, Peggy Dodd, who might be a fanatic, but is easily the sharpest tack in the entire film. When Mildred Drummond returns from a session where she visited a past life, we have this moment:
MILDRED DRUMMOND
That man in the armor, was that me?
THE MASTER
Yes. That was your spirit.
This matron has the knightly qualities of any man; there is nothing in the female biology that prevents or shapes this, her body is simply a temporary container for a spirit that is as heroic as any man’s, and when given a man’s form, has been allowed to act as heroically as any man.
All these characters are given a place at the table which they wouldn’t have outside. When the wedding begins, we hear for the first time Jonny Greenwood’s “Overtones”20, the theme that will play over the happiest Cause events. It sounds like disparate random instruments ultimately joining together in a mounting, unifying anthem, one for a nation you would gladly join and fight for, an anthem appropriate for this eclectic group of those excluded and diminished by larger society, who will now link up and work together in their great mission.
The second, and more important, reason for why Freddie joins the Cause is that the intimacy he always seeks out, yet avoids with a woman, he achieves with Dodd. Dana Stevens, in a Slate podcast with Forrest Wickman, captures the mood in their processing session very well21:
On a second viewing, it really struck me, the homo-erotic current. It’s not overtly a flirtation scene, but it’s very, very intimate. They very, very quickly get to a very very deep place with each other. You get the sense that most processing sessions don’t go this way. Because most people don’t handle the questions the strange way that Freddie would, and that Dodd is really interested in that, and the two of them sortof have this spark. And you pointed out something I hadn’t noticed, they both smoke a cigarette after the processing session.
I think the relationship between these two intentionally parallels that of a man over a woman at the time (and perhaps not just at that time), with the power and the possibility of dominance resting entirely with Dodd. To use the word “homo-erotic” implies a physical attraction, and I don’t think that quite captures the qualities of this attraction, which is very deep, but might not involve physical lust at all. It is an attraction between opposites, attracted to each other because they are opposites. Where Quell has no social gifts, Dodd has bundles of them. Lancaster is expert as a performer, at projecting an image of a figure of authority, with his aristocratic speech and his professorial pose. The image is almost entirely false, but the act never drops, except in the briefest of moments when he loses his temper; the most extended period where the mask falls entirely, even the refined accent, is in the prison cell22. These two roles, the strong man and the saint – though a false one, here – are old ones, and we can see them detailed almost exactly as they are in The Master, in The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James:
The carnivorous-minded “strong man,” the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance?
Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harmless barn-yard poultry. There are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his outward power; and unless he found within us an altogether different faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt.
In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reenacted in human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The sexes embody the discrepancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life.
A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggressive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of society, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quite possible to conceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness-any small community of true friends now realizes such a society. Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be efficacious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the “strong man,” because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be concretely possible or not. The strong man would immediately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are.
There is, however, a very major distinction with how these types exist in The Master: it is the saint who entirely holds the power, who is the tyrant, and the strong man who is near helpless. They are not adversaries, but bonded by a deep attraction. Dodd has all the gifts which Quell lacks, while Quell shares Dodd’s animal-like temper, a temper which Dodd has the faculties to restrain, or channel into something else, while Quell has nothing of the kind: he is an unshaped and unrestrained creature of primitive instincts and feelings. That there is a mutual attraction should not imply that it is a symmetric one; James posits the saint as a female type, but here the false saint is very much a dominant male, though he dominates not through physical power but beguilement. Freddie reveals his deepest secrets to Lancaster, while Dodd gives away nothing equal to his student. Freddie has all the qualities of a perfect disciple, a man like a woman of sand, who can be re-shaped into a socially proper form, a vindication of whatever intellectual or political movement. One can easily picture someone like Freddie in any nationalist or nativist group, prepared to commit the most heinous acts out of fealty to his leader. Freddie’s devotion to the Cause is entirely rooted in his love for this man, a love that is something akin to the contemporary idolatry of an actor or singer, and his devotion ends not because of anything like Helen Sullivan’s questioning of the internal inconsistencies of their creed, but because he questions whether the reciprocal love from the Master is directed entirely to him, or whether it is just an outward radiance of a great performer, where each member of the audience thinks the connection is made exclusively with them.
That Freddie would make an ideal black shirt, or other political legbreaker, is not incidental, and I think there is a very obvious political resonance to this movie. It is an especially contemporary resonance at this time of a tragic anniversary, and it seems to be have been missed. I quote again from David Thomson’s review:
Surely when a movie is called The Master, the chance of revolution or extremism comes into play. And that dark vision of an outraged America ready to overthrow its government is more present now than at any time since 1919. This didn’t have to be a film about Scientology; it should have been a diagnosis of America ruined by kinds of belief that have gone mad and ecstatic with fear and loathing. Dodd needs to be touched by Ayn Rand’s fury.
Perhaps I make too much of certain things, but I see an obvious immediate relevance that appears to have been overlooked. The Cause is a movement that believes the universe is at the mercy of its will. It can transform the world into whatever it wishes, and reality is no obstacle. In the movie’s most striking moment, blue eyes are made black.
The egalitarian scientific method, a soundly democratic idea, where a theory either is or isn’t internally consistent, and either does or does not have an emperical basis, whether the proponent is a pauper or a prince, is considered a nuisance to the Cause. They impose their ideas through sheer will. When Dodd is questioned on the scientific basis of his ideas, it is by a stodgey man, a man who this movie rightfully requires to be stodgey, because his power does not reside in his charismatic appeal, but his skepticism, a skepticism not provoked by Dodd, but the ramshackle intellectual shabbiness of the theories themselves. I give lengthy and full excerpt to this dialogue, because it is crucial to understanding the movie’s contemporary relevance:
JOHN MORE
You’ve also said that these methods, Cause Methods, can cure leukemia, according to your book, and…
THE MASTER
Some forms of leukemia.
THE MASTER CONT’D
In being able to access past lives, we are able to treat illnesses that may have started back thousands, even trillions of years.
MORE
Trillions?
THE MASTER
With a sir.
MORE
The earth is not understood to be more than a few billion years old.
THE MASTER
Even the smartest of our current scientists can be fooled, yes.
MORE
You can understand skepticism…
THE MASTER
Yes!
MORE
…can you not?
THE MASTER
Yes, yes. For without it, we’d be positives and no negatives, therefore zero charge. We must have it.
MORE
Good science by definition allows for more than one opinion, does it not?
THE MASTER
Which is why our gathering of data is so far-reaching.
MORE
Otherwise, you merely have the will of one man, which is the basis of cult, is it not?
THE MASTER
‘Tis, ’tis.
THE MASTER CONT’D
And thankfully, we are, all of us, working at breakneck speeds and in unison towards capturing the mind’s fatal flaws and correcting it back to its inherent state of perfect. Whilst righting civilization and eliminating war and poverty, and therefore, the atomic threat.
MORE
Well…I find it quite difficult to comprehend, or more to the point, believe, that you believe, sir, that time travel hypnosis therapy can bring world peace and cure cancer.
THE MASTER
I have never been to the pyramids, have you?
MORE
No.
THE MASTER
And yet we know that they are there because learned men have told us so. May I ask, what is your name?
MORE
John More.
THE MASTER
Mr. More, if I may, is there something frightening to you about The Cause’s travels into the past?
MORE
Frightening? No, no.
THE MASTER
Yes.
THE MASTER CONT’D
What scares you so much about traveling into the past, sir?
MORE
I’m not frightened.
THE MASTER
Are you afraid that we might discover that our past has been reshapen? Perverted? And perhaps what we think we know of this world is false information?
MORE
Time travel does not frighten me, sir, because it’s not possible. What does frighten me is the possibility of some poor soul with leukemia coming to you…
THE MASTER
There are dangers of traveling in and out of time as we understand it.
THE MASTER CONT’D
But it’s not unlike traveling down a river, you see? You travel down the river, ’round the bend, look back, and you cannot see around the bend can you? But that does not mean it is not there, does it? But certain clubs would like us to think that a truth, I say truth, uncovered should stay hidden.
MORE
I belong to no club, and if you’re unwilling to allow any discussion…
THE MASTER
No, this isn’t a discussion, it’s a grilling. There’s nothing I can do for you if your mind has been made up. You seem to know the answers to your questions. Why do you ask?
MORE
I’m sorry you’re unwilling to defend your beliefs in any kind of rational…
THE MASTER
If you already know the answers to your questions, then why ask, PIG FUCK?!
For almost all of the film, I look at Dodd as a ridiculous figure and nothing more, but in this exchange, I feel anger, intense anger at the man, but not just this man, but for all those who he stands in for. This is a man who leads a movement that does not convince through intellectual argument, but charisma alone. They do not humble themselves before the universe, but demand that it humbles to them. Their claims meet no scientific standard, and those who have the temerity to demand they submit to such a standard are bullied and harassed. The Cause is not, to coin a phrase, a reality based community. On this tragic anniversary, what political administration does this man and his movement remind you of?
When Freddie is drawn to the cause because of his mixed up feelings about intimacy and sex, he meets his opposite, who is not Lancaster Dodd, but his wife, Peggy. Freddie has extraordinary problems with sex, because it compels intimacy, so he finds ways to avoid it. Peggy, who has all the drive and intelligence that in our time would have led her to be the CEO of a billion dollar company, has forsaken the pleasures of sex, and being seen as sexual in any way at all, because of the ways that being perceived sexually, and only sexually, can impair a woman. One of the only times that we break from Quell’s narrative, where we see what he does not, is when Peggy jacks off Lancaster, an act where the power should be with the man, but rests entirely with her; this is a woman without intimacy, even in the most intimate of acts.
There may be some confusion as to why this aggressive moment, which happens right after the surreal party, takes place. I quote from a conversation between Dana Stevens and Forrest Wickman23:
FORREST WICKMAN
We definitely know that she’s picked up on the erotic charge of this gathering. From the next scene, she approaches Lancaster Dodd and she says something like, you need to not have these thoughts, I know you’re having these thoughts, and that’s when she gets him off. That’s more or less when she wins the power grab for the master’s favors.
DANA STEVENS
Here’s my question to you, what makes her do that? What motivates the handjob sequence? Why does she feel she needs to assert her sexual control over her husband, while telling him, you can do anything you want, as long as I don’t know about it…essentially giving him license to cheat on her as long as it’s private, right? But she’s also making sure that she’s calling the shots. And I would love to know what motivates that at that moment, whether it’s the gaze exchange between Freddie and her at the party, or just a general sense, everybody’s trying to get their hands on my man?
WICKMAN
So, I guess this is what I was trying to get into. This is when I think she really starts her dominance over the master. Partly because he’s starting to become attracted to Freddie Quell’s character, and I think it’s before this that we see Val, and this is one of the first crinkles in the Master’s facade, we see where Val, his son, says he’s just making it up as he goes along. And I think one of the reasons Val says that, he’s off on the porch, Dodd doesn’t spend much time with his son. He’s spending all his time with Freddie. And so, that’s how I think he disowns his relationship with his father.
This places too much focus on the party scene, which is important, and not enough on what happens right before. The Cause are being hosted by one of their wealthy benefactors, Helen Sullivan, who gives a presentation on the virtues of their thought cure. At this meeting, there are hints of two potential, separate infidelities.
Lancaster is drawn to Freddie’s unrestrained animality, but so is his daughter, Elizabeth. When Freddie goes to beat down John More, and asks if anyone else will be coming, Clark turns to his wife for her opinion on all this, and she gives him a simple, hard look: what are you waiting for? Be a man. GO.
The attraction Elizabeth has for Freddie’s animal violence recurs during the Helen Sullivan lecture, when she sits next to Freddie and is very, very forward about what she wants. Whatever ambitions this woman has, whatever influence she might yield in our time, is very, very limited in the fifties, and the only domain she’s given to play with is in this sexual area. In seeking out Freddie for an affair, she is at least able to exercise her own will, rather than that of others. When Freddie refuses her, the hurt she registers isn’t simply over the rejection, but that she hasn’t been allowed even that. She hates this man for not even allowing this exercise in freedom, and that is why she makes the false claim later, that Freddie made passes at her. Quell rejects her for the same reason he rejects the other women: he fears getting close.
This is the hint of one infidelity, and the other takes place during Helen’s presentation. She is speaking of the vivid qualities of past lives, when she turns to the Master to praise him, and her look might reflect something more than that of a devoted student. We then cut to Peggy, who is so very good at reading people, and she sees in all this something that makes her very, very upset.
HELEN SULLIVAN
Even human bodies seem to radiate a different kind of warmth when covered with the fabrics of another age. Now, memory filters all of that out. But…when we return this way, the Cause Way, the way Master has discovered, everything is intact.
It is the possibility that Dodd is having an affair with their chief source of funds which bothers Peggy so much, not that any marital intimacy has been violated. If the affair goes wrong, they lose their funding. This is why she is so angry at what she sees pass between her husband and Helen, rather than the sex itself. The guidelines she lays out in the bathroom are simple. He can do what he wants, as long as he is discrete and it doesn’t jeopardize their movement. “We have enough problems” doesn’t refer to the difficulties in their own marriage, but the issues facing the Cause:
PEGGY
You can do whatever you want…as long as I don’t find out. And as long as no one that I know knows about it. Other than that, stop with this idea. Put it back in its pants. It didn’t work for them, and it’s not going to work for you. We have enough problems as it is, OK?
There seems to be some confusion as well over the vision of the naked women at the party, whether the vision is that of Lancaster, Peggy, or Freddie, and what meaning there is in the look exchanged between Peggy and Quell24. It is very much Freddie’s vision, and different dialogue in the screenplay makes this explicit25. What we see is what Freddie wants, but does not want. The woman naked, revealed, while he remains clothed, something like the relationship of a man to the women in a strip club: intimacy with every woman, but without actual intimacy. I stress that at the same time this alone is what he does not want. He wanted to sleep with Doris, was deeply in love with Doris, wanted to be close to Doris, and the ersatz intimacy of simple images of women exposed are not enough. The look that Peggy gives him is not, I think, enigmatic at all. This woman, who can read people like a book, somehow perceives what he thinks right now, and there is something in it which disturbs her. This is not fear of him as a sexual predator, but her properly seeing him as her opposite: she avoids the intimacies of sex, while he deeply wishes for them. Lancaster may not see Freddie as an adversary, the physical man opposed to the priest, but Peggy does.
As part of his therapy, Peggy tries to re-shape Freddie, so that he is something closer to what she is, where sex offers no temptation, no power, nothing. It is an important moment, and one given too little comment. She reads from an erotic story, to which he must give no response. Freddie is in agony – not over any sexual impulse, but because he sees sex as corrupting, and he wishes to look upon Peggy as an ideal, a maternal figure.
PEGGY
This is difficult for you. Listen. “‘It’s really a damn shame to tease you so, my little whore, he laughed, ‘So, I will get the dildo out of my cabinet in the next room.’ He was scarcely gone many seconds before he returned, and I felt his fingers opening the lips of my cunt. ‘Oh, oh, who is that?’ I screamed from under my skirt.”
FREDDIE
I don’t want to hear any of this.
PEGGY
Just listen. No reaction. “Kiss her. Put your tongue in her mouth, my boy. Fuck, fuck, fuck away.”
After this, after Freddie’s successful therapy, we hear again the mounting anthem of “Overtones”, and we see Peggy as this maternal ideal, when she announces the move to Phoenix. She is seen as Freddie and the other Cause members see her, shot from below, a figure of holy purity, holy gravitas.
What then follows is key to Quell’s break from the movement. The anthem continues on as Freddie, and Freddie alone, works with the Master, in the sacred work of excavating the second book. The landscape, the weapons, the music, all lend this the quality of an epic. At this critical moment in the faith, its leader has chosen Freddie, and only Freddie, to accompany him in this task. Freddie, again alone, then helps out Dodd in a series of three photos: outdoor rustic, ridiculous pretense with a quill pen, and an author profile. After this, he joins the others in the audience for the presentation of the second book. Just as at the wedding, Freddie, the perpetual outsider, is welcomed by all. It is only during the presentation, that something seems to change, something upsets Freddie that still affects him afterwards.
As said before, Quell lacks the intellectual focus to examine the Master’s ideas, as Helen Sullivan does, uncovering their arbitrariness and inconsistency26. Freddie’s devotion is not to any idea, but to the leader. He reacts violently to Val’s suggestion that their scripture is made up on the fly, not because the scripture has meaning for him, but because such an accusation would imply a falseness in Dodd. What upsets Freddie in the Phoenix presentation is that after their prolonged moments of intimacy – excavating the book and taking the photos – he recognizes that this closeness is false, a simple performer’s trick27. When Dodd turns to him in the audience, he looks down on him as an intimate, but – not as a known intimate; instead as just one more audience member who is supposed to feel as if the actor is acting for them, the singer singing a song to them. Before his speech, we see Dodd in preparation, and it is like seeing an actor before he takes the stage: he shuts out everything else in order to take on his role. Watts, again in “Trickster Guru”, properly identified the link between these two professions, shaman and actor: “The attractions of being a trickster guru are many. There is power and there is wealth, and still more the satisfactions of being an actor without need for a stage, who turns ‘real life’ into a drama.”
When Norman Conrad says that the book stinks, it only strengthens Freddie’s doubts that this man to whom he feels so close, is false, and he is not close to him at all. He is upset at Conrad not for maligning his faith, but because it confirms what he already feels. He beats this man just as a man might beat someone who confirmed that the man’s wife hadn’t been at work, or hadn’t been at her girlfriend’s house, when she said she had.
This brutal outburst, a regression to Freddie’s animal-man state, is the end piece of this movie’s complex portrayal of this man’s relationship to violence. For this man, violence is his only power, his only form of expression with the wider world, and his chief quality valued by others. He guards againt yielding any intimacy, and he lacks the eloquence to express all that is going wrong with him, so he signals to the outside world that he doesn’t fit in and envies the fitting-inniness of others by assaulting a man posing for his picture. His beating of an opponent of the Cause must be condemned by Dodd as the sort of brutal behaviour he cannot acknoweldge, but it is never raised as a reason for his expulsion of the group; the destruction of one’s enemies because of the over-enthusiasm of one’s followers must be spoken of as unnecessary, and something that is by no means wanted, but at the end of the day…such destruction is awfully helpful.
This violent power, always ready to burst out, is what makes this man attractive to Elizabeth, and perhaps Freddie’s moment of greatest pathos is when this power is entirely suppressed, when he is made into a spineless submissive, handing out leaflets to strangers, barely able to contain his rage at strangers, yet containing it. By making clear that violence is this man’s only power, the movie makes obvious why a marginal man like this so often turns to violence – stupid, nihilistic brutality. There is no fantasy in this, no vicarious experience for the viewer: the unleashed brutality of this man is frightening, and meant to be so. We might travel almost always with Quell, feel ourselves more sympathetic to Quell than Dodd, yet when these two men are imprisoned, we are given only the perspective of the outside of their cells, and the inside of Dodd’s: because Quell is an animal, a disturbing, uncontrolled animal, and whatever our antipathy for Dodd, we feel closer to him and safer in his cell than in Freddie’s, for this man is a rabid animal, and all sentimentality aside, we would fear to share a space with him.
It is after his beating of Conrad that Quell takes a frontierless landscape for what it is, and drives off where he wants, without submitting to the direction or order of anyone. He is not entirely a violent man, or perhaps something prevents him from physically hurting Dodd: he does not rebel by striking him, but by a simple demonstration that he is a creature of free will. That his devotion to Lancaster had been something like an unerotic love is reinforced when this break is immediately followed by his return to his lost love, Doris. A great affair doesn’t work out, so you go back to a past flame. Time, for this man, has remained entirely still while others have moved on: Doris left home long ago. This man who idealizes women, who doesn’t want them corrupted by sex, discovers that his Doris, the girl who happily leaned forward to kiss him, is now Doris Day, just like the asexual good girl icon.
The very loneliness that Watts warns about, which causes people to seek out a guru, a direction, a sense of being part of something greater, Freddie feels now, and it is mixed up with his personal connection with Lancaster. While watching a movie28, he dreams a very vivid dream that he has been summoned to London, and he goes there for his final encounter with Dodd. Neither man, however, is quite the same as before. The very fact that Freddie has it in him to rebel, that he is not simply clay to be re-shaped, diminishes his attraction in Lancaster’s eyes. The Master wants followers, not questioners or equals. Freddie may have returned, but he is not spineless. Before, Peggy was able to impose her own vision on him, have him render her eyes from blue to black, create her own reality, if you will. She now tries to impose her sight on him again, and this time, he rejects it.
PEGGY
Are you drunk?
FREDDIE
No. No, no.
PEGGY
You look sick. Freddie, you don’t look healthy.
FREDDIE
I don’t look like that. That’s not how I look.
PEGGY
You don’t think you can?
FREDDIE
It’s just not how I look.
There is a hint that Freddie has changed in other ways as well, because he may have sought out Dodd, but he may be open to other intimacies as well, one in particular: he asks where Elizabeth is. She is, Peggy says, “DCF”. This phrase remains unexplained in the movie and in the script, an acronym perhaps for some Cause university that has just been established, or something like Scientology’s “SP”, suppressive person, a former movement member who is now an enemy. The answer is unimportant to this story, Freddie’s story, as the significance is that he now has an interest in her, where before he did not. After Peggy leaves the room, Lancaster sings “Slow Boat to China”29, and I think this is the culminating note in guru as performance, intimacy as performance. For the song sounds like it is being sung from Lancaster to Freddie, a deeply felt, sincere rendition, only to this man. But even with an audience of one, the suspicion arises, does this singer even see the person he is singing to, or does he remain entirely within his song, and anyone who hears it is touched by the illusion that the song is for them?
When Freddie leaves the school, we hear for the first time “Overtones” in a context outside of the Cause. Though Lancaster warns him of traveling as an outcast, he must now feel some kind of belonging, a belonging to something larger outside the movement, because this anthem now travels with him, and plays over the closing scenes. We see him have sex for the first time in this movie, not avoiding it or putting it off, and the very manner by which he reached deepest intimacy with Lancaster he tries out on his partner. Whether this is a full victory for Freddie is left unknown. He is close to this woman in a way he has been afraid of throughout. The play at a process session might be an attempt at intimacy, or a method to avoid it: it is the interrogee who always reveals themselves, not the interrogator. In a movie which shows how limited the roles were for women of the time, it ends with this woman, Winn Manchester30, hoping for a next life: one with more possibilities than this one. The scene is a hopeful note on which I wish The Master would end, but it does not. The anthem stops, and we suddenly return to the past, Freddie lying down next to a woman of sand, and maybe, even now, he sees Winn as others have seen him, an object of particles that can be sculpted by their hands. Freddie feels intimacy for a brief moment, feels belonging for a brief moment, but he may well soon be an exile again.
(I remain unsatisifed with this post, and will probably continue to give it further aesthetic edits, without altering any of its major themes. The footnote on Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage was added on April 2nd.)
2 The script gives a slightly different version of this in the processing session, with the aunt promising to pay Freddie for what he does:
MASTER
How did you come to sleep with your Auntie Bertha?
FREDDIE
She said she’d let me have my inheritance if I were to sleep with her. So I did and I never got my money. I was drunk. She looked good.
MASTER
And you did it again and again.
FREDDIE
Yes. Because I liked it. It felt good.
MASTER
She’s rich? Is she? She has your inheritance, does she?
FREDDIE
She controls it all.
MASTER
You feel you’re owed this?
FREDDIE
I am.
3 Excerpts from Anatole Broyard’s book, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, a recollection of his post-war years in New York City which focuses on the transient sensual instance, rather than an encyclopedic detailing of a life, provides a helpful insight into society’s attitudes then:
Nineteen forty-seven was a time when any suggestion of extramarital sex in a movie had to be punished, just as crime had to be punished. To publish a picture of pubic hair was a criminal offense. Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer were banned and Portnoy’s Complaint was twenty-two years away. There was no birth-control pill, no legal abortion—yet none of this tells you what sex at that time was like. The closest I can come to it is to say that sex was as much a superstition, or a religious heresy, as it was a pleasure. It was a combination of Halloween and Christmas—guilty, tormented, clumsy, unexamined, and thrilling. It was as much psychological as physical—the idea of sex was often the major part of foreplay. A naked human body was such a rare and striking thing that the sight of it was more than enough to start our juices flowing. People were still visually hungry; there was no sense of déjà vu as there is now. As a nation, we hadn’t lost our naïveté.
Sex was the last thing such a girl gave a man, an ultimate or ultimatum. It was as much a philosophical decision on her part as an emotional one and it had to be justified on ethical and aesthetic grounds. To sleep with a man was the end of a long chain of behavior that began with calling yourself a liberal, with appreciating modern art—sex was a modern art—and going to see foreign films. Sex too was foreign. It was a postwar thing, a kind of despairing democracy, a halfhearted form of suicide. It was a freedom more than a pleasure, perhaps even a polemic, a revenge against history. Still, there had to be love somewhere in it too—if not love of a particular man, then love of mankind, love of life, love of love, of anything.
In a way I was just as inhibited as they were by my upbringing, which condemned me to a combination of boredom and desire. Like most young men, I hadn’t yet learned how to just be with girls, to exist alongside them, to make friends—and so once my desire was satisfied, I was bored. To make it worse, I suffered from a kind of boyhood chivalry and politeness that kept me from being natural, so that I was acting all the time, and that was fatiguing. I was guiltily aware that I was using girls badly—yet to use them well would have been to love them, and I didn’t have the time or space in my life for that. For all these reasons, there was always an aura of disappointment between us as we kept renewing a bad bargain.
The energy of unspent desire, of looking forward to sex, was an immense current running through American life. It was so much more powerful then because it was delayed, cumulative, and surrounded by doubt. It was fueled by failures, as well as by successes. The force of it would have been enough to send a million rockets to the moon. The structure of desire was an immense cathedral arching inside of us. While sex was almost always disappointing in retrospect, the promise of it ennobled and abstracted us; it made us pensive.
The saddest part of sex in those days was the silence. Men and women hadn’t yet learned to talk to one another in a natural way. Girls were trained to listen. They were waiting for history to give them permission to speak. They led waiting lives—waiting for men to ask them out, for them to have an orgasm, to marry or leave them. Their silence was another form of virginity.
Broyard’s life speaks to another way in the ways in which life then overlaps with life now, and yet is very different: this writer was, by the standards of the census form and the one drop rule, a black man, who passed for white. This detail of Broyard’s life is looked at in-depth by Henry Louis Gates in “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”, and it transforms a book like Greenwich into a series of coded phrases, adding an additional layer to the multiplicities to be expected of a gifted writer like Broyard. An example of this very specific, discretely hidden, theme might be found running through two excerpts.
On being brought in for a writing assignment on jazz music:
Then, just when I needed something to do, my friend Milton Klonsky asked me to collaborate with him on a piece he had been asked to write for Partisan Review. The piece was on modern jazz, a subject neither Milton nor the editors of Partisan knew anything about. Since I had always been interested in jazz, Milton suggested that I write the first draft and he would rewrite it. What he meant was that I’d supply the facts and he’d turn them into prose.
It never even occurred to me to resent this arrangement—I was awed by Partisan Review and flattered by Milton’s offer.
A later passage, on Broyard’s friend Saul Silverman, might be, in light of the previous citation, Broyard tipping his hand to his past. I bold the crucial part:
When he got sick Saul was working on a review for The New Leader. Isaac Rosenfeld, who was the book editor, sometimes gave reviews to friends, or friends of friends, even when they hadn’t published anything before. This was not as frivolous as it sounds, because the Village was full of young men like Saul who could be trusted to turn out a decent piece. Just as Negroes knew about jazz, Jews were expected to know how to write reviews.
A series of flashbacks involving Freddie’s memories of his wartime sweetheart, Doris, seemed more conventional and less illuminating with each viewing, even if the girl was played with haunting directness by the exquisite Madisen Beaty.
The laudable aim of ‘helping mankind’ sat rather uncomfortably with the requirement for security checks, which were stepped up during 1961. An even more intrusive questionnaire was introduced which appeared to have been designed with perverts and criminals rather than potential troublemakers in mind. Many of the questions reflected Hubbard’s morbid preoccupation with sexual deviation (‘Have you ever had intercourse with a member of your family’ and ‘Have you ever had anything to do with a baby farm?’) and a wide range of crimes were also probed (‘Have you ever murdered anyone?’ and ‘Have you ever done any illicit diamond buying?’). In addition Hubbard specifically wanted to know if the individual being checked had ever ‘had any unkind thoughts’ about himself or Mary Sue.
‘One of the things he liked to do was ride his motorcycle – he had an Indian, a real monster – out into the desert. He played a game he called point to point. He’d pick a spot on the horizon and go for it, straight as he could, without deviating, regardless of what was in the way, cactus or whatever. Nibs and Dick Steves, from the org, used to chase him on their motorcycles, but Ron’s favourite trick was to put up dust devils behind him. That’s another thing he could do – manipulate dust devils. He could whip them up and move them around at will. I often saw him do that.’
He also dashed off a new potted biography of himself adding further gloss to his already well-burnished career. It was included in a handout headed ‘What Is Scientology?’: ‘For hundreds of years physical scientists have been seeking to apply the exact knowledge they had gained of the physical universe to Man and his problems. Newton, Sir James Jeans, Einstein, have all sought to find the exact laws of human behaviour in order to help Mankind.
‘Developed by L. Ron Hubbard, C.E., Ph.D., a nuclear physicist, Scientology has demonstrably achieved this long-sought goal. Doctor Hubbard, educated in advanced physics and higher mathematics and also a student of Sigmund Freud and others, began his present researches thirty years ago at George Washington University. The dramatic result has been Scientology…’
Also from Messiah:
The various lectures delivered at this extraordinary event were later condensed into an even more extraordinary book titled All About Radiation and written by ‘a nuclear physicist’ and ‘a medical doctor’.
The doctor was anonymous, but the ‘nuclear physicist’ was none other than L. Ron Hubbard offering the benefit of his advice with customary scant recourse to the laws of science. He asserted, for example, that a sixteen-foot wall could not stop a gamma ray whereas a human body could, an assertion later described by an eminent radiologist as ‘showing complete and utter ignorance of physics, nuclear science and medicine’. In line with his philosophy that most illnesses were caused by the mind, Hubbard avowed, ‘The danger in the world today in my opinion is not the atomic radiation which may or may not be floating through the atmosphere but the hysteria occasioned by that question.’ Radiation, he added, was ‘more of a mental than a physical problem’.
At the beginning of April 1952, Hubbard packed his belongings into the back of his yellow Pontiac convertible and headed out of Wichita on the Kansas Turnpike with his teenage bride of four weeks beside him on the front seat. Their destination, one thousand miles to the west, was Phoenix, Arizona, where loyal aides had already put up a sign outside a small office at 1405 North Central Street, announcing it as the headquarters of the Hubbard Association of Scientologists.
Phoenix was so named because it was built on the ruins of an ancient Indian settlement on the Salt River, which had risen like the legendary phoenix. Hubbard, who had had more than enough of Wichita, could not think of a more appropriate location for the rise of his astounding new science from the still-smoking ruins of Dianetics.
In July, the Scientific Press of Phoenix (another Hubbard enterprise) published a book originally titled What To Audit and later re-named The History of Man. Introduced as a ‘cold-blooded and factual account of your last sixty trillion years’, Hubbard intended the book to establish the foundations of Scientology and he had no desire to be unduly modest about its potential. With the knowledge gained by Scientology, he wrote in the third paragraph, ‘the blind again see, the lame walk, the ill recover, the insane become sane and the sane become saner.’
Even judged by the standards of his science fiction, The History of Man was one of Hubbard’s most bizarre works and possibly the most absurd book ever written, although it was treated with great reverence by his followers. An amalgam of mysticism, psychotherapy and pure science fiction, the content invited the derision which was inevitably forthcoming. ‘To say it is an astonishing document does not adequately convey the peculiar qualities or contents of The History of Man . . .’ one government report noted. ‘For compressed nonsense and fantasy it must surpass anything theretofore written.’
In a narrative style that wobbled uncertainly between schoolboy fiction and a pseudo-scientific medical paper, Hubbard sought to explain that the human body was occupied by both a thetan and a ‘genetic entity’, or GE, a sort of low-grade soul located more or less in the centre of the body. (‘The genetic entity apparently enters the protoplasm line some two days or a week prior to conception. There is some evidence that the GE is actually double, one entering on the sperm side . . .’) The GE carried on through the evolutionary line, ‘usually on the same planet’, whereas the thetan only came to earth about 35,000 years ago to supervise the development of caveman into homo sapiens. Thus the GE was once ‘an anthropoid in the deep forests of forgotten continents or a mollusc seeking to survive on the shore of some lost sea’. The discovery of the GE (Hubbard hailed every fanciful new idea as a ‘discovery’) ‘makes it possible at last to vindicate the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin’.
11 The section of Miller’s Messiah which deals with the near-death experience which gave birth to the book and its strange qualities:
‘He opened his eyes and found a nurse standing over him looking very concerned. Just as a surgeon walked into the room, Ron said, “I was dead, wasn’t I?” The surgeon shot a venomous look at the nurse as if to say, “What have you been telling this guy?” But Ron said “No, no, I know I was dead.”
‘The next part of the story I would find very difficult to direct realistically if I was a movie director. According to Ron, he jumped off the operating table, ran to his Quonset hut, got two reams of paper and a gallon of scalding black coffee and for the next 48 hours, at a blinding rate, he wrote a work called Excalibur, or The Dark Sword.
‘Well, he kept the manuscript with him and when he left the Navy he shopped it around publishers in New York, but was constantly turned down. He was told it was too radical, too much of a quantum leap. If it had been a variation of Freud or Jung or Adler, a bit of an improvement here and there, it would have been acceptable, but it was just too far ahead of everything else. He also said that as he shopped the manuscript around, the people who read it either went insane or committed suicide. The last time he showed it to a publisher, he was sitting in an office waiting for a reader to give his opinion. The reader walked into the office, tossed the manuscript on the desk and then threw himself out of the window.
‘Ron would not tell me much about Excalibur except that if you read it you would find all fear would be totally drained from you. I could never see what was wrong with that or why that would cause anyone to commit suicide.’
[Forrest Ackerman] reported the good news to his client, but Hubbard, suddenly and uncharacteristically bashful, refused to produce the manuscript. ‘He said it was in a bank vault and it was going to stay there. I think he was quite sincere. He seemed like a man who had seen too many people go crazy or commit suicide, who had enough on his conscience already. I never did get to see the manuscript or show it to any publisher. In fact, I never encountered anyone who said they had seen it.’
From The Master screenplay, Clark, Dodd’s son-in-law, talks about the legendary book:
CLARK
…it’s what started all this. Back then…in 1941, the Master…he’d been in operation, in army hospital. He died on the table…gone for seven minutes…but came back:
And in a storm of vision and creative output from this experience he wrote The Split Saber aka The Darkest Cloud.
Whoever read it…either went insane or committed suicide. Twelve people read it. Six dead, four disappeared. The last time anyone saw it…was his last publisher in New York.
Master walked into the office to find out what the reaction was, the publisher called for the reader, the reader came in with the manuscript…threw It on the table…and flung himself out of the skyscraper window….
Master took the book and hid it where no one could get to it…it’s inside this book: all the history. All the facts. All too dangerous. He re-wrote it, using what he could as the basis for what we are able to accept and learn today…that’s Book One that we all study and know…but the real stuff. The things at the center…are still too dangerous. They (kill/cure) any man who reads it. It’s passing through the jaws of resistance. It’s the truth about all this. The book is protected and hidden. No one knows where but Master.
In February 1953, Hubbard decided it was necessary to bolster his status with the phlegmatic British by acquiring some academic qualifications. He knew precisely where they were available – from Sequoia University in Los Angeles. The ‘university’ of Sequoia was owned by Dr Joseph Hough, a chiropracteur [sic] and naturopath who ran a successful practice from a large house in downtown Los Angeles and conferred ‘degrees’ on whoever he thought merited them. Richard de Mille was awarded a Ph.D. from Sequoia, somewhat to his surprise, for a slim volume he had written under the title An Introduction to Scientology.
On 27 February, de Mille, who was then living in Los Angeles, received an urgent telegram from Hubbard in London: ‘PLEASE INFORM DR HOUGH PHD VERY ACCEPTABLE. PRIVATELY TO YOU. FOR GOSH SAKES EXPEDITE. WORK HERE UTTERLY DEPENDANT ON IT. CABLE REPLY. RON.’ De Mille found Hough thoroughly agreeable and replied the following day: ‘PHD GRANTED. HOUGH’S AIRMAIL LETTER OF CONFIRMATION FOLLOWS. GOOD LUCK.’ It was in this way that Hubbard acquired the distinction of appending letters to his name – a mysterious ‘Doctorate of Divinity’ would follow shortly, along with a ‘D. Scn’.
13 I take these notes on Mary Sue from my previous post on Wild Palms.
From an interview about The Master conducted by Brent Bambury, with a former high-ranking scientologist, Kate Bornstein, on Mary Sue:
BAMBURY
Did you know Mary Sue Hubbard, who was L. Ron Hubbard’s wife, and the number two figure in the church for many years?
BORNSTEIN
I knew Mary Sue Hubbard well. And it was a brilliant performance. Amy Adams captured her, completely. And yes, Mary Sue was posted as L. Ron Hubbard’s guardian. That was the post, the guardian. It was her job to protect scientology from bad people. I was scared of Mary Sue. Everyone was.
Miller gives this description of the relationship between the two Hubbards:
Hubbard would never allow anyone to criticize Mary Sue and although he rarely showed much affection for her in public, it seemed, after two failed marriages and innumerable affairs, that he had at last formed a stable relationship, improbable as it had first appeared. They were indeed an unlikely couple – a flamboyant, fast-talking extrovert entrepreneur in his forties and a quiet, intense young woman twenty years his junior from a small town in Texas. But anyone who underestimated Mary Sue made a big mistake. Although she was not yet twenty-four years old, she exercized [sic] considerable power within the Scientology movement and people around Hubbard quickly learned to be wary of her. Fiercely loyal to her husband, brusque and autocratic, she could be a dangerous enemy.
Here is former member Cyril Vosper, from Miller’s Messiah on the implementation of the social control system of “ethics”; I bold his opinion on Mary Sue’s influence of this behavior code:
‘Conditions’ were an essential part of the new ‘ethics technology’ devised by Hubbard in the midsixties, effectively as a form of social control. It was his first, tentative step towards the creation of a society within Scientology which would ultimately resemble the totalitarian state envisaged by George Orwell in his novel 1984 . Anyone thought to be disloyal, or slacking, or breaking the rules of Scientology, was reported to an ‘ethics officer’ and assigned a ‘condition’ according to the gravity of the offence. Various penalties were attached to each condition. In a ‘condition of liability’ for example, the offender was required to wear a dirty grey rag tied around his or her left arm. The worst that could happen was to be declared an ‘SP’ (suppressive person), which was tantamount to excommunication from the church. SPs were defined by Hubbard as ‘fair game’ to be pursued, sued and harassed at every possible opportunity.
‘What happened with the development of ethics,’ said Cyril Vosper, who worked on the staff at Saint Hill, ‘was that zeal expanded at the expense of tolerance and sanity. My feeling was that Mary Sue devised a lot of the really degrading aspects of ethics. I always had great warmth and admiration for Ron [Hubbard] – he was a remarkable individual, a constant source of new information and ideas – but I thought Mary Sue was an exceedingly nasty person. She was a bitch.‘
An incident on one of scientology’s ships, from Miller, I bold Mary Sue’s part:
Arthur’s [a son of Hubbard's] special responsibility on board ship was to look after his father’s motor-cycles, in particular a huge Harley Davidson that had been given to Hubbard by the Toronto org. One afternoon, the Commodore told Doreen [a scientology member] to make sure Arthur had cleaned the Harley Davidson properly by wiping a tissue over the mudguards and petrol tank and bringing it back to show him. She returned with a black smudge on the tissue. Hubbard was incensed. ‘You go and assign Arthur liability,’ he roared at Doreen, ‘he’s not doing his duty.’
Doreen was relieved that Arthur didn’t seem to be too worried by his father’s reaction, or by the need to tie a grey rag round his arm, but it was not the end of the matter. Mary Sue, who was fiercely protective of her children, felt it was Doreen’s fault that Arthur had been assigned liability. Later that afternoon, she grabbed her by the arm and starting shaking her. ‘You little fiend,’ she hissed, sinking her nails into the girl’s arm, ‘you’re destroying my family.’
Another:
A few months later, Diana [a daughter of Hubbard's] upset her father in some way. Hubbard reeled off a long reprimand to the messenger on duty, adding at the end of it: ‘OK, go and spit in Diana’s face.’ The messenger was a little dark-eyed girl called Jill Goodman, thirteen years old. She ran along the deck to Diana’s office, burst in, spat in her face with unerring accuracy and began shouting her message as Diana let out a scream of fury. Mary Sue, who was in an adjoining office, burst in as her daughter was wiping the spittle from her face. She grabbed Jill round the throat as if she was going to strangle her and also began screeching. Jill started crying and when Mary Sue let her go, she immediately rushed off to tell the Commodore. Another acrimonious husband and wife row followed, which ended with Mary Sue throwing her shoes at the luckless messenger Hubbard despatched to chastise her further.
It is Mary Sue, following L. Ron Hubbard’s orders, who heads up the infamous Operation Snow White, an attempt by the church to eliminate any government account that might harm the church’s reputation by having scientologists take positions in government agencies, steal documents from various agencies, and destroy them.
Miller gives a good description of this project:
Now sixty-two, Hubbard was also beginning to ponder his place in posterity. The Church of Scientology had been swift to make use of the recently enacted Freedom of Information Act, which had revealed that government agencies held a daunting amount of material about Scientology and its founder in their files, much of it less than flattering. Hubbard, who had never been fettered by convention or strict observance of the law, conceived a simple, but startlingly audacious, plan to improve his own image and that of his church for the benefit of future generations of Scientologists. All that needed to be done, he decided, was to infiltrate the agencies concerned, steal the relevant files and either destroy or launder any damaging information they contained. To a man who had founded both a church and a private navy this was a perfectly feasible scheme. The operation was given the code name Snow White – two words that would figure ever more prominently over the next few months in the communications between the Guardian’s Office in Los Angeles and the Commodore’s hiding place in Queens, New York.
Operation Snow White, the impudent plan to launder public records that he had dreamed up three years earlier, was progressing rapidly and with a degree of success that few would have believed possible. By the beginning of 1975, the Guardian’s Office had infiltrated agents into the Internal Revenue Service, the US Coast Guard and the Drug Enforcement Agency. By May, Gerald Wolfe, a Scientologist working at the IRS in Washington as a clerk-typist, had stolen more than thirty thousand pages of documents relating to the Church of Scientology and the Hubbards. He was known to the Guardian’s Office by the code-name, ‘Silver’.
Within the hierarchy of the Church of Scientology, ultimate responsibility for the activities of Operation Snow White rested with Mary Sue Hubbard, the controller, but it was inconceivable that she was acting on her own initiative or not discussing progress with her husband. And although the amateur agents had discovered it was ridiculously easy to infiltrate, bug and burgle US government offices, the risks were considerable, both to the agents themselves and their church superiors. Hubbard was not too worried about who would take the rap if Operation Snow White was exposed, as long as it was not him.
Things eventually go wrong, with a number of these infiltrators arrested, and one of them, Michael Meisner, revealing the details of the operation, leading to an FBI raid on church offices, as well as the indictment and conviction of top church figures, including Mary Sue.
At six o’clock on the morning of 8 July 1977, 134 FBI agents armed with search warrants and sledgehammers, simultaneously broke into the offices of the Church of Scientology in Washington and Los Angeles and carted away 48,149 documents. They would reveal an astonishing espionage system which spanned the United States and penetrated some of the highest offices in the land.
On 15 August 1978, a federal grand jury in Washington indicted nine Scientologists on twenty-eight counts of conspiring to steam government documents, theft of government documents, burglarizing government offices, intercepting government communications, harbouring a fugitive, making false declarations before a grand jury and conspiring to obstruct justice. Heading the list of those indicted was Mary Sue Hubbard. She faced a maximum penalty, if convicted, of 175 years in prison and a fine of $40,000. On 29 August, all nine defendants were arraigned in the federal courthouse at the foot of Capitol Hill and pleaded not guilty.
Mary Sue never betrayed her husband, but then she had never intended to. The trial was scheduled for 24 September in Washington, but the government prosecutors and defence attorneys were still bargaining at that date and a stay was granted. On 8 October, in an unusual legal manoeuvre, an agreement was reached that the nine defendants would plead guilty to one count each if the government presented a written statement of its case, thereby avoiding a lengthy trial.
On 26 October, US District Judge Charles R. Richey accordingly found the nine Scientologists guilty on one count each of the indictment. Mary Sue and two others were fined the maximum of $10,000 and jailed for five years. The remaining defendants received similar fines and prison sentences of between one and four years.
14 That Scientology was started by an impoverished author as a money-making enterprise is made in many places, but for the moment I use as a citation this fascinating account of the New York science fiction writing community, related by Harlan Ellison to Robin Williams:
In 1930 former medium, hypnotist, and gold prospector Guy Ballard claimed to have had a personal encounter on California’s Mount Shasta with none other than the Count of Saint-Germain, the figure who had fascinated [fiction writer Bulwer Lytton] and the original Theosophists. Though now thousands of years old, Saint-Germain lived on as an Ascended Master, who chose Ballard as his earthly vehicle and the channel of the forces of light: Guy and his wife, Edna, now became Accredited Messengers of the Masters. Ballard founded the movement of I AM, which claimed to show adherents how to achieve perfect unity with the higher self, the God within. Publishing under the pseudonym of Godfre Ray King, Ballard promulgated his beliefs in a number of books, including Unveiled Mysteries (1934), the title of which recalls Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled. In 1932 the movement set up headquarters in Los Angeles, and it used profits from the books to advertise heavily on radio.
Critics attacked I AM for its flagrant exploitation of public gullibility, especially in cult-prone California. In 1938, the Christian Century described the new movement under the weary headline “Another One in Los Angeles.” One of the deadliest enemies of the group was Gerald Bryan, who produced a series of embarrassing revelations about its origins through the late 1930s. Among other things, Bryan showed that Ballard had plagiarized much of his written material from Theosophical works written over the previous forty years or so, which described meetings with ascended masters in words almost identical to Ballard’s, specifically naming the Count: of Saint-Germain. Visual portrayals of the Ascended Masters were also borrowed, uncredited, from standard Theosophical works.
Bryan shows once again how commonplace such esoteric ideas had become in popular culture by the 1920s and how easily a whole religious system could be concocted from materials lying readily at hand. He claimed that the Ballards “imbibed a little of Christian Science, read a bit of the Walter Method C. S. [Christian Science], branched over to the Unity School at Kansas City, linked up with the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), joined the Order of Christian Mystics [the Curtiss group], studied under Pelley the Silver Shirter, sat at the feet of some of the Swamis, read a little of Theosophy, looked into the magic of Yogi philosophy and Oriental mysticism, [and] interested themselves in Baird T. Spalding and his Masters of the Far East.” Ballard also consulted with Frank Robinson, who “just warned him to keep off my [Robinson's] stuff.”64 Pelley had also had his vision of the Masters on a California mountain, and like Pelley, the Ballards drew from the pulps and popular science magazines. I AM claimed access to “great and mighty Ascended Masters speaking audibly over a dazzling LIGHT AND SOUND RAY [sic],” which manifested in the Ballard headquarters in Chicago. This could easily have been borrowed from a contemporary science fiction magazine like Astounding, if not from a Flash Gordon movie serial.
Whatever its origins, I AM developed its own style of meetings and ceremonials, emphasizing the roles of both Jesus and Saint-Germain. To attract the curious, large public meetings were held in elaborately decorated public auditoria, while permanent I AM temples were developed to serve the fully committed initiates, the Hundred Percenters. Five I AM centers appeared in California, two in Florida, others in Philadelphia, Seattle, and Chicago. Members’ services were reminiscent of traditional seances. Also recalling spiritualism, the Ballard system involved exorcising the countless psychic entities that threatened the human race, with the believer invoking Saint-Germain or some other higher presence: on one occasion in 1939, some four hundred thousand troublesome entities were removed from greater Philadelphia. As well as raiding the ranks of spiritualism, “they have taken followers from Christian Science, Unity, the various metaphysical cults and even from the older religions; many persons of education and refinement are included in their number.”
I AM played to enthusiastic audiences across the nation, with a series of ten-day classes or crusades focusing on particular cities and regions. The movement’s claim to have a million followers is doubtful, but there were at least tens of thousands prepared to support a sizable merchandising operation, which included books, records, pins, rings, posters, and portraits of the Masters, including Saint-Germain and Guy Ballard himself. I AM rings sold for $12, photographs of Ballard for $2.50, a chart of the Magic Presence for $12, and $1.25 bought a special binder in which to store the flood of continuing I AM edicts. New Age Cold Cream was also available.67 By such means I AM allegedly took in $3 million during its first decade of existence.
The occult vision was hierarchical in nature, reflecting the influence of Qabalistic and Neoplatonic thought as well as Hinduism. The universe contained countless beings at different levels of spiritual development, including what past cultures have called gods, demons, and angels, and these beings or forces could be induced to serve the human adept possessing the appropriate techniques. In 1888, a text on rosicrucianism claimed that members of the group “say that if our spiritual powers of perception were fully developed, we should see the universe peopled with other beings than ourselves, and of whose existence we know nothing at present. They say that we should then see this universe filled with things of life,” including the famous elemental spirits of Renaissance magic: nymphs, salamanders, gnomes, undines, and fairies. Far more exalted were the planetary spirits, former human beings who had attained near-divine powers.
Humans were an integral part of this celestial hierarchy. As the spiritualists had supposedly shown, sentient existence did not cease with death, so the soul existed as an eternal spiritual presence. Many went still further in their belief in human survival, as both reincarnation and karma became tenets of most mystical movements. The process of rebirth was part of the soul’s evolution towards perfection and union with the Divine, the ultimate goal of all mystical enterprise: in this vision, alchemy was a material symbol for the inner transformation of the baser elements of the individual soul into heavenly fire. The idea that humans could progress towards divinity meshed well with the optimism of New Thought and with the popular evolutionary ideas so prevalent at this time. Most occult authors were fascinated by evolution, seeing it, however, in terms far broader than materialistic Darwinism.
Great mystics or prophets might represent souls in a very advanced state of spiritual progress, who should be regarded as the rightful teachers of humanity, Masters or Secret Chiefs. This idea explains the ambiguous attitude towards established world religions: the Buddha, Jesus, and other leaders were seen as highly evolved souls who offered authentic wisdom, however much their words had been twisted by their followers. Many Western occultists saw their own belief-system as a return to an authentic Christianity, which preached a message that was identical to Buddhism, as well as to Mesmerism, alchemy, and rosicrucianism. Whereas conventional Christians saw only the external truths, esoteric believers heard the real Jesus. To quote Manly Hall again, “So wisdom drapes her truth with symbolism, and covers her insight with allegory. Creeds, rituals, poems are parables and symbols. The ignorant take them literally and build for themselves prison-houses of words…Through the shadow shines ever the Perfect Light.” In addition to the overall belief-system, believers were offered a vision of a vastly expanded human potential. Then as now, one of these fundamental truths was that human beings contained within themselves immense forces presently unknown to science and that these powers could be mobilized by an individual with the proper insight, training, and initiation. Though some of the methods advocated to this end were purely magical (such as the recitation of spells or names of power), much occult training consisted of attempts to master one’s own body and mind through breath control, the regulation of sexual desire, and the development of skills like meditation and visualization. This shared many points of contact with the New Thought belief in the power of the will to control the ailments of mind and body, though occultists went still further, suggesting that a trained adept would be able to exercise skills such as precognition, psychokinesis, telepathy, miraculous healing, astral travel, and other traditional magic arts.
Meanwhile, tales of lost continents not only flourished, they proliferated. Throughout the twentieth century, believers would claim access to a whole alternate history and archaeology of the human civilization, venturing many thousands of years before the meager period marked out by staid academics. The ancient civilization of Atlantis was soon joined by the lost land of Lemuria, said to lie under the Indian Ocean and to have left traces throughout the Pacific world, making it of great interest to West Coast occultists. Historical accounts of this lost society were mainly derived from mediumship and channeling. The most-cited source for the Lemurian idea was Rudolf Steiner’s The Submerged Continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, which was translated from the German into English in 1911. By the 1920s, James Churchward was claiming to have discovered secret records from yet another sunken continent, that of Mu, the “Motherland of Man,” which had left its remnants in Polynesia. In his view, “[t]he Garden of Eden was not in Asia, but in a now sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean,” and memories of Mu were found scattered across the world, in Mayan, Indian and Egyptian records, on Easter Island, and in the rituals of Freemasonry. Churchward claimed that Mu had foreshadowed and even excelled all modern science, “We are probably now treading the same road which our forefathers trod over 100,000 years ago.” Contemporary groups hoped to gain access to these ancient secrets: in 1936, a Lemurian Fellowship was founded in Wisconsin; it relocated to Los Angeles in 1942.
Theosophy, which possessed a widespread network of lodges in North America, deserves much of the credit for popularizing yoga and associated Hindu ideas, as well as terms like “karma,” “mahatma,” “guru,” and “chela.” The Theosophical tradition also disseminated ideas like the Ascended Masters and reincarnation, which diffused throughout the California sects of the next half century. In 1898, the American Theosophical Society fell apart amidst vicious internal squabbles, but several new groups sprouted from the wreckage. Some of these factions were short-lived but others thrived, such as Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy.
One American strand of Theosophy was dominated by Katherine Tingley, who in 1899 established her headquarters at Point Loma, her “White City in a Land of Gold beside a Sunset Sea.” This became a Xanadu dreamworld, in which forty buildings represented a spectrum of architectural styles, with “Muslim domes, Hindu temples, Egyptian gates, and Greek theaters.” Point Loma gave Tingley a base for her educational and archaeological projects, which included a theosophical university and a raja yoga college. At its height, the colony supported three hundred residents under the autocratic rule of the Purple Mother, and some 2,500 children were educated there between 1897 and 1942. The community became an established part of the southern California social landscape, and it survived for several years after Tingley’s death in 1935.
The experiment had enduring results. Carey McWilliams suggested that “[i]t was through Point Loma that the yogi influence reached
Southern California. . . . After Mrs. Tingley’s appearance in Southern California, the region acquired a reputation as an occult land and Theosophists began to converge upon it from the four corners of the earth.” The location fitted well with the Theosophical worldview, in which a series of great races are said to have dominated the planet at various times since the primeval Lemurians and Atlanteans. Soon, a sixth race was expected to arise and replace the European Aryans; some writers prophesied that this new group would appear in the Pacific regions of the United States. By the 1920s, other Theosophical visitors to California included Annie Besant, a bitter rival of Tingley, and Krishnamurti, whom Mrs. Besant proclaimed to be a messianic figure. Krishnamurti was presented as the long-sought world teacher, successor to Christ and the Buddha. He was lionized on several American visits in the late 1920s, until in 1929 he repudiated both Besant and the messianic claims: later, he would warn listeners against all would-be messiahs and prophets. Another Theosophical immigrant was Alice Bailey, a prolific British writer on all manner of occult topics, who claimed to be channeling a spirit known as “The Tibetan.” Bailey later relocated to New York, where her Arcane School (founded in 1923) dispensed correspondence courses in mysticism.
For his part, Anderson is loath to see the movie as a variation on a pet theme. “Is it getting tired?” he asks when I say that Dodd and Freddie recall the surrogate father-son relationships in many of his films, beginning with the aging gambler Sydney (Philip Baker Hall) and his naive protégé (John C. Reilly) in Anderson’s 1996 debut feature, Hard Eight. He prefers to think of his Master characters as unrequited lovers, a subtle, homoerotic tension that is triangulated in the film by the presence of Dodd’s loyal, steely wife (Amy Adams). “But maybe that’s just my way of dressing it up and thinking I was doing something different this time,” he says. In any case, he seems happy that people-including us-are finally talking about something other than Scientology. “I’ve kind of loved these screenings we’ve had, because no one’s talking about Scientology anymore once they see the film. They’re just talking about how fucking good Joaquin Phoenix is.”
Another social development of these years was the changing role and improving status of women. The suffragette years before 1920 show many parallels to the organized feminist movement that emerged during the late 1960s. In both eras, women enjoyed a higher degree of economic independence and a new social and political power, which was symbolized by important legal victories. For the generation of the 1920s, this meant the suffrage and prohibition; in the 1970s, it would involve sharply increased public awareness of issues of sexual violence. Both decades were also marked by the surging popularity of women-oriented religious ideas and sects, in the early part of the century, the groups founded by leaders like Madame Blavatsky, Aimee Semple McPherson, Myrtle Fillmore, Ellen White, and Mary Baker Eddy.
MASTER
You’ve been implanted with a push-pull mechanism that keeps you fearful of authority and destructive. We are in the middle of a battle that’s a trillion years in the making, and it’s bigger than the both of us.
FREDDIE
You’re making this shit up! You make this shit up! You don’t know what you’re talking about.
MASTER
I don’t know what I’m talking about?
FREDDIE
No, you don’t.
MASTER
I give you facts.
FREDDIE
You don’t give me facts! What facts? What facts?
MASTER
They are fucking facts!
FREDDIE
What facts? What facts?
MASTER
Fuck you!
FREDDIE
Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!
MASTER
Why don’t you kick the bed some more?
FREDDIE
Fuck you!
MASTER
Fuck you, you lazy ass piece of shit!
FREDDIE
Fuck you. Fuck you. I’m not lazy!
MASTER
You’re fucking lazy!
FREDDIE
Oh, you make shit up…
MASTER
You’re fuckin’ lazy!
FREDDIE
Your fucking family hates you! Your son hates you!
MASTER
Oh, they do?
FREDDIE
Yeah! Your son hates you.
MASTER
Who fucking likes you except for me? Nobody! Except for me.
FREDDIE
No, you don’t fucking like me.
MASTER
Who likes you except for me? Except for me? I’m the only one who likes you.
The change in Dodd’s style of speech is there in the slightly different screenplay dialogue which is a jarring break from his usual speaking style. He never uses contractions, never vernacular like “wanna”, and now he does:
MASTER
ME shut my mouth? You’re a fucking DRUNK.
You CACTUS. Play a game with me?
I don’t think so, you little yo-yo. That ain’t the way. You want to shut me up? I’m the best and only friend you have, shut me up for saving you? HELPING YOU. ONLY WAY. FIND ANOTHER ONE, YO-YO. You wanna get rid of this or live this way or MASTER it?
You listen – you wanna spit in that cops face for touching you? I’m gonna beat him with you. Bash his skull in. BUT DON’T TURN ON ME, DRUNK.
Here’s one moment that started to unfold for me only upon a second viewing and became one of the principal reasons I couldn’t resist a third: the party scene I mentioned above, in which Hoffman’s voluble Master performs the mildly bawdy traditional song “I’ll Go No More A-Rovin’” for an admiring group of acolytes, including his pregnant wife Peggy (Amy Adams), while Freddie watches in a drunken stupor from a nearby chair. (The description that follows for the next few paragraphs contains no spoilers in the sense of significant plot revelations, but if you haven’t seen the movie and want to go in interpretively unspoiled, come back after you’ve seen it.) Abruptly, from one shot to the next, all the female partygoers appear stark naked, including the lady musicians. (I liked how the cellist kept on her ropes of pearls.)
The first time through, this sudden tableau of bare female flesh threw me for a moment-not only because a screen full of clapping, naked women will do that to a person, but because my relation to what I was seeing on screen had been unceremoniously destabilized. What was going on here? Was it possible that the women were truly naked-that the Master, established in earlier scenes as a skilled practitioner of mass seduction, had somehow compelled a roomful of his followers to strip mid-song? No, it had to be the sex-obsessed Freddie who was denuding them with his eyes (eyes which, for the majority of the scene, he can barely keep open as he lolls in his wing chair). Or the fantasy might be taking place in the mind of the Master himself, who’s clearly relishing the opportunity to show off his symbolic sexual power to everyone in the room, especially Freddie, who’s already emerged as Master’s pet “guinea pig and protégé.”
Only on a third viewing did it occur to me that the naked singalong might also be read as unfolding in the mind of Peggy Dodd, who’s one of the nude clappers on view, albeit modestly shielded by the arm of her chair. To the extent that there’s any dramatic action in this scene, it unfolds not between Master and the pretty young women he teases and tickles, but between the silent Peggy, seen only in the background of a wide shot that includes her husband and all the other partiers, and Freddie, whom we see only in intermittent medium close-ups, alone in the frame – a disconnected outsider whose spatial relation to the action remains unclear. As the revelry unfolds, Peggy fixes the out-of-frame spot we assume Freddie must occupy with a baleful, indeterminate glare and is herself eventually blocked from view by the bobbing, dancing bodies of the women surrounding her. Is it possible that the vision of Master surrounded by roomful of naked temptresses is a paranoid fantasy on the part of the fiercely protective Peggy (who in the very next scene will assert her sexual authority over her husband in what I can only pray will be this year’s most hostile on-screen handjob)?
25 An excerpt of screenplay dialogue from the prison scene:
FREDDIE
Helen’s house…all those girls walking around, the wives of…I want to fuck all of them.
MASTER
Sex is not an aberration. Never has been. So what’s wrong?
FREDDIE
I want to fuck ‘em all. I want to stick it in every one of them.
HELEN SULLIVAN
You’ve changed the processing-platform question. Now it says, “Can you imagine…?”
THE MASTER
Yes.
HELEN
If our previous method was to induce memory by asking, “Can you recall,” doesn’t it then change everything if now we say, “Can you imagine?”
THE MASTER
We are invoking a new, wider range to account for the new data. “Can you imagine,” allows for a more creative pathway to the mind. More open.
HELEN
But if the new…
THE MASTER
What do you want?!
HELEN looks like she’s about to burst into tears at this.
THE MASTER
Helen. This is the new work.
27 There are many examples of this, but I pick the one most conveniently at hand, a good and recently read piece by John Seabrook, “Factory Girls”, on K-Pop bands:
Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.
“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”
I had arranged to meet Toth because somewhere between my tenth viewing of the Girls’ video “Mr. Taxi” and my twentieth click on “Gee” it occurred to me that I might not know how much I loved these girls, either. “Listen, boy,” Tiffany coos at the outset of “Gee.” “It’s my first love story.” And then she tilts her head to the side and flashes her eye smile—the precise crinkle in the outer corner that texts her love straight 2U.
Later in the story, the writer meets Tiffany herself:
From out in the arena came a long, low wailing sound—the screams of the fans, dying for the idols to appear.
“O.K., we have to go,” the S.M. [S.M. Entertainment, the music agency of Girls’ Generation] man said.
But I did have one personal question for Tiffany. “Your eye smile: did you learn that or is it natural?”
“No,” Tiffany replied, giggling. “My dad smiles this way.” She eye-smiled me from two feet away: a jolt of pure cultural technology.
After this meeting, he sees them in performance:
I was watching the show from beside the stage when the nine members of Girls’ Generation came out, in bluejeans and white T-shirts, to perform “Gee.” The whole place shouted the hook: “Geegeegeegeebabybaby.” Whenever a song ended, the Girls deployed around the stage. At one point, Sooyoung came to where I was standing and began frantically winking and waving her way through the crowd, wearing a blissful smile and shaking her glossy hair. She was no longer the cold idol I had encountered in the press room but a super cheerleader. It was just as Jon Toth had said it would be: the Girls had come to see us.
28 For those curious, the cartoon Freddie is watching is “Casper and the Deep Boo Sea”, which has the very fitting theme, for a movie about a deeply lonely man, of a very lonely ghost seeking out friends.
29 In the original script, the choice of song also serves as a bookend to the film’s opening, where Freddie leaves the military hospital without permission, leaving behind a note:
HALLWAY, DOCTOR’S OFFICE
Freddie places a note on the door of the Doctor. He walks away, CAMERA sees the note, it reads:
“I’VE GONE TO CHINA. SEE YOU AGAIN SOMETIME. THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP.”
30 One can perhaps take a little lexical game a little too far, and say that the names of these characters imply they’ll end up together. Winn is short for Winnie. Anderson is a fan of Kubrick, so he no doubt knows the dialogue in The Shining, where Shelly Duvall’s character is asked, are you a Winnie or a Freddie, because her name, Winifred, is a union of both.
(The Master images copyright The Weinstein Company; Hard Eight images copyright The Samuel Goldwyn Company and associated producers.)
(SPOILERS: what follows gives away plot details of Django, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Death Proof, Blade Runner, and The 25th Hour.)
A movie about slavery, and business transactions gone awry. It’s a movie I avoided seeing for a while because I expected my reaction to be closest to Roxane Gay’s “Surviving ‘Django’”. I think Quentin Tarantino sometimes plays with images as if they have no context, thinking that they can be placed anywhere. This is both connected with, and apart, from his dealing in history’s tragedies. When Kill Bill opens with the Bride covered in blood, begging for the life of herself and her child, I think it is too potent, too wrenching for a simple revenge film, and this suffering overwhelms it. What might give us emotional distance in a gallo with such a scene – the incompetence of the crew, the poor ability of the actress – are absent here with an excellent actress and a skilled director able to bring out the best of his collaborators. The scene is the opening of a simple tale of vengeance, when it calls for something deeper, along the lines of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War. This same issue is in effect in Inglourious Basterds where the transformation of an extermination into a winnable fight is, I think, an obscenity.
That this doesn’t take place in Django is due to a difference in approach taken from Basterds and the Kill Bill movies. We are constantly given devices which distance the movie from the real, that we are in a fantastic, constructed place. When the slaves march during the opening, there is a series of quick, attention-calling zooms. But more importantly, the forest they march through, with its icicle thick trees and where the lantern light the only gleam in the shot, suggest a fairy tale forest – we do not truly feel the cold these men suffer1. When Schultz is killed, his body flies across the room; when Lara Lee is killed, it’s as if she’s yanked from the stage by the old burlesque cane. What reality is let into the shootout scenes, is solely for the movie’s own benefit – such as Django having to move from body to body while under fire to retrieve guns, because these six shooters actually do carry only six bullets. The movie is often shot like a civil war-era ambrotype photo, black and white photos where one color tint was added by hand. Often there seems to be no color at all in the frame, except for the golden light of flame or beer. Before Candieland explodes, Broomhilda (I’m unsure if she gets the cartoon witch’s name or the Norse myth name, so I give her the witch’s name listed in the IMDB) puts her fingers to her ears to keep out the sound, the kind of gesture you associate with cartoons and broad comedies. The movie ends in the fairy tale tone with which it began, Django and Broomhilda lit with moonly light, and the verdant green behind them. Where Basterds is a simple, obvious lie, Django is deliberately a myth, a myth possibly kept hidden by plantation owners and their successors2.
The approach makes the movie feel like something out of an alternative history, where Reconstruction may have taken place a little differently, a great racial inequality did not persist, and slavery ended up an out in the open topic, finally becoming fodder, just like World War II and everything else, for TV shows, and what we see here are clips from a 1970s show of this alternate universe, “The Bounty Hunters”: two men, one a former slave, encounter various adventures in the pre-Civil War south as they search for the freed man’s captive wife. The final episode culminates in the striking events of such series finales: the death of the german bounty hunter and the rescue of the enchained woman. Abuse of slavery’s most powerful images is avoided by treating them as things that are already out in the open, and do not need explicit reference. The most upsetting sequence, for me, is when D’Artagnan is torn apart by the dogs: though Tarantino has a reputation for dwelling on violence, when the event takes place, we are only given a brief shot, at an overhead distance, and then another from D’Artagnan’s perspective. The rest is entirely the reactions of the trackers, Schultz, and the slaves to this horror, with the explicit moments of the event only seen in the microsecond memories of Schultz at the plantation. We are similarly given only the briefest shots of Broomhilda emerging from the hot box – as if we live in a world where a hot box is as well known as a gas chamber, and only a passing reference is needed. This approach avoids the double quality of such images, where a sequence of a man torn apart by dogs ostensibly has been designed to repel us, when it may also end up sating our appetite for torture. It also avoids a repulsive self-serving piety that takes place when showing such things, explicitly: this movie is good, its makers are good people, because they have shown such horrors unembellished.
This is a deliberate approach, not arbitrary, and it works for much of the movie, but not all. There are some things that are too strong, that the movie cannot contain, and demand a different movie, just as the opening of Kill Bill summons a different slant. Only one of these is an image, and it’s of Broomhilda branded as a runaway. It is brief, and yet it is still too long, and shot too close. The pain is too great, the submission too much, and it requires the movie to somehow explore this, and it does not. The other times when Django dives into too deep waters has nothing to do with explicit horror, but a limiting of life that cannot simply be touched on, then walked away from, but this is what happens: it does walk away. There is Django stumbling over the simple english of the “Wanted” poster, and there is pliant Bettina unable to understand, as if this were magic or anti-gravity, what a free black man is. In this alternate universe, such issues may have been explored in-depth, and a passing reference is sufficient, but that universe is not our own.
The serious flaw of Django has to do with its character approach, and this is both related and unrelated to its dealings with its historical subject. E.M. Forster distinguished between round and flat characters, with round characters demonstrating gradual change throughout the course of a story, while those that are flat appearing entirely unchanged, demonstrating the same attitude throughout the story. Michael Corleone is a round character: he moves steadily and quietly from the cheerful boy, outside his father’s business, to the cold-souled tactician of the first movie’s end and its sequel. Sitcom characters are flat: Homer will always be stupid, Marge practical, Lisa bookish, and Bart a juvie. Deviations from this type are temporary or for comic effect: Homer will have a life-changing experience where he ceases to be so insensitive to others, but by the next episode he has returned to being the same man. The roles of Pulp Fiction – kingpin, moll, boxer, hitmen – stay immutably the same; Jules Winfield may have a crisis of conscience, but his overall character remains indistinguishable from what it was before. It is a change that compels his exit from the movie, just as an abrupt change in a sitcom character compels their exit: the Fonz falls in love and decides to finally get married.
That Tarantino’s characters are flat often goes unnoticed, because their dialogue is so colorful3. Where, however, what is said, and unsaid, by a character in another movie or book might open itself up to a large forking path of possibilities – Tarantino’s writing is usually a very ornate and intricate expression of a simple idea. This gold watch is of great value to your family, and much was done to preserve it. If you don’t throw the fight, we will kill you. I say you have african ancestry, and this upsets you. This is not unique to Tarantino, and it is not an indictment of him. I quote at length from Orwell describing a similar gift on the part of Dickens (from “Charles Dickens”):
Dickens is a writer who can be imitated, up to a certain point. In genuinely popular literature – for instance, the Elephant and Castle version of Sweeny Todd – he has been plagiarized quite shamelessly. What has been imitated, however, is simply a tradition that Dickens himself took from earlier novelists and developed, the cult of ‘character’, i.e. eccentricity. The thing that cannot be imitated is his fertility of invention, which is invention not so much of characters, still less of ‘situations’, as of turns of phrase and concrete details. The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens’s writing is the unnecessary detail. Here is an example of what I mean. The story given below is not particularly funny, but there is one phrase in it that is as individual as a fingerprint. Mr. Jack Hopkins, at Bob Sawyer’s party, is telling the story of the child who swallowed its sister’s necklace:
Next day, child swallowed two beads; the day after that, he treated himself to three, and so on, till in a week’s time he had got through the necklace – five-and-twenty beads in all. The sister, who was an industrious girl and seldom treated herself to a bit of finery, cried her eyes out at the loss of the necklace; looked high and low for it; but I needn’t say, didn’t find it. A few days afterwards, the family were at dinner – baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it – the child, who wasn’t hungry, was playing about the room, when suddenly there was the devil of a noise, like a small hailstorm. ‘Don’t do that, my boy’, says the father. ‘I ain’t a-doin’ nothing’, said the child. ‘Well, don’t do it again’, said the father. There was a short silence, and then the noise began again, worse than ever. ‘If you don’t mind what I say, my boy’, said the father, ‘you’ll find yourself in bed, in something less than a pig’s whisper.’ He gave the child a shake to make him obedient, and such a rattling ensued as nobody ever heard before. ‘Why dam’ me, it’s in the child’, said the father; ‘he’s got the croup in the wrong place!’ ‘No, I haven’t, father’, said the child, beginning to cry, ‘it’s the necklace; I swallowed it, father.’ The father caught the child up, and ran with him to the hospital, the beads in the boy’s stomach rattling all the way with the jolting; and the people looking up in the air, and down in the cellars, to see where the unusual sound came from. ‘He’s in the hospital now’, said Jack Hopkins, ‘and he makes such a devil of a noise when he walks about, that they’re obliged to muffle him in a watchman’s coat, for fear he should wake the patients.’
As a whole, this story might come out of any nineteenth-century comic paper. But the unmistakable Dickens touch, the thing that nobody else would have thought of, is the baked shoulder of mutton and potatoes under it. How does this advance the story? The answer is that it doesn’t. It is something totally unnecessary, a florid little squiggle on the edge of the page; only, it is by just these squiggles that the special Dickens atmosphere is created.
That a character is flat does not suggest a limit in talent or a lower standard of writing. In “Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction: A Wax Museum with a Pulse”, I tried to explain why such flat types are necessary for the movie to work, and that the problem with its many imitators is they didn’t note the importance of this detail. Many of the humorous characters of Shakespeare and Dickens are flat. The comedy of “The Simpsons” requires flat types, and this does not take away from it being a fiendishly well-written show. The only qualifier is that such flat types work effectively, but only in certain contexts, and when they are placed in a lengthy scene where they are the focus, where, whatever their witty dialogue, they remain unchanging, they become dull in the same conditions that Hamlet or Michael Corleone are fascinating. There is nothing unknown about flat types, they always act for the same reason, and they give explicit statement for why they act the way they do. It should be noted that a round character does not need to belong to a conventional drama, and it does not require us to know much of them in biographic detail; Blade Runner is a science fiction thriller whose title character is an enigma throughout. Yet when he crushes the origami in his hand at the end and we hear a line from his nemesis, Gaff, we must guess at what this man is thinking.
Tarantino avoided the flaws of flat characters two ways early in his career. The first was by having them share the movie with so many others, that their screen time was shortened. Some of his best writing comes from characters who are on so briefly, we don’t even see their flatness, whether it’s the single monologue scene given over to Captain Koons, or the dialogue between Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken) and Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper) – Worley has two scenes, Coccotti has one. The second solution was to feature characters for which the audience has a distanced attitude, which creates tension over their fate. Different characters could have different ends in Fiction, with Mia dying, or Jules getting killed and Vincent leaving the profession, without the movie becoming a tragedy. The men and women of Fiction could well be the villains in another movie. In Reservoir, there is only one character who is something close to a hero and that’s the undercover cop. That he has this heroic quality is only revealed to us in the middle of the film, and it is almost immediately qualified by his having shot a civilian point blank during the robbery aftermath. Even if Mr. Orange were to survive, he would still have killed that woman and felt as if he betrayed Mr. White – the story’s arc would remain tragic, and life would be little consolation.
All this changes from Jackie Brown on. Jackie is clearly the hero, and Ordell Robie is the villain. If she doesn’t win, the story is a tragedy. It is also Tarantino’s first and only piece of writing where we see round types. Jackie grows in confidence from the beginning of the movie to its end, while Ordell starts out calm and descends into exasperated anger as his failed schemes pile up. It is a movie where a character’s motives remain unknown: we’re given no explicit reason as to why Jackie doesn’t end up with Max Cherry at the end, and are left to our own best guesses. After this, we return to flat types, but with clear heroes as in Jackie. The bride must win against Bill, just as Jackie must win against Ordell; the first set of women can die in Death Proof, but the second set must win; the military unit must succeed in their mission against the Nazis in Basterds and, impossibly, they do; Django must save Broomhilda. If these heroes don’t win, their movies must be told as tragedies, of heroes pursuing a noble cause, and failing. That the characters are flat doesn’t matter as much in Kill Bill, because so much of the movie is devoted to kinetic action – most action movies contain flat types, and must have flat types, and that doesn’t keep them from being memorably written, the best examples perhaps John McClane and Hans Gruber. It’s an issue with Death Proof where the women need to be distinct, individual, with parts unknown – these qualities would give their conversations on sex and relationships a sense of revealed intimacy, rather than banal explicitness. It’s a problem with Basterds where the heroes are their missions alone, and nothing else. For instance, we never feel the impact of Aldo Raines’ scar from a hangman’s rope in anything he does or says. This near death mark feels as incidental as the color of the hands of a timepiece he might wear. The shortcomings of flat characters might be an even greater issue in Django, maybe best evidenced by the lengthy Candieland dinner scene.
The conversation between the four men – Django, Schultz, Calvin, Stephen – properly has a slow rhythm, and properly feels endless. Tarantino has compared the quest for Broomhilda to the journey up the river in Apocalypse Now, and this house has the feel of the lost plantation in the Redux version of the film, a place somehow entirely outside of time and civilization itself. There’s the brilliant, paradoxical detail of Lara Lee as a woman beyond a certain age, whose dress and manner are still that of a girl at her first cotillion. The problem is not the setting, but the instruments: the four men are almost entirely static. Django is the angry man who wants his wife back. Schultz the helpful wit. Calvin the evil slave owner. Stephen, his cruel servant. There is nothing these men can expose in themselves, and there is no gradation in their character, whereby they shift from one place to another. When Kareem Abdul-Jabar calls the movie a B picture, rather than A picture (“Django is wonderful. But it shouldn’t be up for best picture.”), this, I think it is this that he’s getting at. Though they have more dialogue, they exist only along the same polarities as in Game of Death: Django is on a righteous quest, and Calvin is the Fifth floor guardian, the obstacle to his goal.
There are many ways in which the dynamic between the four could be made more interesting by using rounder characters, and I give one, not as a solution, but as a contrasting example of available possibilities. We re-make Calvin a little as a man with a demeanor that is only outwardly slow. He defers to the far greater intelligence of Schultz. The doctor, while clever, is a little too self-confident, and thinks Calvin a fool from whom he can get Broomhilda easily, once he buys Eskimo Joe. As the dinner progresses, it becomes more and more clear that Calvin is much smarter than he lets on, that he knows what these two men want, and may even have a trap ready for them. Django picks this up before Schultz does, and he hates Schultz for it: hates the doctor for being so self-confident, and hates that he has to rely on this man for help. Calvin reveals that, thanks to helpful sources, he has known who these men were and what they wanted before they even met. Though no guns are drawn, Schultz and Django realize they are in mortal danger. Calvin then gives an incredibly eloquent speech on enlightenment values and christian charity, a speech that might sound uncannily, and not coincidentally, like something out of the writings of Thomas Jefferson – we expect its conclusion to be his announcement of the emancipation of all his slaves. But, no: he makes chillingly clear that his vision of enlightenment includes only the race of himself and Schultz, and anyone of african descent be damned. At this moment, Schultz himself reveals that he has known before this lengthy, deceptive oratory how to elude Calvin’s trap, and he then explains to the plantation owner how. Django is relieved, grateful for his friend’s resourcefulness, yet angry still, at this man and himself, for his dependence on him, a dependence necessitated entirely by the dangerous condition of an ex-slave setting foot on the Candieland plantation. After this, we might return to the movie’s arc: the purchase of Broomhilda, the bloodbath, and the resolution.
The changes here are small: the only alteration is to give these men the possibility of mystery, of something hidden that we all possess. I make this example not out of arrogance, but to suggest a possibility of the balance shifting in a way that doesn’t take place in the scene as is. That Calvin should be able to briefly outsmart the bounty hunters, and that he should give his speech of narrow charity, does not exculpate slaveowners, but only brings it closer to our world, where the pro-slavery and pro-segregationist faction has often shown a frighteningly cleverness, and where the writings of Thomas Jefferson make an eloquent and thorough case for liberty, while side by side his other writings give unwavering support to the manacling of a good portion of humanity. By making these characters round in this way, Calvin Candie becomes more than a simple villain, but that does not necessarily make him any less a villain – however, the primary objective is aesthetic. Where now the dinner conversation is a straight river towards which we move to the shoot-out, it now becomes a more winding, twisty place where the boat comes close to toppling over, before it finally does fall off the edge when guns are drawn.
I make mention of possible changes to three of the quartet, while leaving Stephen out for an obvious reason: though he is as flat a character as the others, there is something of an enigmatic depth to him as well4. That he is easily the most interesting man in the film is not just a tribute to the formidable gifts of the actor playing him, but that this character has a quality the others lack. He is a man who has found a freedom, power, and dignity as Candie’s lieutenant, the executor of his edicts and the power behind the throne. The very moment Stephen sees Django, his face twists up into a snarl: he hates this man for having attained these same things without needing to kowtow or betray anyone. Though Schultz is intended to be our proxy, an enlightened man of our times with no first-hand knowledge of slavery5, it is this resentment, though expressed by a caricature, that more closely resembles ignoble human feeling than anything in the movie, our anger at those akin to us who have achieved what we fought so hard for, and seemingly without the moral compromises we have had to make. When Stephen goes through the list of similes of how much he missed his master, and reaches “I miss you, like I misses a rock…in my shoe”, there is the uncertainty of whether he likes this man at all, or in fact despises him for being so stupid and so powerful at once. Yet when Calvin dies, Stephen openly wails, though there are no white people alive to appreciate his keening. Perhaps he truly feels grief for this man, or maybe he is an onion of deception, where underneath every lie is another lie. Before his death, he lets his cane fall, and he stands without difficulty – though even when alone in his first scene, unobserved by anyone, he shuffles bent over, as if he effected feints and masks not for others, but because he felt naked without them. These are mysteries without easy explanation, and none of the other characters have anything akin.
This is why I think it has been a mistake for critics to say that Schultz is simply a re-write of Christoph Schultz’s Hans Landa. It is Stephen who is the proper reprise of the Landa character, and just as Stephen’s ambiguity makes him more interesting than anyone else, such was the same with Landa. Here was a man of substantial intellectual ability, extraordinary charm, and great sympathy for others. His interrogations showed such understanding of the subject that it seemed impossible that they would move towards a malign intent, but so they moved. Just as Stephen has his unknowns, the unknown for Landa was how such a figure, who has all the qualities one expects in the enlightened resistance hero, is an ardent nazi. The partial answer, given at the film’s end, is that he is nothing of the kind: he is a simple opportunist, who will adopt any ideology which is to his benefit. That Schultz lacks this quality of Landa is to the detriment of that character, and the movie. Schultz says his lines with all sorts of zigzags and pauses, but they are fundamentally dull because there is nothing to be revealed. Questions such as how a man might move from dentistry to ace marksmanship go unanswered, and though in a rounder character their answer might be an intriguing revelation, or a haunting riddle, they are of no interest here: this is a flat man, a kindly, well educated gunman from the movie’s beginning to his end.
That Stephen is easily the smartest man on Candieland, a man without whom the whole plantation would fall apart is no doubt part of a larger critique of the entire plantation society. The southern towns are mud filled eyesores, while the estates are degenerate, but lush palaces; the moral decay only makes the plantation soil more fertile. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes was something of an idiot savant, brilliant at airplanes and publicity, inept at everything else. DiCaprio’s Calvin Candie is also an idiot savant, but without the savant part; a good-for-nothing who goes for bunko phrenology scholarship and a francophile who doesn’t speak a word of french. This pre-confederate society is a dysfunctional place where everyone is either slave, poor trash, or one of the fools fortunate to be born to the right place, as Candie’s lawyer testifies: “Calvin’s father and I were about eleven when we went to boarding school together. Calvin’s father’s father put me through law school. One can almost say that I was raised to be Calvin’s lawyer.”
The first meet between the bounty hunters and the slave owners is in the Julius Caesar room in the Cleopatra club. Candie’s mistress is named Sheba, after the well-known queen of the extinct kingdom. Corrupt, declining empires shadow this slave empire which will soon end. When one of Jerry Goldsmith’s best themes, “Nicaragua” plays over the approach to Candieland, this is not arbitrary magpying by the director; it was Nicaragua that the southern states hoped to conquer, in order to extend the life of the slave empire by extending its reach6. It is the legacy of the plantation system that is the root cause of the long-term inequality of latin america, and it is the legacy of the plantation system in the south which is the root cause of its repellent inequality as well. The landowner class of many of these countries, including Nicaragua, backed military juntas who could guarantee their business interests, and the movie Under Fire, the source of Goldsmith’s theme, is about the fall of Antonio Somoza, the man who received substantial U.S. aid as military dictator of the country for which Goldsmith’s theme is named.
As said, that the smartest man on the Candieland estate, whose non-slave elite is made up of idiot rich and street trash, is a black slave, and that the estate is almost entirely run by this man, is intended as scathing satire. I do not think the satire was made with any hidden malign message, but if we treat this satire in analogy fashion to another historical tragedy, I think we see one major problem with it. Imagine, as a thought experiment, Django Unchained re-made and set instead in World War II europe. Two men, one jewish, the other christian, travel through the continent incognito, searching for the jewish man’s wife, who is trapped in one of the many concentration camps. The jew is portrayed as a man indifferent to the condition of all the jews in these camps; his quest begins and ends with his wife, that’s all. When they finally find the death camp in which his wife is located, they find it staffed by incompetent and stupid germans. The only reason why this camp is able to keep functioning in any way is through the supervision of a brilliant jew turncoat. It is the christian, and not the jew, who is finally so outraged by the camp conditions that he ends up being killed after shooting the ostensible camp commander. The camp’s destruction is incidental to the rescue of the hero’s wife, and the movie ends with the killing of the chief villain, the jew who was actually running the camp the whole time. The problem, apparently, is not german nationalism, or german ideology, but jews having no sense of community or regard for each other.
This lack of any sense of community or common plight which is Django‘s other important flaw. Tarantino is often labeled, pejoratively or not, as a hipster director, with little thought given to the definition and tradition of the word “hipster”. John Leland’s flawed but valuable Hip: The History7 makes a strong attempt at finding such defining traits, some of which we can find in Tarantino’s movies. One central idea is ambiguity: that something said might be both one thing and another, or neither. He cites the old school use of “bad”, where the word might carry its traditional connotation, or be a compliment, all based on how it’s said. The lyrics of Bob Dylan carry this same mystery. So does the music of Kind of Blue, where the feeling is keen, yet difficult to define: certainly not happy, but not quite melancholy either.
There is also another kind of ambiguity, though I think Leland misunderstands it, where music or clothing may or may not be a put-on: are you wearing this with sincerity, irony, or both? The moment such fashion loses this quality, it ceases to be fashionable. When Leland writes of the benighted era of the trucker hat – an era I don’t remember except for the fact that, as always, Ashton Kutchner was somehow to blame – he tries to find some anthropological basis for this trend, when it’s entirely unnecessary. Such fashion, in the proper context, asks the question, am I putting you on? This is similar to the pose where stylish gear surrounds a t-shirt of an out-of-fashion icon, Michael Jackson a few years before his death, Madonna a few years from now. Is your t-shirt sincere or ironic? If the answer is obviously and immediately one or the other, then the effect doesn’t work.
The ambiguity of Tarantino’s work begins in one place and ends in another, with Jackie Brown the dividing line. Reservoir and Fiction are ambiguous the way detective fiction and hard-boiled stories (Fiction‘s very title a hat-tip to this ancestry) are ambiguous: what should our attitude be towards characters who are kept at a distance, outside the range of traditional sympathy?
This section from Hip, on detective fiction, captures the disconnect well:
The books served up a masculine swinger in action. Equally comfortable with lowlifes or swells, he was detached from both. In the high art of the period, modernism cracked the continuity of narrative. Pulp writers applied this disjunction to sex and violence, rendering them as discontinuous facts, without foreplay or afterglow. The action assumed a slapstick illogic:
I giggled and socked him. I laid the coil spring on the side of his head and he stumbled forward. I followed him down to his knees. I hit him twice more. He made a moaning sound. I took the sap out of his limp hand. He whined. I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face. While he was still groaning I knocked him cold with the sap.
In this passage, from Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940), the violence is all in the syllables, short and fast, but the rub lies in Chandler’s small wisecrack: He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face. Even in the midst of this pounding, the narrator distances himself from the violence by converting it to attitude and performance. Violence, then, becomes a kind of language, with its own humor and point of view. Through this device action becomes consciousness.
Tarantino’s later movies lose this ambiguity when they have clearly defined heroes and villains. We might find Stephen and Hans the most fascinating, most quotable characters of their respective movies, but if they win, those same movies are now tragedies. Our attitudes towards them are fixed because of the complicity of these men in unquestionable suffering. The ambiguity in Tarantino’s later work instead becomes that of someone wearing an outré piece of clothing: am I putting you on, or aren’t I? Should I treat the violence in Kill Bill as sickeningly real, or comic exaggeration? Are Basterds and Django serious attempts to grapple with historic tragedies, or are they callous jokes? There is evidence for both sides, and again, if there weren’t both such possibilities, the ambiguity wouldn’t be there.
Django‘s seeming indifference to a greater good lies with another quality of hip which Leland pinpoints. If the thesis of the good citizen is “to subordinate the self to the doctrine of the community, to conform to the values of the charter”, the hip are its anti-thesis. Those who Leland cites as belonging to this antithetical group – jazz musicians and Beat writers, among others – were frequently in this position of exile because of their race and sexual orientation. Their work did not concern the larger community, because they had been exiled from the larger community. Their explorations are often inward, rather than outward, though not without larger purpose – by simply establishing these depths, by creating work that contained qualities undefined and unknown, they made clear that, however they were seen, they were men and women as substantial as those who had exiled them. This is the crux of Django’s problem, because this is a movie where its lead carries no such ambiguities, and more importantly, he has seemingly no interest in his own community, the exile community of which he is one of the exiles.
Neither problem is tied to the race of the man, both traits are inherent in Tarantino’s work, and only problematic in the context of this historical story. His characters, as said before, are often flat. The Nelson George critique of the quality of roles for top name black actors, “Still Too Good, Too Bad or Invisible”, misses this point; George writes, “Mr. Foxx’s Django is undeterred and implacable in search of his lost wife. But he is not a true human being. Like most action movie heroes he is more an idea of a character, one with no detectable flaws who’s enjoyable to root for.” This accurately describes the flatness of Django, without noting that this flatness exists in the rest of the cast, and the casts of most of Tarantino’s other movies – though these characters might be different, more loquacious than Django, they are ultimately as static, as unreal as he is.
That there is a lack of kindred feeling among people is to be expected in Fiction and Reservoir, which deal almost entirely with criminal society. That Kill Bill involves a woman fighting almost entirely alone, without any allies, is traditional to the revenge genre. Basterds, despite the subject matter, is one where the larger society of jews is irrelevant; if Raines’ unit were made up of people, whatever their race, who had lost family members to the Hitler war machine and were trying to extract vengeance, it’s the same movie. If Shoshanna is a christian woman whose parents were killed by the Reich because of their opposition to the regime, and she takes vengeance for this act, we have the same movie. The end of the holocaust as a result of Hitler’s death is never brought up, and none of the apaches ever mention it. Both sets of warriors, Shoshanna and Raines’ unit, are devoted to their deadly missions, rather than the plight of any larger community. Jackie, Tarantino’s only movie with round characters, breaks this trend: Max and Jackie shouldn’t trust and help each other out, but they do. This indifference to any larger community only becomes starkly obvious, and a problem, when we reach Django: this is a hero who wants to rescue his wife, and doesn’t seem to care about any other slave – barely even speaks to other slaves. That Candieland slaves are ultimately freed through his actions is incidental to his quest.
This aversion to fellow feeling provides the movie one of its most provocative moments. Schultz and Django go in character to meet with Candie, as a fight fan and a black slaver. The difficulties of these men playing these roles is not equal, because the true feelings that Django has to submerge in order to play his role are far greater than what Schultz has to hide. Django gives himself away almost immediately during the mandingo fight, when he sits at the bar, looking away from the violence, burning with anger. The barman sees him, and knows right away the man’s front is false: no black slaver would be so upset by this spectacle. Taking on this role for Django means being hated in a way Schultz isn’t, not just by the estate hands, but by the marching slaves as well. “100 Black Coffins” sounds in Django’s head as he looks at the Candieland elite, but it sounds in the slaves’ heads as well, as they look on this one eyed charlie. The disturbing apex of this is when Schultz offers to buy D’Artagnan, so that he isn’t torn apart by dogs, and Django stops him from doing so. There is a practical reason to do so, but I also read an anger, which, if it was allowed to play out between the two men, would have made for a more interesting relationship. When Django stops Schultz, one can imagine him thinking: if I have to put up with looking at these atrocities, and doing nothing, I’m going to force you to do the same. I won’t allow you any self-serving sentimentality that in saving this man’s life, others like him won’t die every day. The movie avoids any cheap schmaltz in this moment, but also implies that such a moment could only be cheap schmaltz. It avoids life-saving benevolence as well.
That this problem is not specific to its historical context – if the military unit of Basterds came across jews on the verge of deportation and did nothing for them, it’s the same problem – doesn’t make it any less problematic. That this lack of selflessness is wholly false makes the issue even worse: former slaves who had only briefly held freedom gave their lives as soldiers in order that the slave empire be defeated. This might be an apt place to note that the point at the opposite end of hipster ambiguities is the pious, the sincere, the message movie. These are always explicit in their statement, always asking for a better world, and always of noble intent. Tarantino’s films are antithetical to this: that they never show any larger community feeling isn’t simply skepticism of false pieties, but skepticism of all pieties. The closest we get to earnest, benevolent people in his movies are in their inverse: Lance and Jody, the hippie dealers, who are an evil mirror of the achingly sincere, well meaning archetype. They do not want to help Vincent when Mia is dying, Lance sells heroin to Vincent – not the gentler ecstasies of weed or hallucinogens – and when questioned on his quality, he asks, “do I look like a nigger?” The conflict between Tarantino and Spike Lee is often presented in racial terms, when these are its actual polarities. Do the Right Thing is about the righteous thing to be done, with the characters in disagreement over what that thing is. The protagonist of The 25th Hour is given the possibility of salvation, and the possibilities of this saved life are an explicit reference to The Last Temptation of Christ: if he makes a break for it, this man must lead a benevolent life and help others. The respective critiques of the work of both men reflects this divide: the knock against Tarantino is that his movies devolve towards nihilism, that his characters don’t care about anything except themselves and their immediates. The knock against Lee is that his films have become didactic sermons.
Any sense of greater fellowship in Django is on the part of Schultz, and it always strikes me as false. This man, who has gone from dentistry to assassination for financial reasons, is moved to help Django because his quest resembles that of Siegried’s. He is suddenly so upset over the condition of slaves as to lose his life over it – this man who travels throughout the south has never before come across the reapings of its bloody institution. The arbitrariness of both moments, both in the service of the larger necessity of the plot, are what we might associate with the writing of an old school TV series. We might again imagine “The Bounty Hunters” where episode by episode, this pair have adventures throughout the pre-Civil War south. That their pairing up is hokey and forced is irrelevant, because the start of the relationship in episode one is never referred to again, and has no bearing on the later episodes. The state of these characters is the same in episode two, as it is for episode seventeen, and they make no mention to the conditions that brought about their initial pairing. That the doctor, in the series finale, suddenly gets upset about slavery is arbitrary as well, but to be expected in such a drama where what takes place in one episode seems to have nothing to do with what happens before or after in the drama.
The most obvious motivation for the bonding of these two men is not myth, not benevolence, but economics. Django is first necessary to get the bounties for the Brittle brothers, and he then becomes extraordinarily helpful in obtaining other bounties through his expert marksmanship. We never see acceptance of Django as a citizen; we see acceptance of him as a businessman, when he is treated as any other man, without reference to his race, in the scene where they bring in the corpses of the Wilson-Lao gang. Django and Schultz are not outlaws, but lawful capitalists. The slave traders deal in life, this pair deals in death. That there is something vile in the trade they engage in is something the movie acknowledges, but critics seem to have ignored. If you are declared a criminal, by anyone or any company whatsoever, these men are given license to kill you without trial or evidence. The squalor of their trade is brought up by Django, and Scultz’s argument is two parts. The weakest is tautological: if the handbill says you are guilty of the crime, then you are guilty of the crime and we can kill you. The second, and strongest part is financial: this will get us the money to buy your wife.
SCHULTZ
Let’s take out Smitty Bacall’s handbill.
SCHULTZ does just that, unfolds it, and gives it over to DJANGO.
SCHULTZ
Read it aloud. Consider that today’s lesson.
DJANGO
Wanted. Dead. Or alive. Smitty Bacall and the Smitty Bacall…gang. For murder and stagecoach…robbery. Seven zero zero zero…
SCHULTZ
Seven thousand.
DJANGO
Seven thousand dollars. For Smitty Bacall…one thousand dollars for each of his gang…members. Known members of the Smitty Bacall gang are as follows: Dandy Michaels, Gerald Nash, and…
SCHULTZ
Crazy Craig Koons.
SCHULTZ emphatically stabs the handbill with his finger.
SCHULTZ
That is who Smitty Bacall is. If Smitty Bacall had wanted to start a farm at twenty two, they never would have printed that. But Smitty Bacall wanted to rob stagecoaches, and he didn’t mind killing people to do it. You want to save your wife, doing what I do…this is what I do. I kill people and sell their corpses for cash. This corpse is worth seven thousand dollars. Now quit being a pussy, and shoot him.
DJANGO aims at the man steering a plow over fields, and his shot is dead solid perfect. The farmer, no larger than an ant, falls to the ground. His son, at the foot of the plow, rushes over to the dead man, and we can hear him cry “Pa!” even from this great distance.
This trade might be murderous, but it is protected under the law. Just as slavery is legal, and runaway slaves must be returned to their masters, Schultz and Django have full immunity in what they do. This is what allows them to kill a town sheriff in broad daylight, and to kill the whip hands on Big Daddy’s estate. We have one set of capitalists, the death dealers, versus another set, the life dealers, and the movie’s thesis appears to be that slavery hasn’t simply destroyed millions of african lives, but this reliance on human labor has held the south in a premodern stasis, over which the technological skill and vitality of these two men have infinite advantage. The bounty hunters are not simply more moral men because of their opposition to slavery, they are better capitalists.
The businessmen of the movie who preserve slavery do so not just because they hold business sacred, but because slavery ownership enhances their sense of self. Slavery is sale of human property, a business practice that is protected because business is sacrosanct. Yet when the death dealers show up on Big Daddy’s property, engaging in their legal business, they are not protected – because a black man killing whip hands threatens this very sense of self. Though this has been a simple business transaction, just as slavery is such a transaction, Big Daddy tries to stop them, not through economic means, but as leader of a mystic force8, a crowd of torch carrying horsemen, an image that evokes nothing less than the quasi-mystic rituals of the Nuremberg rallies. We cut behind the scenes, and find the men who compose this crowd to be petty, stupid wretches, the show of horror they’re about to put on giving them grandeur to their lives. This here is the cause for the continuance of slavery, not any economic reason. These men have status if others, simply because of their race, live in mortal fear of them. The killings at Big Daddy’s are the first business transaction that goes awry, and the second, of course, is when Broomhilda is sold. The transaction is completed, the papers have been signed, but: Candie insists his hand be shaken. The ownership of men and women is not simply owning of property, it is power over human life. Candie requires deference to this power, and this Schultz cannot show. However, by the very failure of this business transaction, this movie can get made and we get to see it; a movie about slavery, even one directed by Tarantino, would have a deuce of a time getting funds. A Tarantino revenge movie, on the other hand, with a massive shoot-out at its end, is a slightly easier sell. The commercial transaction inside the movie must fail in order that the commercial transaction outside the movie can go ahead.
That these capitalist heroes, Django and Schultz, are a break from the traditional concept of hipsterism, of celebrating people outside society’s structure, outside its economic structures, seems to have gone unnoticed. Tom Carson, a talented writer whose work I sometimes find astonishing and funny, and sometimes repellent, misses this in his review, “Tarantino, Chained”. He focuses on the movie as one more in a series of racial games that Tarantino plays, then brings up as reference point, that he never mentions again, a keystone work: “Despite my teenage fascination with Norman Mailer’s tellingly bonkers midcentury essay, ‘The White Negro,’ I hardly thought I’d end up citing it as a relevant text in connection with any filmmaker’s work in 2012.” Mailer was a man disgusted with the banalities of advertising, capitalism, and contemporary society, so he attempted to find refuge from such things in the primitive, the mystic, the magical, the violent. Such questing did not begin or end with Mailer, and the only problem with an essay like “The White Negro” is that he found such qualities entirely in one race of men and women. He hated the sterile, prepackaged adventure in such things as the Apollo mission, and so he tried to find salvation in african americans, who he thought would counter the rise of the engineer class through, as he saw them, their mystic powers and utter inability in mathematics9.
I raise this not to debate Mailer, but to make clear that Django and Schultz contain none of these elements. They are not mystics. They are not rebels. They are very successful businessmen. The death at a distance, whether by drone or carpet bombing, which Mailer hated, these men deal out. The mystic is the province of Big Daddy’s ante-Klansmen. The religious feeling that animated Nat Turner10, which animated the abolitionists, is entirely absent from this movie, except for Big John, who sermons while he whips. Carson bring up Mailer to give support to his claim that Django is part of Tarantino’s continued fetishization of black americans, then taunts the director for lacking the sand to depict the sexual assault of slave women – as if the miseries of slavery revolved entirely around that. This was not, I believe, cowardice on Tarantino’s part, for I think you can discern two obvious reasons for his approach, an approach that goes directly against Carson’s primary claim. Though black americans may have been first valued, then fetishized, for their physical qualities, this movie takes pains to have Django’s victories connected entirely to skill and his mastery of the technology of the pistol. Django pulls a man down from his horse, whips Little Raj, but never engages in a fistfight. When he walks about the Big Daddy estate, we are shown the disparity between this modern capitalist, and the primitive men of the plantation, in obvious symbols: he is able to see at great distance with a telescope, while Ellis Brittle has an eyepatch. Little Raj is barely able to pull out his gun, while Django is lightning fast. He kills Big Daddy at great distance through the use of a rifle scope. Whatever Django’s innate ability, this is a skill, something obtained through the practice sessions we observe. That it is not some extension of “primitive” virility, is proved by the example of the man who is probably, after Django, the best marksman in the movie: the middle-aged, fussy merchant, Schultz.
The second reason involves the movie’s ending: if the sexual ill treatment of Broomhilda is made explicit, or even brought up, then it makes the movie’s ending impossible, because such abuse would overwhelm the lovers’ kiss. Again, rather than focus on their physical essence, and the physicality of the kiss, we are conveyed the ephemeral float after an eternity apart through silhouette. This image also properly evokes myth: one is sure, without having seen them, that such a shot is there in Casablanca or Gone With the Wind, and these lovers are now placed on the hallowed Olympus too. This consecration into legend is in the movie’s final moment as well. Jesse James, a confederate partisan and indifferent gunman, was somehow promoted into the best gunslinger of the southern states. But there was in fact, another man, unknown up to this time, who could easily outdraw him. “You know what they’re going to call you?” asked his mentor, “The fastest gun in the south.” Django Freeman, who started out as a german myth, has become an american one.
FOOTNOTES
1 A contrasting example in which the true physical aspect of the world is conveyed, and a man truly feels this cold, can be found in William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, as Turner waits in his cell.
Over Jerusalem hung a misty nightfall, over the brown and stagnant river and the woods beyond, where the water oak and cypress merged and faded one into the other, partaking like shadows of the somber wintry dusk. In the houses nearby, lamps and lanterns flickered on in yellow flame and far off there was a sound of clattering china and pots and pans and back doors slamming as people went about fixing supper. Way in the distance in some kitchen I could hear a Negro woman singing-a weary sound full of toil and drudgery yet the voice rich, strong, soaring: I knows moon-rise, I knows star-rise, lay dis body down … Already the dusty fall of snow had disappeared; a rime of frost lay in its place, coating the earth with icy wet pinpricks of dew, crisscrossed by the tracks of squirrels. In chilly promenade two guards with muskets paced round the jail in greatcoats, stamping their feet against the brittle ground. A gust of wind swept through the cell, whistling. I shivered in a spasm of cold and I closed my eyes, listening to the lament of the woman far off, leaning up against the window ledge, half dreaming in a half slumber of mad weariness and longing: As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me …
2 It is this unreality which, I think, prevents the frequently used racial epithet from having anything like its full impact. I quote, in contrast, an excerpt from Hemingway’s “The Killers”, where each use of the word is like a hard, painful tap. The story also serves as a helpful comparison in the establishment of tension through characters who, though their intents are simple – kill or be killed – are rounded enough that there is tension in what might happen next in this short story. George is the owner of the business which two hitmen have taken over, looking for their quarry, a man named Ole Anderson. Al is one of the hitmen, Nick Adams is one of the customers, and Sam is the cook.
“What’s the idea?” George asked.
“None of your damn business,” Al said. “Who’s out in the kitchen?”
“The nigger.”
“What do you mean the nigger?”
“The nigger that cooks.”
“Tell him to come in”
“What’s the idea?”
“Tell him to come in.”
“Where do you think you are?”
“We know damn well where we are,” the man called Max said. “Do we look silly?”
“You talk silly,” Al said to him. “What the hell do you argue with this kid for? Listen,” he said to George, “tell the nigger to come out here.”
“What are you going to do to him?”
“Nothing. Use your head, bright boy. What would we do to a nigger?”
George opened the slit that opened back into the kitchen. “Sam,” he called. “Come in here a minute.”
The door to the kitchen opened and the nigger came in. “What was it?” he asked. The two men at the counter took a look at him.
“All right, nigger. You stand right there,” Al said.
We see the greatest fullness in Sam, after the hitmen leave. He might be dismissed as nothing by these men, but he knows more of the world than any of them, and thinks they are ridiculous naifs for trying to help out any of these hitmen’s targets.
“Listen,” George said to Nick. “You better go see Ole Anderson.”
“All right.”
“You better not have anything to do with it at all,” Sam, the cook, said. “You better stay way out of it.”
“Don’t go if you don’t want to,” George said.
“Mixing up in this ain’t going to get you anywhere,” the cook said. “You stay out of it.”
“I’ll go see him,” Nick said to George. “Where does he live?”
The cook turned away.
“Little boys always know what they want to do,” he said.
3 That Tarantino’s characters are flat is why they seem so referential. Anna Karenina does not signify, or refer to anything else other than Anna Karenina, she is so full and vivid a character. The flatter a character, the more it seems to point to something else, just as a simple graphic of an eye or a skirted figure suggests a symbol representing something else, and a large scale oil painting does not.
Stephen, for instance, may or may not call to mind the title figure of Uncle Ben’s rice:
When Django puts on tinted glasses, he may simply be hiding the anger in his eyes from the Candieland staff, and he also amy be a reference to the photo of civil rights figure Elizabeth Eckford:
The historical context of the photo by Johnny Jenkins can be found here:
4 The only other character who has anything like this is the tracker played by Zoe Bell. Her riddlesome nature is due to a good chunk of the scripted part being cut, so we are left with a mess of contradictary details that make her more mysterious than anyone else on-screen. She has been disfigured in some way, either by wound or disease, so that she must cover up her face; she is the only woman in a crew of rough housing men, suggesting that she is a very tough piece of work; the only close glimpse we’re given shows her going over old photos, which imply that she and Django knew each other as children. The expression on her face after looking at this photo is cryptic, one of the rare times in the film where we can only guess at what is felt by a character.
We are also left to infer the character of another silent role, Sheba, Calvin’s escort, though given the way this role has been constructed as a woman who is a consort, only a consort, and finds value in this relatively elevated position, her expressions and gestures, though always mute, have, I think, a single meaning. When Django arrives at the bar, she moves away from him, and towards the fight: this man is beneath her. After Calvin’s funeral, she is dispatched to prepare coffee, and she gives a poisoned look to the maid she accompanies: again, such a lowly service as making coffee is below her station.
5 Tarantino himself makes this point in an interview on Elvis Mitchell’s radio show / podcast, “The Treatment”.
6 From James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, about William Walker, a former journalist, who maanged to take over the country of Nicaragua, briefly, giving hope that it might serve as a bulwark against attempts to end the slave empire:
In 1854 Walker signed a contract with the rebels in Nicaragua’s current civil war and in May 1855 sailed from San Francisco with the first contingent of fifty-seven men to support this cause. Because Britain was backing the other side and American-British tensions had escalated in recent years, U. S. officials looked the other way when Walker departed. With financial support from [Cornelius Vanderbilt]‘s transit company, Walker’s filibusters and their rebel allies defeated the “Legitimists” and gained control of the government. Walker appointed himself commander in chief of the Nicaraguan army as Americans continued to pour into the country-two thousand by the spring of 1856. President Pierce granted diplomatic recognition to Walker’s government in May.
Although Walker himself and half of his filibusters were southerners, the enterprise thus far did not have a particularly pro-southern flavor. By mid-18 56, however, that was changing. While much of the northern press condemned Walker as a pirate, southern newspapers praised him as engaged in a “noble cause. . . . It is our cause at bottom.” In 1856 the Democratic national convention adopted a plank written by none other than Pierre Soulé [a member of then-President Samuel Pierce's administration] endorsing U. S. “ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico.” Proponents of slavery expansion recognized the opportunities there for plantation agriculture. Indeed, Central America offered even more intriguing possibilities than Cuba, for its sparse mixed-blood population and weak, unstable governments seemed to make it an easy prey. Of course the Central American republics had abolished slavery a generation earlier. But this was all the better, for it would allow southerners to establish slave plantations without competition from local planters. “A barbarous people can never become civilized without the salutary apprenticeship which slavery secured,” declared a New Orleans newspaper that urged southern emigration to Walker’s Nicaragua. “It is the duty and decreed prerogative of the wise to guide and govern the ignorant . . . through slavery, and the sooner civilized men learn their duty and their right the sooner will the real progress of civilization be rescued.”
During 1856 hundreds of would-be planters took up land grants in Nicaragua. In August, Pierre Soulé himself arrived in Walker’s capital and negotiated a loan for him from New Orleans bankers. The “greyeyed man of destiny,” as the press now described Walker, needed this kind of help. His revolution was in trouble. The other Central American countries had formed an alliance to overthrow him. They were backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, whom Walker had angered by siding with an anti-Vanderbilt faction in the Accessory Transit Company. The president of Nicaragua defected to the enemy, whereupon Walker installed himself as president in July 1856. The Pierce administration withdrew its diplomatic recognition. Realizing that southern backing now represented his only hope, Walker decided “to bind the Southern States to Nicaragua as if she were one of themselves,” as he later put it. On September 22, 1856, he revoked Nicaragua’s 1824 emancipation edict and legalized slavery again.
This bold gamble succeeded in winning southern support. “No movement on the earth” was as important to the South as Walker’s, proclaimed one newspaper. “In the name of the white race,” said another, he “now offers Nicaragua to you and your slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the face of the earth.” The commercial convention meeting at Savannah expressed enthusiasm for the “efforts being made to introduce civilization in the States of Central America, and to develop these rich and productive regions by the introduction of slave labor.” Several shiploads of new recruits arrived from New Orleans and San Francisco during the winter of 1856-57 to fight for Walker. But they were not enough. Some of them reached Nicaragua just in time to succumb to a cholera epidemic that ravaged Walker’s army even as the Central American alliance overwhelmed it in battle. On May 1, 1857, Walker surrendered his survivors to a United States naval commander whose ship carried them back to New Orleans. They left behind a thousand Americans dead of disease and combat.
Ed Harris, who played a mercenary in Under Fire, would play the title role in a bio-pic of this man, Walker. It is a surreal movie, somehow taking place both during Walker’s time and the 1980s, when the U.S. made attempts to prop up the contra rebel movement in that country.
7 I am thankful to Leland’s work for his many insights, as well details on Jesse James and Elizabeth Eckford that I have used in this post; I do, however, think one major flaw in Hip is his attempt to find some moral striving in those who have belonged to hip communities and made hip works, when there is no necessity of any such thing, and a moral earnestness may even be an obstacle to the quality deemed hip. I try and imagine someone who fully embodies all the qualities which are contained in Leland’s amorphous concept of hip, and I think of a hypothetical Actress X. She is a figure of the past, because in the present where any information can be found instantaneously, there are no tribes of fringe fashion, or obscure musics – everything is known and available, and nothing is in the shadows. This Actress X is hauntingly beautiful, and this already connotes the amorality of hip, because there is nothing inherently moral or good in beauty. There is always a hint of mischief, and sometimes bored malice, in her face. She is not stupid, and she does not suffer fools. Her most well-known photo is one of her giving a cold look to the camera for interrupting her while halfway through Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Some, uncharmed by this figure, point out that she appears in a number of photos, months and years apart, with the same half-read Dostoevsky, but these claims are in turn questioned – the issue always remains unresolved.
She is without industry or ambition, someone bored with acting but casually great at it, someone outside of the traditional demands of work and money earning. Again, there is nothing moral in this, simply the fortunate circumstance of the elite actor, and this lack of any link to traditional work or work ethic only adds to her pose. A good part of her appeal is that she acts as she will, giving no explanation or justification, and feeling no such need to do so. She acts not simply in a manner that is anti-authourity, but as if authourity doesn’t exist. Again, this places her in the past, when there was such thing as a strong moral scolding center, taken semi-seriously when it lectured public individuals about their private behaviour. She has probably slept with many men, and a few women – but she doesn’t give much mention of it, and it is beneath her to be “naughty” in such an ostentatious manner. Who she has slept with exactly remains unknown – she is always very discrete about this, and other men and women are always bragging about things they haven’t done.
The albums of Prince, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, and Nine Simone are among her favorites, of course; but so too are The Carpenters’ Greatest Hits. She does very good acting in some good to great movies, and she is on the verge of something greater, that exciting, well hyped moment when someone will produce their breakthrough work, when she dies at a tragically youthful age, a few years shy of thirty. Again, there is nothing moral or just in this young death, but it helps her be even closer to hip: she is always on the edge of eclipsing what she once was, of developing into someone else, without ever becoming so. Whether she would actually produce anything like this great work is doubtful, given her bored indifference with anything to do with her career. Any compromises she would have to make with relationships, with work, surrendering to the responsibilities of children, all those are never reached. She is always amorphous, about to form into something new, something unknown. She dies, and forever there is speculation on who she was, and these questions are answered, the answers refuted, and the questions asked again. Though many companies attempt to bid on her image for commercial use, the top grab the photo of her with Dostoevsky, they are all refused, even Apple and their “Think Different” campaign. Actress X remains unknown, Actress X remains untouchable, Actress X remains hip eternal.
8 I refer to this pre-Klan as a “mystic force” as their imagery is a deliberate attempt to evoke the supernatural; the lengthy and ridiculous preparations of the men are intended not for material effect – their hoods, hilariously, make it more difficult to see, reducing this material effect – but to invoke an image that might be associated with the powers of an almost supernatural entity. There is a good deal of evidence for this as a reason for the Klan’s outfits, but I pick the nearest at hand, an interview with David Cunningham, author of Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan, on “Fresh Air”, hosted by Terry Gross, (“‘Klansville, U.S.A.’ Chronicles The Rise And Fall Of The KKK”):
TERRY GROSS
And how did the white sheet, and the white hood get created as both a symbol and as a costume of the Klan, and the covering of the Klan to protect their identity?
DAVID CUNNINGHAM
Well, again there are a lot of stories about where the particular aspects of these symbols came from. The general story, I think, is that the white hood, the masks over the face, were designed to create the sense of a spectre or ghost. In some ways, it was designed to both hide people’s identity, and create these ghastly personas where they could go out at night, under the cover of darkness, often on horseback, and sortof combine these pranks that would sortof move back to then resonant folklore tales, and things like that, ghosts who would drink enormous quantities of water, and all these kinds of supernatural things, but turn it in a way that also be terrorizing. So, the people that they would target with these quote unquote “pranks” were not random certainly, and they were people they really wanted to scare and send a message to.
9 Norman Mailer’s blind devotion to his instincts leads him to places that are sometimes sublime, sometimes ridiculous. He ends up in the latter place, with the strange racial theories of his account of the Apollo lunar landing, Of a Fire on the Moon:
Aquarius [the nickname Mailer gives himself in this book] had never been invited to enter this Black man’s vision, but it was no great mystery the Black believed his people were possessed of a potential genius which was greater than the Whites. Kept in incubation for two millennia, they would be all the more powerful when they prevailed. It was nothing less than a great civilization they were prepared to create. Aquarius could not picture the details of that civilization in the Black professor’s mind, but they had talked enough to know they agreed that this potential greatness of the Black people was not to be found in technology. Whites might need the radio to become tribal but Blacks would have another communion. From the depth of one consciousness they could be ready to speak to the depth of another; by telepathy might they send their word. That was the logic implicit in CPT. If CPT was one of the jokes by which Blacks admitted Whites to the threshold of their view, it was a relief to learn that CPT stood for Colored Peoples Time. When a Black friend said he would arrive at 8 P.M. and came after midnight, there was still logic in his move. He was traveling on CPT. The vibrations he received at 8 P.M. were not sufficiently interesting to make him travel toward you – all that was hurt were the host’s undue expectations. The real logic of CPT was that when there was trouble or happiness the brothers would come on the wave.
Well, White technology was not built on telepathy, it was built on electromagnetic circuits of transmission and reception, it was built on factory workers pressing their button or monitoring their function according to firm and bound stations of the clock. The time of a rocket mission was Ground Elapsed Time, GET. Every sequence of the flight was tied into the pure numbers of the time line. So the flight to the moon was a victory for GET, and the first heats of the triumph suggested that the fundamental notion of Black superiority might be incorrect: in this hour, it would no longer be as easy for a militant Black to say that Whitey had built a palace on numbers, and numbers killed a man, and numbers would kill Whitey’s civilization before all was through. Yesterday, Whitey with his numbers had taken a first step to the stars, taken it ahead of Black men. How that had to burn in the ducts of this Black man’s stomach, in the vats of his liver. Aquaris thought again of the lunar air of technologists. Like the moon, they traveled without a personal atmosphere. No wonder Blacks had distaste for numbers, and found trouble studying. It was not because they came – as liberals necessarily would have it – from wrecked homes and slum conditions, from drug-pushing streets, no, that kind of violence and disruption could be the pain of a people so rich in awareness they could not bear the deadening jolts of civilization on their senses. Blacks distaste for numbers not because they were stupid or deprived, but because numbers were abstracted from the senses, numbers made you ignore the taste of the apple for the amount in the box, and so the use of numbers shrunk the protective envelope of human atmosphere, eroded that extrasensory aura which gave awareness, grace, the ability to move one’s body and excel at sports and dance and war, or be able to travel on an inner space of sound. Blacks were not the only ones who hated numbers – how many attractive women could not bear to add a column or calculate a cost? Numbers were a pestilence to beauty.
If the Blacks yet built a civilization, magic would be at its heart. For they lived with the wonders of magic as the Whites lived with technology.
10 From The Confessions of Nat Turner, a transcribed testimony of the leader of the most successful slave revolt in the United States, a description of the mystic vision that he said inspired him to action:
About this time I was placed under an overseer, from whom I ran away-and after remaining in the woods thirty days, I returned, to the astonishment of the negroes on the plantation, who thought I had made my escape to some other part of the country, as my father had done before. But the reason of my return was, that the Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of Heaven, and that I should return to the service of my earthly master-”For he who knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes, and thus have I chastened you.” And the negroes found fault, and murmurred against me, saying that if they had my sense they would not serve any master in the world. And about this time I had a vision-and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened-the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams-and I heard a voice saying, “Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it.” I now withdrew myself as much as my situation would permit, from the intercourse of my fellow servants, for the avowed purpose of serving the Spirit more fully-and it appeared to me, and reminded me of the things it had already shown me, and that it would then reveal to me the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation of tides, and changes of the seasons.
After this revelation in the year 1825, and the knowledge of the elements being made known to me, I sought more than ever to obtain true holiness before the great day of judgment should appear, and then I began to receive the true knowledge of faith. And from the first steps of righteousness until the last, was I made perfect; and the Holy Ghost was with me, and said, “Behold me as I stand in the Heavens”-and I looked and saw the forms of men in different attitudes-and there were lights in the sky to which the children of darkness gave other names than what they really were-for they were the lights of the Saviour’s hands, stretched forth from east to west, even as they were extended on the cross on Calvary for the redemption of sinners. And I wondered greatly at these miracles, and prayed to be informed of a certainty of the meaning thereof-and shortly afterwards, while laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn as though it were dew from heaven-and I communicated it to many, both white and black, in the neighborhood-and I then found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters, and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens. And now the Holy Ghost had revealed itself to me, and made plain the miracles it had shown me-For as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew-and as the leaves on the trees bore the impression of the figures I had seen in the heavens, it was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgment was at hand.
(Some edits and additions have been made, unaffecting the overall themes, since the original posting. The footnotes dealing with Of a Fire on the Moon and Hemingway’s “The Killers” was added March 9th.)
(Django Unchained images copyright The Weinstein Company; Blade Runner image copyright Warner Brothers.)
(SPOILERS, obviously. The shooting script differs enough from the finished movie that the dialogue excerpts in this post are transcribed from the movie, rather than taken from the screenplay, available here.)
A movie which I am only able to see in one context, and it is this context which makes it a heartbreaking and powerful experience. Richard Brody, whose reflections on every movie I read, and which I value whether or not I agree with them, writes in “Performance Anxiety” of it as a picture about art itself, and the devotion necessary to make it. One becomes so committed, that it is something like madness, and the movie embodies this: it is mad, and it is indifferent to its madness, and how its madness appears to others. However, I see Swan differently, can only see this movie in this one way, and I do so instinctively, viscerally, and not out of any attempt to give it any depth, or to fit pictures into a puzzle, but for the same reason a gesture signifies something so overwhelmingly to the watcher, and it can signify nothing else. I think it is very much a movie about sexual abuse, abuse we never see firsthand, abuse of Nina by her father, where the events of the movie are both echos and aftershocks of this sexual abuse. The mirroring that takes place, where Lily is a sensual double of the chaste Nina, makes me think of nothing other than the displacement that takes place among those who are abused: this did not happen to me, it happened to someone else; I did not do that, someone else did. The climactic moment of this film is, of course, when this girl realizes that all the qualities of her double are her own, and the profound emotional consequences of that. For me, this is the movie’s context, and it cannot be anything else; I think I can make a fairly diligent case for this, but whether it results from deliberate intent or strange accident, I cannot say.
Black Swan opens with Nina dancing the lead in Swan Lake, her face wearing an expression of earnest sunniness, a desperate desire to please, that she carries through so much of the film. This is a movie dominated by handheld camera shots which seemingly stalk this beleaguered woman, and we have the first one here, but with a twist: it does not follow her, but Von Rothbart, trailing him as he moves toward her1. In Swan Lake, Von Rothbart is the magician who has turned several young women into swans, including Odette, the heroine of the story. Von Rothbart has a daughter, the black swan, Odile, who looks almost exactly like Odette2. Nina’s own father is noticably absent, his absence never explained, or even mentioned. The only images we have of a father are the figure of Leroy, and the cruel magician Rothbart. Odette and Von Rothbart dance together now, Von Rothbart becoming more and more monstrous, until we cut away to Nina in her bedroom. She relates to her mother the story of this dream, the frightening dance with Von Rothbart, but the mother gives no response, no indication that she’s even listening, and Nina looks down.
NINA
(while stretching)
I had the most amazing dream last night. I was dancing the White Swan.
No answer.
NINA (CONT’D)
Different choreography, like the Bolshoi’s. It was the prologue, when Rothbart casts his spell.
This is the closest we get to a direct reference to the abuse Nina once suffered. The later relationships are a re-play of what once took place, and which explain the tension between mother and daughter, but never in anything like explicit terms. Nina’s father forced himself on her, just as Leroy forces himself on Nina, but Erica did not see her daughter as the victim, but as the seducer, just as Beth sees Nina as the seducer. All the conflicted feelings about sexual abuse – a daughter wanting to please a father, a daughter feeling like a whore for what she’s done, a mother suppressing her daughter’s own sexuality because she sees her as a rival, a daughter hating her own body for its attractive powers – all these are played out again in Nina’s contemporary relationships.
An important, often mentioned, trait of this movie is its campiness. Dennis Lim’s “Dirty Dancing: Is Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s tawdry thriller, a work of camp?” is perhaps the most in-depth and insightful investigation of this quality, but I think it gives insufficient focus to what gives the film this trait. Camp cannot be knowing, it cannot be deliberate; there is something unworldly and innocent about it. If we associate musicals with camp, it is because these involve an unrestrained and guileless exposure, something child-like. The antithesis to this is the cynical and the carnal, and mixing these two opposing forms often produce dramatic contrasts, such as the musicals of Trey Parker and Matt Stone like Orgazmo and The Book of Mormon where wide-eye innocents sing profane songs, or Pennies From Heaven where characters stuck in the sinful earthliness of our world sing songs of naive hope. There can be no cynicism in camp, no immediate profit motive or ambiiton; it must embody an almost delusional ideal that art can make the world a better place – if camp is art that fails at this ideal, it does not make it any less poignant or diminish a fan’s admiration for it. Lim cites Showgirls as partial camp or failed camp, but I don’t think he sees the same contradictary forces I believe make it both camp and not camp: it is not camp because it was made with the intent to make money through a lot of women getting naked in a movie directed by the guy behind Basic Instinct; it moves towards camp because instead of simply giving the people what they want, it is somehow a genuine attempt to try to make art – pornography does not need to be this ambitious.
What is central to Black Swan‘s campiness is not the ballet setting, or Swan Lake, or its horror movie elements, but the heroine, Nina, who has all the qualities of camp I have mentioned – she is guileless, innocent, and unworldly. Nina is a pliant blank, a woman who simply wanted to be a good daughter, but was forced to submit to sexual abuse as part of this role. Sex for her now has become something toxic. She still has sexual desires, but she has them only in another displaced identity – the girl Lily, who always ends up blending into a malevolent version of herself. A rigidly chaste figure like Nina would usually be seen from outside, as a figure of ridicule, but here we adopt her perspective entirely, without irony, and this is what gives the movie its campiness. Critics have written of the part as one playing to Natalie Portman’s focus and control – but I don’t see this at all. The power in this role is that it is entirely affectless, vulnerable, without the safety net of irony. Nina is a ridiculous figure, but she is ridiculous for tragic reasons – yet Portman makes no attempt to curb the ridiculousness of this figure, and the ridiculousness only makes her more heartbreaking, underscoring the tragedy at the heart of her life. It is this pliant blankness, whose unworldliness is so alien to us now, so alien especially in a place like New York City, which summons in the observer the idea that this woman must be the victim of abuse. “Black Swan: Movie about Mother-Daughter Sexual Abuse” is a blog post that takes an entirely different perspective on who is responsible for Nina’s sexual abuse; I do not agree with the hypothesis, but I highlight it as an example of how Nina’s pose itself, outside of physical evidence or theories of who is responsible, provokes the visceral reaction that this woman has been such a victim.
After breakfast with her mother, Nina goes to ballet school, and we get the first of many handheld shots where Nina is pursued. This is entirely consistent with a woman haunted by abuse – she is a woman who never loses the sense of being prey. Beth is the star ballerina, Leroy’s girlfriend, but because she is now of a certain age, she will soon be let go. Nina looks up to her, admires her, as a daughter might look up to a maternal figure. When Beth storms out of her dressing room, Nina steals some of the items that mark a woman from a girl – her perfume, earrings, and lipstick. We then see her wearing lipstick for the first time in a meeting with Beth’s boyfriend, Leroy, and we assume it is Beth’s lipstick. It is just as if a little girl might try out the lipstick of an older sister or mother, a daughter playing the role of her mother.
Leroy forces himself on her, to which she is passive until finally, she bites him – he is astonished at the violence of this reaction. She is perhaps reacting not just to this incident, but her past abuse as well. This moment and its aftermath contain all the ambiguties of this earlier abuse – she is playing chaste role-playing, her father assaults her, she feels that she provoked this reaction in her father, and her mother reinforces this, blames her for being a seducer. She gets the lead role in Swan Lake, and though she did not consent to Leroy’s assault, she is viewed as the temptress, that the role was given in return for her sexual consent – someone writes WHORE on the mirror. But perhaps not someone else: it is written in lipstick, and we immediately think of Beth’s lipstick, and that Nina has written this in condemnation of herself – because she has been assaulted, she must have brought it on. The self-hatred is what we would associate with a child who has been sexually abused by a parent – that the child blames themselves for provoking it, and if the parent shows love or affection for the child, gives gifts to the child – that affection, those gifts are shot through with the feeling that it is shown in exchange for some past sexual act.
This is a movie where a hatred of the body recurs again and again, and specifically, the post-pubescent body. Nina scratches constantly at her back, where she’ll develop wings. Her double, Lily – the part on which all sexual experience is displaced – has a flower openly tattooed onto her back, a flower that develops into wings during sex.
I cannot accept the movie’s look at ballet as a serious criticism of ballet in and of itself because Nina’s ballerina life is so false – her role as ballerina is only as passive instrument, only at the command of others, taking no joy or excitement as a collaborative artist in what she does. Her diet and training are never seen as something like that of an intensely dedicated athlete or creator, but only as self-punishment. These images do not work for me at all as some kind of indictment of ballet: I think they fit perfectly with the idea of dance as an abstraction for sex. Nina can only see sex as an experience of suffering, where she is acting on the order of others – and this is what dancing is like for her as well. Her body is in pain from dancing, and of course, she often has bleeding wounds; we might take this as a symbol of her menstrual cycle, a sign of a sexuality repressed, or a more disturbing symbol: the breaking of Nina’s hymen, the loss of her virginity to her father3.
Her mother has made her feel that she tempted her father, that she wronged her mother, and Nina’s attitude towards her mother is one of constant penance for this past misdeed, and her dance training is masochistic, a self-adminstered punishment. Her bedroom remains that of a much younger girl, filled with stuffed animals; she wishes to remain in a pre-pubescent state forever, a place before her body got her into trouble. Her sensual double has a full, curvaceous body, while Nina starves herself so that her curves might disappear. When Lily dances, she is enthusiastic and enjoys herself, qualities absent from Nina’s dancing, who has made herself into a machine that will please others – an asexual pleasure. She makes all these attempts to desexualize herself and still she fails – she sits on the subway and an old man mimes masturbation. After the reception, she fixes on a statue that she feels kin to, one with wings, but no arms to defend itself, without sex, its face a mask of pain.
In “Performance Anxiety”, Brody rightly gives attention to the eyes of the four principals, and though these features are distinctive and emphasised, it is crucial that this is not a movie about voyeurism. The gaze primarily emphasised is not others spying on Nina, but Nina looking at herself – this self-awareness, this awareness of who she is, is what she fears and wants to avoid. This haunts her, but so does the look of her mother, though this is an implied gaze, and, I think, a gaze of something specific: her mother witnessing the abuse of her child, and not properly seeing it, seeing her daughter as the seducer, just as Beth sees Nina as a seducer when she’s done nothing. Nina masturbates, and suddenly she realizes that her mother is in her bedroom, asleep – there is the obvious, general shame of sex, but a more specific one as well; it is Nina’s sex that caused so much trouble. She walks into her mother’s studio, and the eyes of a drawing of herself, with a forced, pliant smile, follow her around the room – she cannot stop seeing what she has done though she only wants to forget it. A second time in the studio, all her mother’s work is alive with gazes, looking at her, blaming her, and doing nothing.
Both Erica and Nina know a secret, and both conceal it: when Nina scratches herself, Erica has cover-up they’ll use that they’ve used many times before.
ERICA
Sounds like quite an evening. I wish I could’ve been there.
NINA
You know I asked.
ERICA
I know you did. Susie told me. Guess he wanted you all to himself.
NINA
That’s not why.
ERICA
I don’t blame him. Where’d you get these? (ERICA touches one of NINA’s diamond earrings, the ones she stole from BETH)
NINA
They’re fake.
ERICA
Fooled me.
ERICA helps her take off her dress.
NINA
I can do it.
ERICA
He must have been by your side…all night. Showing you off.
ERICA finishes unbuttoning NINA’s dress and sees the scratches on her back.
ERICA
Oh, Nina!
NINA
It’s just a rash.
ERICA
A rash, what are you talking about?
NINA
It was worse a few days ago. It’s fine already.
ERICA
You’ve been scratching yourself again.
NINA
No, I haven’t.
ERICA takes off her dress.
NINA
Mom!
ERICA
Thought you’d outgrown this disgusting habit.
They run to the bathroom.
ERICA
Jesus christ, Nina, I’d thought you’re done with this. The shrugs. You keep wearing the shrugs. Sit down. You have the white one. And the pink one. And that’ll help hide it. And then I’ll dig out that expensive cover-up. We still have some. No one will see it.
NINA
Mom, please.
ERICA cuts NINA’s nails.
ERICA
It’s the rule, isn’t it? It’s all this pressure…I knew it’d be too much, I knew it.
ERICA cuts a nail too close, and NINA ows. ERICA kisses NINA’s knuckle.
ERICA
Gonna be alright, gonna be alright, gonna be alright.
NINA looks away.
The last moment, where her mother’s gaze is not implied, but finally direct, is at the ballet itself. Nina is the black swan, the dark wings are her own, not displaced onto another – and her mother witnesses it. The sexual self that the black swan embodies, Erica always tries to suppress. Erica wants to keep Nina from going out, from having sex, not for any religious reasons (though the relationship of Erica and Nina is most often compared with the mother and daughter of Carrie, where the mother was a religious fanatic) but because she feels her daughter’s sexuality was destructive in the past. Nina takes a small bar to jam her door so that she isn’t confronted with her mother’s prying eye, but she blocks the door with such familiarity that I cannot help but think she has done this before: to keep her father from entering her bedroom.
Leroy plays the role of a proxy father, forcing himself onto Nina. After an unsatisfying rehearsal, he asks the cast to go, and he then plays the role of the prince, where he proceeds to touch her all over the place. He calls Beth his “little princess”, and, in the end, calls Nina “little princess” as well. Lily calls this “gross” though she doesn’t explain why – but isn’t “little princess” exactly the nickname a father would have for his daughter?
This encounter with Leroy is intensely painful for her, and it triggers the appearance of her double, Lily, who is both her and not her. When this figure first appears in the shadows, it is her, but in Lily’s clothing. She does not ask, “Who is there?”, but “Who is that?” The conversation that follows is that between two parts of Nina in reaction to an abusive father, with the self-confident, sexual Lily raising the most difficult, taboo questions. Nina looks at the father in platonic terms, the qualities which require admiration and inspire obedience. Lily brings up the possibility that fathers can be disobeyed, that this abuse is not an extension of a parent’s love, but a violation of it. Nina defends the abuse, the way a child might defend abuse, because otherwise it requires that they see the parent as violator – “well, you don’t know him”. Lily then raises the difficult subject of Nina’s own attraction to this man, the way a child’s pre-sexual and sexual feelings intertwine with abuse. We admire qualities in our parents, and we wish to see them in our mates, qualities that in others inspire attraction; an abused child sees these qualities in the abusive parent, and questions whether they are the guilty ones, whether they brought on such abuse, whether the admiration the child feels for the parent is a reciprocation of the parent’s explicit sexual feeling.
NINA
You can’t smoke in here.
LILY
Well…I won’t tell if you won’t.
LILY sits down.
LILY
Big day’s getting closer and closer, huh?
NINA stays silent.
LILY
Well, I can’t wait. I think you’re going to be amazing.
NINA (softly)
Thanks.
NINA takes a cigarette, and LILY lights her up.
LILY
So…do you want to talk about it?
NINA starts crying.
NINA
I just had a hard day.
LILY
Leroy playing a little too rough for you?
LILY cont’d
C’mon Nina, he’s a prick.
NINA
He’s brilliant.
LILY
Sure. But it’s not like he’s all warm and fuzzy.
NINA
Well, you don’t know him.
LILY
Someone’s hot for teacher!
NINA gets up to leave.
LILY
C’mon, it’s okay. I don’t blame you.
NINA
I should go home.
LILY
C’mon Nina, I’m just playing around.
LILY cont’d
Nina.
But NINA is gone.
When Nina gets the lead, Beth hates her for it, calls her a whore4, and then the maternal figure, Beth, is badly hurt in a car accident. This, I think, is an echo of the way an abused child might look at abuse, and how Erica has made Nina see it: I tempted my father, and I have destroyed my mother through this temptation. Leroy interviews Nina at his apartment about her intimate life, opening with the statement, “I don’t want there to be any boundaries between us”: there were no such boundaries with her real father, either. When asked about boyfriends and whether she’s a virgin, though she says otherwise, her whole demeanor suggests someone who has been entirely chaste, except perhaps for one taboo relationship. He asks the question of whether she enjoys sex, and though for most people the answer would be a qualified yes, Nina doesn’t answer – nor does she say why the answer might be no.
LEROY
I don’t want there to be any boundaries between us.
NINA
No, me neither.
LEROY
So…you got a boyfriend?
NINA (very softly)
No.
LEROY
And…you’ve had many in the past?
NINA
A few, but…no one serious.
LEROY looks at her for a while.
LEROY
You’re not a virgin, are you?
NINA smiles, looks down.
NINA
No.
LEROY.
So. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
NINA takes a drink.
LEROY
And: you enjoy making love?
NINA
Excuse me?
LEROY
Aw, c’mon. Sex. Do you enjoy it?
NINA doesn’t answer.
LEROY
We need to be able to talk about this.
NINA nods, always looking away and down.
LEROY
I got a little homework assignment for you. Go home, and touch yourself. Live a little. It’s late. There’s lots of work tomorrow. The doorman will find a cab for you.
As I wrote earlier, the first scene where Odile dances with Rothbart, a frightening, violent dance, is the closest we get to a direct reference to abuse. It is Rothbart as Nina’s father that carries such disturbing power for her, not Rothbart the character itself. During the concluding ballet, when she is backstage, the actor playing Rothbart gives greeting, and she barely notices him.
There are three other scenes when Rothbart shows up, all frightening. Nina looks at herself in the mirror, and the reflections take a life of their own, looking back at her. In the corner of the mirror, his perspective gazing down on her, is a photo of Rothbart. She wishes to forget this memory, she never mentions it, and yet it is there – she knows who she is and what she’s done, her own reflections confront her with this.
Another is much, much more direct. Lily is the identity on which all of Nina’s sexuality is displaced; at crucial moments, of course, there is no separate person, and she is Lily. Such is the case where Nina spies Lily having sex with Leroy, the father figure. Suddenly, the scene changes nightmarishly. It is now Nina on the table having sex with Leroy. And then: Leroy is no longer Leroy, but Rothbart, Odile’s father.
The music used to score this is the same as in the opening scene, the frightening dance. That this discovery fits the pattern of a previous sequence is notable as well. Nina practices with the dancer playing the prince, but Leroy tells her she’s doing the part of the black swan wrong. The lights go out, and Leroy has to yell that they’re still working, and the lights go back on. He dismisses the others, then practices with Nina alone, playing the part of the prince, fondling and kissing her. He ends the session by telling her why she’s doing the part wrong, which might be why someone might have told her she’s not being a good daughter: she’s not responding to his passion in kind – it is she who should seduce him, not the other way around. We now have this second sequence, where she practices practices practices, repetitively, punishingly, at such length that the accompanist finally leaves. She then is haunted by mirror images that seem to turn round and scrutinize her with a cold, piercing look – they can see all of her, all her memories. The lights go out, just like before, but this time no one listens when she says someone’s still working. She goes out to the stage, and there makes her discovery.
There is one other moment when Rothbart shows up, and it would have entirely eluded me were it not for the valuable work done at the Cinematic Corner by the blogger Sati, “48 hidden images in ‘Black Swan’” (reached via the Reddit thread, “48 hidden images in Black Swan”), which breaks down the images of the nightclub scene, images we see only in the briefest of microseconds. I assumed, wrongly, that they show us Nina relaxing, when they only do so on the surface. Looked at frame by frame, they show nothing of the kind, but only reinforce the idea of a woman falling apart, the images often not of dancers in the club but constructs from her own hallucinations, chock full of images of importance to her. There is much in these, but I believe there is at least one obvious recurrent theme: Rothbart, a symbol standing in for someone else, as her predator.
One of the first frames has the statue which fascinated Nina in the background:
We then have the gates to the Swan Lake castle:
Followed by the white swan, Odette, with Rothbart behind her:
She dances with Andy, Rothbart in the background:
She dances with Andy, who first becomes Leroy:
Then transforms into Rothbart:
Another nightmarish frame of Rothbart:
Though I consider the work on Cinematic Corner on this film invaluable, I disagree on one point of their description of these frames. They label these eyes as belonging to the black swan; I think they are Rothbart’s eyes, the same distinctive eyes that burn with frightening brightness in the opening dance:
Rothbart silhouetted by the moon:
In the arms of Rothbart:
Nina seems to remember something very upsetting, while to her side is an image of herself splitting apart. From here, until Lily shows up, calling Nina’s name, we hear on the soundtrack, “Sweet girl, sweet girl” over and over in a distorted singsong; this, of course, is a name her mother has for her, and which Lily mockingly says after she brings Nina to orgasm5. Her mother may call her a sweet girl, but there are things in her past that make Nina feel not sweet at all, but corrupt.
Nina represses her sexuality because she looks at it as a destructive force, something which her mother blames for tempting her father, and which she associates with the pain of abuse. In the club, we see visions of an asexual ideal as well as a few moments which contain images that specifically reference female sexuality. The asexual ideal shows up in the images of the statue, as well as a brief frame of the black swan distorted into this sexless figure.
Still focused on this upsetting memory, while to her right we see someone with the distinct eye shadow of the black swan:
Which then distorts into this alien, hairless, sexless creature:
Then, an image of her nonchalant, yet by her side an image of her screaming in agony:
Still outwardly calm, paired with an obvious sexual image, a bare breasted woman with her face veiled:
A realization, of something horrific, where in one frame she is the black swan, and in others, she splits apart:
The black swan behind the scrim of her room’s butterfly wallpaper. Nina is a butterfly who forces herself to remain larval, the black swan is the sexual self she both wants to be and fears being:
Again, transfixed by a memory, and Rothbart right beside her. After this image, the “Sweet girl” singsong stops.
After she dances with Andy and Tom, these dark images cause her to reflect, and she never dances again with the boys, dancing only with Lily, who, transforms into herself. Another memory, with the statue’s pained face and Lily in the background:
With Lily, and the tower from which she’ll fall to her death:
Nina with Lily, the moon by their side; the moon is in the background of one of Odette’s dances, and a woman’s menstrual cycle was once thought to be linked to the cycle of the moon:
Nina with Lily, Nina with Lily and the butterfly wallpaper as a background:
Another disturbing image of Rothbart:
Another of the obvious images of female sexuality, this time it’s the curve of a woman’s breast:
The moon, again:
A woman’s breasts, underwater:
The eyes of Rothbart staring out at her, a hand holding a moon-like globe with light falling on the water. The ocean’s tides are moved by the moon’s motion, just as a woman’s menstrual cycle was once thought to be guided by the lunar sphere. Odette is under Rothbart’s spell, just as the ocean is in the command of the moon. A hand holds this globe as if it possesses it: her father has possessed her; her father has taken her virginity.
She was dancing with Lily, now she is dancing with herself:
The black swan in the background:
Nina is the little princess, but also the swan queen. In the credits, Erica’s title is Erica Sayers / The Queen. Leroy’s name isn’t the american pronunciation, Leroy, but the french – “Le Roi”, “the king”. Nina takes over the role of queen from Beth, Leroy’s girlfriend. When Leroy makes the announcement that Nina is taking on the role of queen, there is applause, but there is also Lily laughing at something very funny about this. Lily, who delves into the taboo areas that Nina forbids herself, and who asks the taboo questions that Nina does not ask, but who is ultimately just a projection of Nina, is laughing at a joke that Nina knows, but does not allow herself to laugh at: a father figure is giving her the mother figure’s role, just like before. Lily’s laughter here echoes the recurrent, eerie laughter in the movie, which I think always centers around the sick joke of Nina’s relationship with her father, and the memories Nina does not want to have.
Other than its first use during the opening credits, we hear the laughter when there is a moment that might remind Nina of her past abuse, a symbol loaded with the possibility of her past abuse, or when a reflection of Nina, a Nina without a mask, looks back at Nina coldly and fully, as if seeing every part of her, including all the horrors she keeps hidden. The laughter is there when Leroy kisses Nina for the first time, the moment blood, hymenal or menstrual, drops into the bath water (a moment discussed in greater detail later), when Nina cuts her nails and suddenly she is a fiercer, less saccharine figure, her reflection turning as the photo of Rothbart looks down, her reflection turning when she practices alone after the accompanist leaves. And there is one last instance of this laughter, and it’s crucial: after the lights go out in the practice room, Nina goes to the empty stage, sees Rothbart across the wings, and as she crosses it, she hears the haunting laughter, which then becomes very real, the laughter of Lily having sex with Leroy, then Nina with Leroy, then Nina with Rothbart.
LEROY
But: as we bid adieu to one star, we welcome another. We’re opening our season with my new version of Swan Lake. Taking the role of the new swan queen, the exquisite Nina Sayers.
What Leroy keeps demanding of Nina, what she will not give, is complicity, that she actively participate in sex, that she enjoy it. This, I think, relates to one of the great shames that victims of sexual abuse feel, that the pleasurable apsect of sex is not entirely absent – and though this does not make abuse any less abuse, it is what shames Nina, and causes her to turn away from sex. The image of Rothbart having sex first with Lily, then her, is frightening because she sees herself consenting and enjoying it. She does not want to be the person who did these things, and so she isn’t; it was someone else, a double, who did these things and to whom these things were done. She consents, and did not consent at all. This idea is there again when she clearly sees Lily put something into her drink, but drinks it anyway – then, after a debauched night, gets upset at Lily for putting it in her drink. It is on this same night that I think there’s another crucial moment, in the cab ride home. Lily walks her fingers over to Nina’s pants, but Nina gently takes them away, and then holds her hand: no, right now, I just want the comfort of a held hand. She looks out the window, light passes over the glass, and we hear on the soundtrack a man having an orgasm: it seems unconnected to any man in the movie, and maybe it is a memory that requires the comforting clasp of another’s hand, and maybe this is a memory of her own father.
These clasped hands are of sufficient importance that they show up in the club scene, which is chock full of images, from her past and future, significant to Nina. She sees Rothbart, the statue she feels kin to, the tower from which she’ll fall to her death, and these hands in a specific context; Rothbart’s eyes stare out, a hand holds a globe, possesses it, and off to the side, the clasped hands.
Dance, for Nina, is always associated with pain. Her own participation in sex she links with self-destruction and death. She displaces sex onto women who aren’t her, doubles that she envies for their self-confidence and power. Her first double is herself, walking past with a cool gaze unafraid of anything in the night, before she pushes this identity further away onto a more sensual type – Lily, who’s curvy with olive skin6, and has no inhibition about pissing in a sink.
A small note: Nina’s earrings are always rounded, while Lily’s are almost always sharp, sword-like, we might even call them phallic. Lily has the sexual confidence and strength that Nina associates with a man.
That she envies Lily’s self-confidence, her strength, and wants it, shows up in one particular scene – one that makes clear that this very strength is her own. She is at home with her mom and they fight; her mom is worried that Leroy will prey on her daughter. Even though he already has, Nina denies that anything has taken place. They get into the thorny issue of Erica giving up her career for Nina, and Nina mocks her. Erica asks her daughter about her skin, then insists that she see it, and Nina refuses her bluntly: no. The very moment that she shows a strength she’s never shown before in dealing with her mother, Lily suddenly shows up, knocking at their door.
ERICA and NINA, at opposite corners of the room, ERICA sewing one of NINA’s shoes, NINA tempering the material of another with a lighter.
ERICA
Has he tried anything with you?
NINA looks up, then back down, but doesn’t answer.
ERICA
He has a reputation.
NINA still doesn’t answer.
ERICA
I have a right to be concerned, Nina. You’ve been staying late so many nights, rehearsing. I hope he isn’t taking advantage, that’s all.
Nina now looks up.
NINA
He’s not.
ERICA
Good.
ERICA cont’d
I just don’t want you to make the same mistake I did.
NINA (a quiet sarcasm)
Thanks.
ERICA
Not like that. I just mean as far as my career is concerned.
NINA (still quiet, but fiercer sarcasm)
What career.
ERICA gives NINA a long, hard look. It’s as if you can hear the metal of a sword unsheathed. From now until NINA’s “Nothing”, ERICA gives NINA an unrelenting stare, while NINA looks down.
ERICA
The one I gave up to have you.
NINA (the sarcasm is not as bold, but still there)
At twenty eight.
ERICA
So?
NINA
Only-
ERICA
Only what?
NINA
Nothing.
She punctuates this with a look up at her mother. NINA has the strength to meet ERICA’s gaze.
ERICA
How’s your skin?
NINA goes back to looking down.
NINA (quietly)
Fine.
ERICA
Are you leaving it alone?
NINA hm-mmms, without looking up.
ERICA
Let me see.
ERICA stands up, and her expression could break through steel.
ERICA
Take off your shirt.
NINA
NO.
NINA looks up at her mother, and she has inherited enough of her mother’s hard stare to meet hers.
At this very moment, the doorbell rings, and both women turn in the direction of their possible guest.
The struggle between these two types is not rote game playing, it is a struggle because it requires Nina to see the earnest, affectless type as the false one, and this other, stronger type as her truer self. Yet she also looks at this other self as evil, evil for what she’s displaced onto her – the act of having sex with her father, and evil because this girl, this truer self, can destroy who she is. For her to become this other person, she must confront her memories of the past, and this she cannot do. Nina masturbates, but stops when she sees her mom in the room – her mom has made her think that her sexuality destroyed their lives. In the bathtub, she masturbates again, then sinks below the water. That she has this sexual desire makes her want to drown. Blood, from nowhere, suddenly appears in the water. I associate it with blood of the hymen – this girl lost her virginity to her father. Right after, in the movie’s most frightening moment, a malevolent Nina appears above the water, ready to drown her.
When she and Lily are in her bedroom, it is not a sign that Nina is actually into girls – it’s because the only sexual partner she trusts is herself. Yet even this fantasy goes awry – because she wants this girl to be both herself, the one person she trusts, and another displaced identity that is not her. At various moments Lily is briefly not Lily, but Nina – the first, and most striking one, her reflection in a mirror.
Lily does not simply eat Nina out – she consumes her7. During sex, there are intermittent, frightening moments for Nina, when Lily is suddenly her. Nina reaches orgasm, and this physical pleasure makes her see clearly that Lily, this other on whom all her sexuality has been displaced, is in fact her as well. This briefly destroys her – the other Nina smothers herself with a pillow.
Nina returns the lipstick, perfume, and earrings to Beth, and Beth is upset: “You stole them from me?” The scene’s importance is, I think, as an echo of earlier abuse: Nina takes items that signify to a little girl what it is to be a woman and Nina stole her mother’s role as her husband’s lover. Nina is treated as the guilty one, but to present herself as the victim of abuse would require that she acknowledge to herself that abuse took place, so she instead presents herself as another kind of victim, a girl whose role is in turn being stolen by someone else, this sensual other, Lily. Beth stabs herself in self-hatred, much as Erica may have shown self-hatred – outrage at her daughter as romantic rival, rather than abuse victim. Beth stabs herself, and suddenly it is Nina stabbing herself – her role is Beth’s, her role is Erica’s, she has tempted their men, a proxy father and an actual father, and she wishes to destroy herself for it.
That Nina feels she has taken the place of both Beth, a mother proxy, and Erica, her actual mother, in relations with Leroy, a father proxy, and her actual father, shows up in this scene and the next as she seemingly sees herself in both roles. After leaving the hospital, where Beth transforms into her, Nina returns to a seemingly abandoned house. She washes her hands in the empty kitchen, turns the light off, and hears someone say, “sweet girl”, her mother’s name for her which recurs through the movie, a phrase that haunts her because she doesn’t feel sweet at all. She switches the lights back on, but instead of her mother, it’s her in the hospital gown, as Beth. She rushes to her mother’s studio, where the paintings confront her, chanting “Sweet girl, sweet girl, it’s my turn, it’s my turn.” She looks in the mirror, and again, sees herself as Beth, then, when she turns round to confront the reflected figure, she sees not herself, but her mother.
The movie’s last part revolves around Nina fully becoming this other self, and how this acceptance is annihilating. She throws out all the dolls that she kept, the souvenirs of her prepubescent life. Her skin tone and hairstyle change, so that when she lies in bed before throwing out the dolls, we might briefly think we’re looking at Lily. Finally, the rash in her back sprouts dark feathers, her feet web, her eyes go blood red, and her legs arch like a swan’s – it is all like the physical changes of pubescence, the very transformation that caused her so much trouble.
She asks Leroy for help because she thinks Lily is trying to take over her part; but Lily, the strong, sexual girl is already taking over her part: she fights back against her mom and escapes from the house; when Leroy talks about her not playing the lead, Nina refuses him with steely will.
Before getting to the last sequence, culminating in the image of Nina, lying back on a mattress, it might be helpful to point out that the movie is organized around variations in Nina right before going to sleep and waking from sleep, with some of the most important moments coming at this time. Although the practice for Swan Lake must takes months, the action of the movie seems to occur in less than a week and a half. I mention only necessary and relevant events around these moments of waking up and going to sleep.
The movie opens with her nightmare of Rothbart, but rather than waking up disturbed, she has a vague smile on her face, as if unwilling to see the fearful images we’ve just seen. Something then briefly changes in her expression, as if inferring some memory hidden in this dream, and then she returns to smiling happiness.
She returns home from ballet, her practice having gone awry with Lily’s entrance, and she’s very upset. Her mother re-assures her daughter, “Everything will be better in the morning. It always is.” I bold the last for empahsis, because I don’t think she speaks just of today, but events long ago as well. She then calls her the name that repeats again and again, always with mocking irony throughout the film, “sweet girl”.
Nina gets the lead, there is the reception where Beth calls her a whore, and accuses her of using sex to get the part. Leroy asks about her sexual history, and her mother cuts her nails after she sees the rash on her back. When shes wakes up this time, she appears in a much worse state. It is after this that she tries to masturbate, before stopping when she sees Erica in the room.
Possibly in the evening of the same day, she finds a bar to block the door, but does not put it in place yet. Nina lies in bed, and Erica asks, “Are you ready for me?” Those who believe that Nina is sexually abused by her mother put great weight in this line, but I think this is a more conventional question of a mother asking her daughter whether she’s set to be tucked in. Though I think Erica is domineering, I don’t her as someone with a sensual attitude towards her daughter. From all her visible behavior, we see the opposite attitude, of someone trying to eliminate Nina’s sexuality.
Nina rebels against her mother, she goes out with Lily, on the way home in the cab we hear what might be her father for the only time in the movie. Sex with Lily makes her orgasm, and then destroys her – Lily does not simply resemble her, she is Lily, and her double now smothers her. She wakes up for the third time in the movie, and she’s in even worse shape.
She goes home, and lies in bed, but does not sleep. She smashes her music box and throws out her dolls.
Nina has the stunning vision of Rothbart with herself, then goes to the hospital where Beth transforms into her. She flees home, there to be haunted by the role of proxy mother, a hospital gowned Beth who is actually her, who then becomes her own mother. She rushes to her bedroom, blocks the door, and her transformations become more disturbing and violent; red eyes, feathers, arched legs. Her unfamiliarity with these new legs cause her to trip, and she is knocked unconscious.
The focus for the first time in a wake-up scene is not on Nina, but her mother, most likely up all day and night, by her side, in the bedroom. Her mother has placed mittens on Nina to keep her from harming herself by scratching, but we might also see these as insulation from the tactile world, a last attempt to keep the sensual at bay. Nina wakes up, and for the first time, she does so not in the morning, but at night – she’s been unconscious for so long she might miss the premiere. She fights past her mother and leaves the bedroom.
At the ballet, Nina waits in the wings to go onstage, looks over at Leroy, and then at the actor playing the prince. She sees Lily aggressively sexual with this man, an aggressiveness she both wishes for, and which she turns away from because she associates so much of sex with her abuse. She is held aloft during the dance by this prince, and just as abuse colors the later sexual lives of the abused, it affects her here: she is held in this man’s arms, she is afraid, and she falls out of them. If this dance with the prince is like sex, then what makes her fall out of the prince’s arms is the past association of sex with her father’s abuse – she sees Lily in the chorus, and then sees herself in Lily’s place; Nina is also Lily – Odette does not simply resemble the black swan, Odile, she is Odile, and Rothbart is her father.
She fights Lily, and now finally the line between these two selves, the image of chastity she holds onto and the person on which she displaces her whole sexual identity, literally shatters. The mirror breaks during the fight, and Nina stabs her opposite with one of its shards. She dances the part of Odile, the black swan, Von Rothbart’s daughter, with assurance. Where before Leroy imposed himself on her, she now kisses him passionately.
When she returns to her dressing room, she discovers that Lily’s body was never there, a fight never took place, the qualities of this person have been hers all along. Just as her orgasm was followed by her being smothered, her becoming the black swan is followed by her death: she wants to be this self-confident, sexual other, yet if she is this other, then it means certain things have been done to her, and she has done certain things, and this makes her want to destroy herself. She extracts the mirror shard: literally, her reflection is inside of her. Her wound is like a bloody vagina – a symbol so literal it requires no explanation.
We see her weep as she holds the shard, and her tearful expression is not that of one anticipating death, but one of remembering.
Though she is literally dying inside, she now wipes away her tears and puts on a white mask of make-up, an act very much of a part with a life spent having to hide the pain she suffered.
She goes out for the last dance. She ascends the steps, and just as she looked from Leroy over to the actor playing the prince, her gaze now moves from Von Rothbart to the prince on stage. We see her mother in the audience, the first time we see her outside the shelter of her house, and just as she witnessed her daughter with her own father, she has now seen her daughter transformed into this sexual self, the black swan.
Nina falls from the stairs onto the mattress, the camera closes in on her face like a lover, and it is like her own submission to her father as she tumbles onto the bed: a surrender to her father, and to death as well. The cast gathers round and they realize that she is dying. Her last words are to Leroy, the proxy father. “I felt it”, she says. LeRoy asks, “What?”, and she answers, “Perfect”, and this is not about the performance now, but what took place years ago: the pain she felt then is one she has always felt, no matter how much she has tried to hide it, and there has been something perfect in what she suffered, like a bullet that is a direct hit on a mortal place. “It was perfect”, are her last words. When Odette dies, Rothbart’s spell over her is broken, and in her last moments, the spell Nina’s father has cast on her has ended as well. This campy, irony-free girl is for the first time ironic: she speaks of her past trauma the way we speak of an ideal sexual experience, but she is not speaking of it as an ideal sexual moment at all. What was inflicted on her then was a perfect wound, and it has now destroyed her.
FOOTNOTES
1 The image of a camera shooting from behind a character with their back turned, looking at Nina, is repeated twice again, both with significant figures.
Again, Rothbart in the opening:
Leroy’s first entrance, looking down at the practice session:
Nina, looking at herself, in the practice room, after Leroy fondled her. Nina transforms into Lily when she makes her entrance.
3 The connection between sex and the grinding, disciplined forms of the ballet is not simply the intuitive, obvious connection between dance and sex, but a point made as well through the use of music.
We see Nina dance alone in front of a mirror, accompanied by “Lose Yourself”, a sinister, pulsing piece that moves over the same notes, again and again. The music’s steady, prominent beat might be called sexual, but it is a joyless, menacing, machine-like sex. This scene might be a solo practice, and we might call “solo practice” a euphemism for something else. In the midst of this practice, something interrupts her, the broken toenail. Something interrupts her sexual thoughts as well: a past violation, a past breaking.
“Lose Yourself” is played again, when Nina tries to masturbate. She stops abruptly when she realizes that her mother has been in the room, asleep, the whole time. Erica either did not see, or refused to see the abuse which took place, and her reaction to this was to restrict and restrain her daughter, who she saw as the instigator.
We then have a brief play of “Lose Yourself” in the cab, when Lily moves her hand into Nina’s pants, and it then fades out when Nina makes clear she wants to hold someone’s hand right now, not anything more forward than that. We then have Nina possibly remembering something, the sound of a man having an orgasm, and this might be a past memory of her father. Each time, the “Lose Yourself” theme ends with a moment that might be a veiled reference to past abuse: the broken toenail, the mother who is close to her daughter’s sexual intimacy but asleep to what takes place, the sound of a man climaxing.
The theme from “Lose Yourself” occurs one last time, in the selection “Opposites Attract”, which plays over the sex scene between Nina and Lily. Lily, of course, is not exactly there: this is Nina with a fantasy version of herself, the only partner she trusts. It can be thought of as a variation on the first scene featuring “Lose Yourself”; that was solo practice in front of a mirror, and this is a sort of solo practice before a mirror too. Where before the horns jumped in when Nina saw her mother, now they sound when Nina realizes that Lily is her, that Lily’s sexuality isn’t someone else’s but her own, and is reminded of the painful history which accompanies this part of her.
NINA
Beth! I’m so sorry to hear you’re leaving the company.
BETH
What’d you do to get this role? He always said you were such a frigid little girl. What’d you do to make him change his mind? Did you suck his cock?
NINA
Not all of us have to.
BETH
You fucking whore. YOU FUCKING LITTLE WHORE.
LEROY
Woah woah woah…what’s going on here?
BETH
I NEED TO TALK TO YOU.
LEROY
Beth. My little princess. Please.
BETH
I’m coming by later. I have something for you. A token of my appreciation.
BETH cont’d
You make the most of it, Nina.
5 She calls her this in one of the first scenes, right after the opening nightmare, and before the first ballet session.
ERICA moves to put a top on NINA
ERICA
Up.
ERICA sees the mark where NINA’s wings will sprout.
ERICA
What’s that?
NINA looks at the blemish in the mirror.
NINA
Nothing.
ERICA puts the top on her daughter.
ERICA
You sure you don’t want me to come with you?
NINA gives a smiling no thanks.
ERICA
Sweet girl.
ERICA hugs NINA, a sober look on ERICA’s face.
6 That the more sensual type is always the more “ethnic” type is a trope still with us, though from the perspective of many in the past, we are all ethnic types now.
7 There might be a jokey foreshadowing to this early on in the movie, during the reception. Nina and Lily have their first exchange of dialogue in the bathroom. Nina is about to leave as Lily gets ready to piss in a sink; Lily asks her to stay and keep her company, but Nina leaves anyway. Right after this, Leroy runs into Nina as the reception lets out and these are his opening lines:
LEROY
Hey. They tried to eat you alive, but there you are.
(The material on the club scene was added to this post on February 16th – when that edit was made, earlier material on the different earrings of Nina and Lily, as well as a brief examination of the post-practice conversation between the two women got taken out. It was put back in the next day. Some small additions and edits have been made since then. The footnote on “Lose Yourself” was added March 7th. This same footnote was edited on March 13th, because I’d forgotten about the use of this music in the cab ride.)
(Obviously, there are spoilers – but the post is so focused on certain details of the movie that it will be incomprehensible to those who have not seen the film. Since I assume anyone who has interest in what follows has seen Lost Highway, I give no summary of its plot, but simply plunge into a few of its intriguing aspects. As usual, for convenience sake, the post title omits the name of one of the writers: his name is Barry Gifford, and though I have not had the fortune to read many of his works, I have read his memoir, Phantom Father, and it is excellent. For quotes, I rely on the original draft script, as well as a transcript of the film – the movie differs often from its draft screenplay.)
Possibly David Lynch’s darkest movie, it is from beginning to end the world of a sociopath: the color palette is greys, browns, yellows that are sickly, greens that are hospitally, a few reds that are always ominous. There is something essential missing in this man, Fred Madison, and there is something essential missing in the colors of the movie. A question I’ve had for a while about Highway is in the post title: why does the movie take the time to establish that the same character, played by Robert Loggia, doing a great job as usual, has two separate and distinct names, Mr. Eddy and Dick Laurent? This man is a brazen, intimidating figure with armed guards; he has no need for the discrete cover of a secret identity, and the movie gives us no hint that one identity is a cover for the other, does not give us any explanation at all – he simply appears to be known by two names without connection to any other. The answer provided on the film’s wikipedia page, is, surprisingly, completely wrong: “Arriving at a cabin in the desert, Alice reveals to Pete that Mr. Eddy is actually a porn producer named Dick Laurent and he forced her to do the films.” There is a flashback (at a much earlier hotel rendezvous, not at the cabin) where she first meets Eddy and she is forced at gunpoint to take off her clothes – but no mention is made of his name. Additionally, there’s no evidence that she’s coerced into making these movies, and this complicity is a crucial point.
I think Lost Highway is a simpler movie than some believe it to be (though that doesn’t detract from its quality), and I think the reason behind the names used for this character is simple as well. Highway, as most concede, is about a man who, after killing his wife, enters a fantasy world where he is now a younger, more virile character, who gets to have sex with a woman who is a double of the wife he could not perform with. It is world of denial and forgetting, where a man is able to deny his responsibility for his wife’s murder by blocking all memories of it, where everyone else is the villain, and he is the victim. If it is enjoyed less than some of Lynch’s other work, it is because there is only one character, Fred Madison, and his double Pete Dayton; his wife is a distant enigma to him, and the characters of the fantasy world are variations on those of his past life, his projections, the people he wants them to be. This, I think, is the reason for the two names, Dick Laurent and Mr. Eddy of this character. Fred Madison, a few days before killing his wife, killed the man he suspected was her lover, and this man is Dick Laurent. Just as Alice Wakefield is a fantasy variation of Renee, Mr. Eddy is such a variation on Laurent.
Before I go into this important point, I’d first just like to clarify what’s a confusing, and deliberately mysterious elemt of the film: the layout of the Madison house.
FRED AND RENEE’S: A MAP
The Madison house is a great background for the first part of the movie, because it seems labyrinthine, a place the characters can get lost in its mysterious corners, though its layout is simple, consistent (no tricks which add or remove rooms), and mapped without difficulty, allowing us to easily place the action at its various points.
Two polar points on the house seem to be presented as the domain of Fred and Renee, respectively, the rehearsal space and the bathroom. We only ever see Fred in the rehearsal room, and when Fred enters the bathroom while Renee removes her make-up, she gives him a hard stare in the mirror until he leaves.
I go through various parts of the first part of the film and give physical context for some action, where such context is ambiguous or where such context might offer additional insight.
The movie opens with Fred in the dark, on his side of the bed, smoking. The curtains, which are operated by an automatic mechanism to open at a specific time in the morning, open, and we now see Fred reflected in the mirror.
He gets up to answer the intercom, then goes down the corridor, so effectively used in this movie, to the living room, to peek out at whoever left the message. He moves from window to window, before reaching the window of the rehearsal space.
A small note: some have speculated that this intercom message, and this whole scene happens the morning of Renee’s murder. I don’t believe this is the case, but I don’t know whether there’s any direct evidence that I could cite to refute this. I should mention, however, that the last time we see Fred and Renee before they enter their house the night of the murder, the car is parked in the street. When Fred looks out this morning, there’s no sign of his own car in the street.
Fred gets his equipment ready for his gig in the rehearsal room, Renee comes out of the hall, Fred walks from the music room to Renee, the living room fireplace in the background:
When he calls the house that night, we see the phones in the living room,
the rehearsal space,
Renee’s side of the bed,
When he comes home from the gig, we see him ascend the stairs, then turn down the corridor to the bedroom. He sees his wife asleep on her side of the bed.
Fred’s dream involves him emerging from the corridor, then turning about in slow motion from the perspective of the fireplace to the stairs – yet I’m never sure if he’s at all times in the same place, or if he is moving through the twists of the corridor, back to the bedroom.
He sees the fireplace burning with a speeded up fire.
He may then turn around to the other side of the room to see smoke ascend from the staircase. This smoke might be thought of as an intruder into the house – always the evil without, never within. Then, we have a further ambiguity, because the camera then travels down the hall, as if it were taking the perspecive of this smoke moving through the corridor, yet we cut back to Fred, turning, either still in the living room, or navigating the twists of this hallway. We then reach the bedroom, and Renee raises her hands in fear.
The morning that the second videotape arrives, Renee goes out to get it. Fred, however, is up already, entering the living room from the direction of his music room.
The second videotape carries an unexpected detail: we would assume that the cameraholder would move from the area of the staircase to the Madisons’ bedroom, but the motion instead is from the rehearsal space, Fred’s domain, across the living room to the corridor.
On the night of the muder, Fred goes inside the house to make sure it’s safe. The phone is ringing. We see Fred move through the corridor.
Then, the camera moves from the phone out into the hall, as if following a spirit that’s been trasmitted from the device into the house. This spirit seemingly meets Fred, who is very scared of it, and a look crosses his face as if he’s been given an order he doesn’t want to follow but is afraid to refuse.
Fred re-enters the house with Renee, Renee takes her makeup off, and gives Fred the already mentioned cold look. Fred moves down the dark corridor.
We have now one of the more ambiguous and, for me at least, most disturbing, moments of the film – Fred appears to be at the end of the corridor which opens into the living room. We do not expect a mirror to be here, yet Fred now encounters his reflection. Perhaps the viewer has misplaced where Fred is in the house, or perhaps this is not a reflection at all: this is Fred meeting his double. This double comes, expectedly, from the direction of Fred’s space, the music room.
Alice calls for her husband, just as she did in Fred’s dream, from the bedroom’s edge of the corridor.
This, however, is not quite a re-play of the dream. There, the fireplace was lit with an accelerated fire. Now, the fireplace is vacant. Fred may have met his double in the earlier sequence; now we see a pair of shadows move across the living room walls, again, from the position of Fred’s space, the music room, towards the corridor.
We now see Fred emerge from the hall, into the bedroom.
The camera pulls back from a bordered darkness – but this is not the hall. It’s the next morning, and this is the Madisons’ television.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
It is helpful to look at the way Alice Wakefield1 is portrayed before getting to Dick Laurent. Alice belongs to a fantasy world that Fred constructs for himself, one where he hopes to find a happiness that eludes him in his present state. Before reaching this fantasy world, we see Fred often looking upward, as if for some kind of deliverance.
This begins after the cops arrive, Fred looking up while following some mysterious noise, only to see one of the cops near a skylight.
He makes the same gesture on the morning that the last tape is delivered, before he starts watching it.
When in prison, he looks up, but his way is, literally, barred: any salvation is blocked.
Fred looks up from his bed in his prison cell and sees only the light of a lightbulb, a dim fraction of the salving light he looks for. The bulb itself is behind a grill:
He is forced to look up in the prison hospital, in order to take a sedative – a kind of release, a kind of escape, but a brief and shallow one.
He looks again up at the light, then turns to the prison wall, which unfolds like a curtain upon a cabin which returns to its form after its destruction. The same process will take place with Fred: he is now in prison, his life destroyed, yet somehow, impossibly, he will return to life. Out of the cabin appears the Mystery Man; Fred’s deliverance will come, not from god, but this force of malevolence.
Finally, Fred is in his prison cell, and there is a great noise, and a light, much like some divine visitation. Again, Fred looks upward, and this time he is delivered.
Fred is re-born as Pete into this new world, but it is not a fully constructed one. His focus is on sating his lust for the wife who is not quite his wife, Alice, the double of Renee, and other parts are left awry, a telling clue that this is all fantasy.
This shows up most clearly with his parents, who seem sketched in, an afterthought, not quite animated by actual credible life, and sometimes disappearing altogether2.
They sit on a couch, watching a banal, ancient documentary on berry picking:
Later, speaking to Pete about the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance, they sit in their living room, without any light on.
Pete leaves his room to go out, looks around the house to say goodbye, but his parents are gone.
He speaks to Eddy on the phone, his parents standing right there in front of him, and then, suddenly, they disappear.
In this fantasy world, Alice is Renee with all the virtues and vices Fred wants. She is beautiful, and sexually hungry, but, of course, in this world, he is able to satisfy her. She is also deceptive, malicious, wanton, mendacious – he wants these qualities in her as well, as they vindicate Fred’s view of this woman and her murder. The creation of this very fantasy, the very thing he wants, a sexually ravenous lover who will betray him, is the very thing that will destroy the fantasy. He wants this woman to lead him into murder, because it cannot possibly be his fault that he killed anyone, and she must be deceptive, so that even if he did kill her, she had it coming. These very elements lead to the movie’s nightmarish end, where the qualities Fred wants in this woman bring about a murder where he ends up chased by the police. Long before things fall apart, Fred may has a sense that whatever world he dreams up, it will disappoint him. He arrives in his new life, and we see him relaxed in the backyard of his parents’ home, the only scene of bright, rich color in all of Highway. He should be blissfully happy, and yet he gets up, looks over the fence at the neighbouring house, and ponders the life next door.
Just as Fred looks for deliverance in his cell and sees only the false light of the bulb, Fred creates another image of false light in Alice, an incandescent creature with glowing blonde hair. In their second meeting, she is a bright beacon, dressed all in white. We might look at her shoes here as part of this fantasy design as well; we might refer to these heels as ultrahigh, vertiginous, insane, or, doubtlessly how Fred sees them, slutty.
He is drawn to this light, like a moth, and it will end him. We are given this very image in Pete’s room, as the face of Alice twists around the room, and then we cut to the room’s bulb:
Throughout the Pete Dayton sequence, we see images of Renee played again, but skewed, so as to give them a different cast, always of a sinister, malevolent feeme fatale.
A close-up of Renee’s lips when she’s on the phone to the cops:
A close-up of her eyes when watching the tape:
In both images, we see a deeply frightened woman. When the images recur as Alice, they are of a woman rabid with lust, betraying her husband, Mr. Eddy.
The mouth:
The eyes:
We might take this specific contrast even further, by giving the full context of some of these images: a pan over Renee’s face when she’s on the phone to the cops that is mirrored in Alice’s phone call to Pete; one moves from Renee’s mouth to her eyes, the other from Alice’s eyes to her mouth.
We see a shot of Renee, overhead, unsatisfied, after Fred’s failed attempt at sex.
There is a very similar overhead, later, Alice’s face lying in bed, only now she’s asking Pete to help rob her friend:
ALICE
I’ll set it up for tomorrow night. You’ll meet me at his place at eleven o’clock… Don’t drive there… Take a bus … Make sure no one follows you…His address is easy to remember… It’s 2224 Deep Dell Place… It’s a white stucco job on the south side of the street… I’ll be upstairs with Andy…The back door will be open… That leads into the kitchen – go through the kitchen to the living room – there’s a bar there… At eleven fifteen, I’ll ask Andy to fix me a drink… When he does, you can crack him in the head… Okay?
Of course, there is the contrast of Fred and Renee trying to make love, their lips never touching, and the passionate embrace of Pete and Alice near the end:
Renee is friends with Andy, a skeevy type who Fred does not like at all. On the ride home, Fred asks his wife how they know each other. It involved work at a place called Moke’s:
FRED
How’d you meet that asshole, Andy, anyway?
Renee stares out the front window – thinks back.
RENEE
It was a long time ago…I met him at this place called Moke’s…We…became friends…He told me about a job…
FRED
What job?
RENEE
I don’t remember…Anyway, Andy’s okay…
FRED
He’s got some fucked up friends.
Pete asks Alice how she got mixed up with her unsavory ring of friends, and the story touches on the same points as Renee’s, but here they fill in the details of what she did at Moke’s, exactly according to Fred’s fantasy of this woman: she is a whore. The job at Moke’s his wife never talked about involved her making pornography, and Alice liked making it.
PETE
How’d you get in with these fuckin’ people?
ALICE
Pete… Don’t…
PETE
How’d it happen, Alice?
ALICE
It was a long time ago…I met someone at this place called Moke’s…we became friends. He told me about a job…
PETE
In pornos?
ALICE
No… A job…I didn’t know what. He set up an appointment for me to see a man.
(we have the lengthy scene where she’s forced to strip at gunpoint, we then cut back to Alice and Pete)
Alice’s hand reaches up and strokes Pete’s cheek.
PETE
Why didn’t you just leave?
Alice doesn’t say anything. She drops her hand – looks down.
PETE (CON’T)
You liked it.
ALICE
If you want me to go away, I’ll go away.
Alice not only liked making these pornos, she married the man who forced her to take off her clothes with a gun to her head. She’s a woman who respect force, who likes it rough.
Since Fred sees her as a lying, malicious bitch, it should be expected that this woman is happy to set him up for the murder:
PETE
We killed him.
ALICE You killed him.
They travel to the cabin in Andy’s car, which, for some reason, looks very similar to that of Fred’s.
This is Fred’s:
This is Andy’s:
This car ride involves a series of shots that’s almost an exact mirror of the scene of Fred and Renee driving from the party – both in the shot, close-up of Alice, close-up of Pete; the original ride has both in the shot, close-up of Renee, close-up of Fred, two-shot again. In the original car conversation, Fred assails his wife with a series of suspicious questions about Andy, about Moke’s, questions that exhaust her. The second conversation shows us how Fred sees himself, as Pete, the perpetual victim of this treacherous woman, dragged further and further into this criminal enterprise – he’s very scared, she’s coldly confident.
I quote again the conversation, about Moke’s, in the first car ride.
FRED
How’d you meet that asshole, Andy, anyway?
Renee stares out the front window – thinks back.
RENEE
It was a long time ago…I met him at this place called Moke’s…We…became friends…He told me about a job…
FRED
What job?
RENEE
I don’t remember…Anyway, Andy’s okay…
FRED
He’s got some fucked up friends.
The conversation in the second car ride:
PETE
Where the fuck are we going, Alice? Where the fuck are we going?
ALICE
We have to go to the desert, baby. The fence I told you about…He’s at his cabin.
Here is a sequence of the images from both car rides, a pairing of almost exact symmetry – the first car ride ends with the two characters in the shot, the second car ride does not:
DICK LAURENT IS DEAD
Only one set of characters refers to Eddy as Dick Laurent, and those are the cops surveilling Pete. The first time takes place when Eddy goes to the garage:
AL
Lou, you recognize that guy?
LOU
Yeah…Laurent.
The identification is made only one other time, at Andy’s murder scene:
AL
Ed… Take a look at this!
ED
Yeah. That’s her all right. That’s Fred Madison’s wife with Dick Laurent.
This, of course, raises the question – how does Fred know that Eddy is also called Dick Laurent, famously saying at the film’s end, “Dick Laurent is dead” when he never hears such information?
Just as the unfaithful wife he cannot satisfy is turned into a vicious femme fatale, Fred turns Renee’s lover into someone else to justify his killing; Dick Laurent becomes the homicidal lunatic Mr. Eddy. We are, however, so engulfed in Fred’s own fantasy world, that we’re unable to even see the distinction between the actual man and created character. Unable to see that when Fred assaults and kidnaps Laurent, then cuts his throat, this man has perhaps no connection to the crime world whatsoever, but whose only transgression is having an affair with Renee.
Following the scene in the Mystery Man’s cabin, we suddenly jump to the “Lost Highway Hotel”, with no explanation as to why Fred has gone there. His wife and Dick Laurent are in room #26, and he takes room #25.
He carries with him the gun Alice gave him, because of course he is never a violent man, only an instrument of others. His wife leaves, and he storms into the room with the gun, knocking Laurent unconscious, then taking him to the desert.
After Fred cuts the man’s throat, he stands over him with his double and helper, the Mystery Man. As Laurent waits for some explanation for why this has happened to him, the Mystery Man hands him a console showing him video playback. Earlier in the film, we had this crucial and well-known exchange between Fred, Renee and the detectives:
AL (to Renee)
Do you own a video camera?
RENEE
No. Fred hates them.
The Detectives both look at Fred.
FRED
I like to remember things my own way.
AL
What do you mean by that?
FRED
How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
The Mystery Man now shows Dick Laurent Fred’s own memories, of how he wanted things to happen, of the man he wants Laurent to be: Mr. Eddy, a sexual pervert, a mobster, a monstrosity.
He kills Dick Laurent, and leaves the body in the desert.
Because Laurent’s body is lost in the desert, Andy has no idea that Laurent is dead. We might also note that during this conversation, the moment after Andy brings up Laurent’s name (“He’s a friend of Dick Laurent, I think”), and Fred repeats it (“Dick Laurent?”), we cut to Renee; what connection does she have with Laurent that we cut to her now? When she joins the conversation, for reasons either deliberate or accidental, Laurent’s name goes unmentioned – as if either Andy or Fred know that she’s having an affair with this man, and don’t want to provoke a reaction by speaking of him as dead.
FRED
Andy, who’s the guy on the stairs? Guy in black?
ANDY
I don’t know his name. He’s a friend of Dick Laurent, I think.
FRED (troubled) Dick Laurent?
ANDY
Yeah. I believe so.
FRED
But Dick Laurent is dead, isn’t he?
ANDY
He is? I didn’t think you knew Dick. How do you know he’s dead?
FRED
I don’t. I don’t know him.
ANDY
Dick can’t be dead. Who told you he was dead?
RENEE
Who, honey? Who’s dead?
FRED
Let’s go home.
The killing of Laurent also gives significance to the images of the desert that recur throughout the movie, seemingly for no reason at all – Fred has suppressed his memory of the killing, just as he has managed to forget his killing Renee, yet both rise to the surface. He has visions of Renee’s dead body when he is Pete, in Pete’s room, and the memory of the surrounding desert returns again and again, beginning when Alice comes back to the garage, then again when they have a rendezvous at a hotel.
We also see this memory surface explicitly at another moment: Pete sees the photo of both Renee and Alice together at Andy’s house, and his nose starts to bleed. He rushes to the upstairs bathroom, and he’s suddenly in the hall of the hotel. There’s room #25 where he lay in wait, and there’s room #26, the very room where we see Renee and Laurent in bed. When he opens that door, he sees his wife, a nasty, sarcastic vixen, having sex, betraying him.
During the killing of Laurent, though we see Fred as Fred, I think he still thinks of himself as Pete: the man who does these murderous deeds is always someone else, not him, not Fred, who’s somehow gotten blamed for these killings. We note the almost magical quality of Pete’s clothes: though Fred and Pete are men of very different height and bulk, somehow Pete’s clothes fit Fred without difficulty. We note also what the Mystery Man yells at Fred, that Alice is Renee, as if this name would be unfamiliar to him. The Mystery Man demands of this man his name. Though we see him as Fred, this is a man still playing a part.
FRED / PETE
Where’s Alice?
MYSTERY MAN
Alice who? Her name is Renee. If she told you her name is Alice, she’s lying. And your name? What the fuck is your name?!
There is now a cut back to the detectives at Andy’s mansion, who discover Pete Dayton’s prints all round the murder scene. Conveniently, they connect this killing to that of Renee: Fred isn’t guilty of that murder, it was always Pete Dayton who was the guilty one.
ED
Hey, Al, look at this.
(a shot of the framed picture of Laurent, Andy, and Renee together)
AL
It’s her, all right. Fred Madison’s wife … with Dick Laurent and Mr. Dent-head over there.
AL
We’ve got Pete Dayton’s prints all over this place.
ED
You know what I think?
AL
What’s that, Ed?
ED
There’s no such thing as a bad coincidence.
So, we have Pete who somehow is the villain all along, and Fred is blameless. Pete is the one who killed Renee, Andy, and Laurent. Fred kills Laurent, leaves him in the desert, yet he imagines himself as Pete doing this, Pete delivering the message to Fred that Laurent is dead. Pete is a stranger, Fred does not know this man, yet somehow he is also his servant, doing his bidding, killing this man he wanted dead, and then delivering the news.
The cryptic opening shot of Fred at the beginning, smoking in the dark, is him in the dawn after he has actually killed Laurent. He has entirely blocked out what he has done, and yet he somehow feels what he has done. The knowledge of his wife’s betrayal and his part in the death cast a shadow on him, and his expression is grim. In this movie of doubles and reflections, where we find it difficult to distinguish between what is Fred’s life and his fantasy world, this opening shot of Fred staring into the camera is actually a shot of his reflection in the bedroom mirror.
The bedroom mirror is clearly seen in this shot:
I will raise one last possibility, of which there is little evidence, but I find tantalizing nonetheless. Though we never see this, I think Fred somehow knew someone like Pete in passing, and decided to try to set him up for the murder of his wife and Laurent, just as Pete ends up fingered as the actual killer by the detectives, at Andy’s mansion. I think Fred paid a hoodlum like Pete some money, then gave him access to his house, either by leaving a door unlocked or providing him some keys, so that he could come in at night and film the outside and inside, then send the videotapes to his address. A mysterious request: but Fred will be pay this man a lot of money for this task, no questions asked. All in order to put the suspicion on this young man for the murder of Renee. Whether Pete stumbled onto the murder as it took place when shooting the last videotape, or whether Fred imagines this last videotape, I have no answer. Again, I have no evidence of this, except one moment, which might give indirect support.
This is a movie with various intricate visual connections, the shots of Renee linked to the shots of Alice. After the killing of Laurent, the Mystery Man whispers something in the ear of Fred, which might be instructions on what to do next. We then move to a close-up of Fred’s eyes. There is, I think, only one other moment where we have a close-up of Fred’s eyes, and that is when they receive the first videotape. I detect in him a different feeling here than in Renee, as if he has been expecting the videotapes to arrive. We have a possible veiled reference to this in the draft script, after they watch the second videotape. My bolds:
Fred and Renee stare at the snowy TV picture. After a few moments of silence, Renee gets up and switches off the set. She is visibly shaken, trembling. She stares fearfully at Fred who seems less disturbed.
Again, as I said, we only have one other close-up of Fred’s eyes, and that’s while they watch the tape. Here are the close-ups of Fred after the Mystery Man whispers to him, and then when he watches the tape with his wife:
Renee’s eyes show fear. Perhaps Fred’s show something else: a sense of a plan slowly going into effect, a plan both known and unknown, the memory there and the memory suppressed, of his criminal acts, and the blood he’s shed.
ADDENDUM: THE KILLERS INSIDE ME
Within this movie are two men, one a suspected killer, the other a man who killed many. The Mystery Man was played by Robert Blake, an actor who appeared to have had a blessed start in life as a child actor in Treasure of the Sierra Madre and as a regular on “The Little Rascals”. This blessed life was nothing of the kind. As related in “To Die For”, by the always excellent David Grann, he was beaten and resented by a father who would later kill himself. His “Rascals” co-stars would die in barfights, commit suicide, or become addicted to drugs. Blake would exile himself from his family and become a heroin addict, selling drugs to keep his habit going. He would get three comebacks, once as a young killer in the movie In Cold Blood, once as the star of Baretta, and a final one as the malevolent riddle in Highway. His comebacks would always end in bitterness, and his last would be finished with his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, shot to death in a restaurant. Bakley was a troubled woman who hadn’t been allowed to wash as a child because her grandmother feared running water. She grew up obsessed with the ideal of fame and wanting to marry someone famous, first setting her sights on Jerry Lee Lewis, then on Blake. After her death, a quickie biography was rushed out, a Hollywood scandal tour bus would stop at the place of her last meal, and Hustler published some old nude photographs. This is what she always wanted, her sister would say; “This is what she died for.” Blake would be indicted, found not guilty of the murder, though believed by many to be the killer. His role in Highway is haunting and brilliant work, and at the time of this writing, his last.
In Slavoj Zizek’s “Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway”, an analysis of great repute which I find flawed and over-complicated, Zizek identifies the Mr. Eddy figure as a paradoxical law-making jouisseur, a paternal authority who also looks on the world as a carnal feast, there for his unrestrained enjoyment. I disagree: Mr. Eddy is entirely an agent of chaos, and his passion for proper driving etiquette is not evidence of lawgiver authority, but a tic whose aberrance throws the rest of him into absurd contrast, the agent of chaos who doesn’t see himself as such. A similar example might be Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs, who insists on proper tipping before heading out to rob a bank.
That I don’t think this label applies to Mr. Eddy, however, does not mean I think it doesn’t exist. I believe it does apply to someone in Lost Highway, though not to any character, but to one of the cast members: Louis Eppolito, who played Ed, one of the two detectives who visit Fred and Renee.
Louis Eppolito’s grandfather was Diamond Louie, a man who stole diamonds, fenced goods, and ran prostitutes. He was friends with Lucky Luciano, and three of his sons would join organized crime. The debonair Freddy the Sheik would become a Gambino underboss, Jimmy the Clam became a hitman, and Ralph, Fat the Gangster, was a mafia soldier. Fat the Gangster, a man who hated rats and cops, was Louis’s father. He killed a nightclub owner, he beat his son, and, when a priest slapped his son for causing a disturbance, he sucker punched the priest. When Louis Eppolito went to school, FBI agents investigating his father’s heroin trade would tail him. Joe Profaci, a distinguished mafia eminence, told the son to be like his dad: “You got to grow up and have a lot of honor like your father.” Follow his footsteps, counseled Profaci. “If you want to grow up right, grow up like your daddy.” Louis Eppolito became a cop. In one class, a diagram of the Gambino crime family was used as a teaching aid. Look, said a fellow student to Eppolito, this guy’s got the same name as you, and the fellow student pointed to the diagram node that was Louis Eppolito’s father.
The cops of Lost Highway are Mutt and Jeff pairings, and Eppolito was half of a Mutt and Jeff pairing as well. He was boisterous and physical, a doo wop lover, a former Mr. Universe before his bulk turned to fat. His first partner was Steve Caracappa, a thin, quiet man who wore tailored black suits, pearl tie tacks, and a gold nugget pinkie ring with the NYPD logo. He would go on to be considered one of the best detectives in the department and an expert in organized crime. His cold, always watchful eyes gave him his name: the Prince of Darkness. When Eppolito and Caracappa arrested a member of a gang that was robbing dance clubs, Eppolito dunked the man’s head in a bucket filled with a mixture of hot water and ammonia. When one husband beat his wife, Eppolito didn’t arrest the husband but instead came back to the scene wearing a ski mask and beat the man with a lead pipe. Abused women, according to Eppolito, were an easy source of sex: “Every time we went on a call where a husband smacked his wife, I went back that night and smacked it to her, too. Battered wives were the most vulnerable.” After nearly choking one man to death, he had an affair with the man’s wife, a woman with a gorgeous body who fell a little too hard for the detective: “She was a cop’s dream — until she’d cry and tell me how much she loved me. I knew deep down there was no way in the world I’d consider throwing a ring on this one’s finger.”
Eppolito would describe all these events in his book, Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop, a memoir which related many fascinating stories from his career, while leaving a few out. Though it was an intriguing story, he did not mention the time jewelry went missing from the scene of a homicide that Eppolito and Caracappa were investigating. When a man was arrested in his office by Caracappa, the arrestee would allege that money and office property were gone; another man would be arrested and handcuffed, then find three hundred he had with him missing. A DEA informant told the government that Eppolito dealt drugs. Another informant would allege that Caracappa and a second detective unknown to the informant had offered to show her a copy of a homicide report in return for ten thousand dollars. All these stories went untold, and received no disciplinary actions or censure. All cops, especially busy cops, received complaints – but these complaints seemed out of proportion with the amount of arrests Eppolito and Caracappa were making, and without the usual motivations. You could understand the self-interest of an arrestee lodging a complaint, but why would two separate confidential informants allege that cops they didn’t know were dealing drugs and selling confidential reports?
Mafia Cop closed with the incident that brought Eppolito’s career as a detective to a close. In 1984, after mob boss Carlos Gambino’s nephew was arrested in a drug deal, his house was searched and a confidential NYPD file related to the investigation of Gambino’s nephew was found on the premises. In order to obtain fingerprints from the document, it was placed in a bell jar, and photographed after it was fumed with a corrosive chemical – the chemical would destroy the document shortly after the photographs were taken. The fingerprints were obtained, and they matched Louis Eppolito’s. This was the last, most explosive accusation leveled yet against Eppolito while he was still a cop. The detective was suspended, then transferred to another unit, before retiring in 1990. As said, this was the last, most explosive accusation made towards Eppolito while he was still a cop.
Four years after Eppolito’s retirement, a Luchese underboss named Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso became a federal informant. He confirmed what another mob turncoat, Pete Chiodo, had already revealed: the mob had a source inside the NYPD which gave them access to any and all intelligence they wanted – federal, state, local, anything. They called this source “the crystal ball”. Chiodo was not close enough to this source to reveal who they were, but Casso could. The crystal ball was not one man, but two, and their names were Steve Caracappa and Louis Eppolito.
Casso was a frightening and deadly man. He had helped many people to their death, and these two detectives had sometimes helped out as well. When Jimmy Bishop, a Luchese associate and head of a painters union, a man who knew enough to do a lot of damage to the Lucheses, became a confidential informant, it was a secret known only to the police department’s Organized Crime Investigation Division. After he began his co-operation with the police, Bishop was shot several times outside his mistress’s house. James Heidel, truck hijacker, Luchese associate, and member of an ace robbery crew known as the Bypass Gang (they could bypass just about any alarm), was another confidential informant. Among many other things, Heidel revealed to his police contact that Luchese underboss Anthony Casso had a source inside the police who shared crucial information, but he didn’t know the name of the detective. A few months later, Heidel had just finished a game of handball and was gong to his car when a man walked up and pulled out a gun. Heidel turned and ran into some on-coming traffic when this man and others started to shoot. Shot several times, Heidel managed to jump onto a passing motorcycle, before being shot again multiple times and then falling off, dead. The Times, the next day: “Another Man Slain in Mob-Style Killing.” It was the eighties, and such daylight murders were happening all the time. A few days later, the crystal ball passed on to Casso a recording that Heidel had made while wearing a wire, proof of his betrayal.
When Casso associate Burton Kapan was involved in a scheme to steal treasury bills and sell them overseas, one person involved in the scheme pocketed money that he should have handed over. This person, Israel Greenwald, had no connections with organized crime and no knowledge that the bills were stolen. The FBI, having caught on to the scheme, convinced him to co-operate and wear a wire. Shortly after, on his way to work, he was pulled over by two police officers who told him he was a suspect in a hit-and-run investigation and needed to appear in a line-up. He was never seen alive again, and more than a decade later his bones were found in the dirt under a parking garage. When an attempt was made on Anthony Casso’s life, he was given the confidential NYPD report on his own attempted murder. The report identified the chief suspect as Jimmy Hydell, head of a mafia crew. Kaplan would later explain that the detectives accepted no payment for handing over this report:
Q: What did Casso ask you? A: What do I owe them for this? I told him the story that they wouldn’t take no money because someone tried to hurt him, and he shook his head, he said, Boy, that’s really nice of them. They must be pretty good guys.
Jimmy Hydell would be arrested, handcuffed, and disarmed by two cops, who dropped him off in front of a Toys ‘R’ Us, where the detectives taped up Hydell’s legs and stuck a handkerchief in his mouth, before putting him in the trunk of the car of Frank Santora, another Casso associate. Hydell was taken to the basement of a house in Bergen Beach, where he was tortured by Casso and others for several hours. Hydell knew he would die, and pleaded with Casso that his body be left somewhere it could be found, so his mother could collect the life insurance. Casso assured the man he would do so, then shot him multiple times. To this day, Hydell’s body has never been found.
When Casso made these revelations, Eppolito and Caracappa were retired cops living opposite each other in Las Vegas. Eppolito made some money as a bodyguard, and some acting in films such as Goodfellas, State of Grace, Predator 2, and as “Al the Guard” in Switch. He would write the screenplay for Turn of Faith, a movie about a hero cop who is best friends with a mob killer and a priest. The world it depicts is one that is unremittingly cutthroat and profane. The cop beats a man in an alley and gives the mob killer tips on upcoming investigations; the priest says things like, “Get your fucking hands off me, fuckface.” He was hired to write a comedy about a homeless bag lady; he entered talks with LaToya Jackson’s ex-husband, Jack Gordon, about writing Jack Gordon’s autobiography. After Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish were convicted of killing casino magnate Ted Binion, Eppolito formed a one-man committee, “Citizens to Ensure Justice Is Done”, which bought a full-page ad in a Vegas paper declaring Murphy’s innocence, all in the hopes of getting a screenplay deal out of the woman, which would, of course, tell her side of the story.
This was Eppolito’s post-detective career: acting on the fringes of movies by great directors such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and David Lynch, while writing scripts that were never bought or produced. Jayne McCormick, a former call girl, mortgaged her house to pay him to write a screenplay based on her unpublished autobiography. McCormick saw Reese Witherspoon as a good choice to play the lead, but Eppolito preferred Angelina Jolie. When Eppolito sent over the finished script to McCormick, she was appalled. It was filled with misspellings, typos, and grammatical errors. Eppolito shushed her: a good screenplay didn’t need proper spelling. I Never Met a Stranger: The Jane McCormick Story traced the life of an escort from her difficult beginnings to her time as a rat pack consort. The movie opened with a thuggish man trying to convince his girlfriend to become a prostitute. “It’s gonna be a piece of cake,” the boyfriend said to someone played by either Reese Witherspoon or Angelina Jolie, “Besides, with a body like you have, he’ll cum in two minutes and it will be all over.” Eppolito told McCormick he always wrote a cameo for himself in his scripts, just like Alfred Hitchcock. That’s why Stranger had a scene where a fat man took a prostitute to his hotel room, but passed out before he could have sex. McCormick would end up going bankrupt paying Eppolito for his work. When she called the ex-cop to cuss him out, he would get angry back. “Don’t call me when you’ve been drinking,” he would reply, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
The other movie he was trying to get made was Murder in Youngstown, a crime film set in the notorious Ohio city, and Eppolito was having more success with this project. He had come across an eager and well-connected investor in Steve Corso, a mob connected accountant. Corso wanted to get into the movie business, and he was also looking to score drugs and girls for some friends coming to Vegas for the weekend. Eppolito assured Corso that he could provide him some great movie investment opportunities, and that he and his son, a local dealer, could help him out with the other stuff. Corso had led an interesting life. He had come out of working-class Hackensack, gone to school at New York University, then Cornell, then joined a white shoe accounting firm that had offices all the way from Los Angeles to Switzerland. He lived in the wealthy neighbourhood of Greenwich, Connecticut, and he took frequent trips to Vegas. But his life was even more interesting than that. He gambled often in Vegas, and he often lost. He owed over half a million to various casinos. This was in addition to past debts, for which he’d stolen over five million from the white shoe accountants to pay. These thefts had caused the FBI to raid his firm. Corso went on the lam, then cut a deal. He would be a confidential agent for the bureau, and act the part of a mob accountant. That was why he was wearing a wire at the meeting with Louis Eppolito. And when Eppolito entered the restaurant where a follow-up meet was scheduled, that was why four agents pushed the ex-cop against a wall, handcuffed him, and announced he was under arrest.
William Oldham had been working towards this moment for years. He had quested after the crystal ball since he was with the Major Case squad, the very place Steve Caracappa had worked, when the series of confidential informants were killed with almost unearthly prescience. Caracappa worked across from Oldham, in the Organized Crime Homicide Unit (OCHU), where he had literally written the book on mafia death in New York City – an index of every mob killing in the city; if a homicide detective wanted to see how a victim fit into the larger structure of the mob, they would consult Caracappa’s book. Caracappa had fought for the creation of the OCHU, it was disbanded after he left, and Oldham had always been haunted by a horrible thought: that Caracappa had wanted to establish the OCHU to make his intelligence work for the mafia easier. The arrest of Caracappa and Eppolito was one important moment; the other was the co-operation of Burton Kaplan.
Kaplan had been a Navy codebreaker during World War II, a man so good at breaking japanese codes that he was offered a job at the new born National Security Agency. He went back to Brooklyn instead, and became an appliance salesman. A gambling habit he’d had since he was thirteen meant he needed more money than a legitimate job could give him, and he soon became a top notch fence in stolen goods, a successful marijuana dealer, and an associate of Anthony Casso. In his seventies and near blind, he was convicted on drug charges that meant he would probably die in prison. Oldham would meet him there, with the offer of a deal: there are two guys we are interested in, and you know which two guys. Kaplan chose his words carefully: “With all due respect, and I do respect you guys because my father-in-law was a cop, I got nothing to say.” Kaplan didn’t need to explain why he wouldn’t co-operate, but he did: “I took an oath.” Oldham lost it. “They took a fucking oath,” said Oldham. “I was a cop for twenty-five years. I was in Major Case with one of those guys. I know what a fucking oath is about. If every cop in New York City was like these two, no one could walk the streets.” Kaplan got up to leave. Oldham had one more thing to say, his voice now without anger. “Burt, you’re giving up your grandson.” Oldham, again: “You’re going to die in jail without ever touching him. You’re choosing the fat guy and the skinny guy over your only grandson’s chance to know his grandfather.” Some shadow of hate fell over Kaplan’s face. He avoided looking at Oldham for the few seconds left in the meeting. But he wrote down the name of his lawyer on a legal pad, and passed it to the detective.
Caracappa and Eppolito were indicted on eight counts of murder, as well as kidnapping conspiracy, witness tampering, bribery, money laundering, and drug trafficking. Kaplan’s testimony would be crucial in their eventual conviction. The following was given on his first day of this testimony, and said without any emotion at all:
Q: Did you have a business relationship with Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa? A: Yes. Q: Can you please tell the jury what the nature of that business relationship was? A: They were detectives on the New York Police Department who brought me information about wiretaps, phone taps, informants, ongoing investigations, and imminent arrests and murders. They did murders and kidnapping for us. Q: What did you do for them in exchange for this? A: I paid them.
When the crystal ball was at the height of its powers, John Gotti had demonstrated his invulnerability in beating yet another murder conviction. By the time of the Caracappa-Eppolito trial, his Ravenite social club was a shoe store. Tony Café, the head of the Bonanno family, once one of the five powerful mafia families in the city, had five hundred dollars lifted from his pocket by a woman. Café was upset about that. He was upset about a lot of things. He had two broken toes from diabetes, he’d been hit with a bookmaking charge, and if he was convicted, he’d lose his social security and veterans’ benefits. His co-defendants had four bypass surgeries among them, and they all needed afternoon naps. When they were arraigned, a federal agent was worried that one of the defendants would escape by running out the back door. Run out?, asked the incredulous judge, this man can hardly walk. What’s the worst thing that happened to the mafia, Café was asked. “Gotti”, he says.
Caracappa and Eppolito would be found guilty on all counts. Eppolito would take off his jacket, his belt, his tie, and his gold chain after the verdict. He was a cop, and he knew the procedure: you hand over valuables, and anything that can be used to hang yourself. A few days later, during the hearing where the cops were sentenced to prison for life, there was a ruckus. In 1988, Eppolito had walked off his beat into a Brooklyn deli, took a soda from the refrigerator, drank it, and was about to leave when a counter worker gave him a hard stare. “You got a problem with me?” asked Eppolito. “You didn’t pay for the soda.” said the counter worker. Eppolito threw some money down. Two days later, he came back and arrested the counter worker, Barry Gibbs, for the murder of a prostitute. Gibbs would be convicted, and serve close to twenty years, before the key eyewitness would reveal that Eppolito had threatened to arrest the eyewitness’s mother for drug possession, drugs that Eppolito would plant on her, unless he named Gibbs as the killer.
“Remember me?” Gibbs would yell from the gallery. “Remember, Mr. Eppolito?” The attention of the court, Eppolito, everyone, fixed briefly on this man. “Do you remember what you did to me? Barry Gibbs! Do you remember? I had a family, too. You remember what you did to my family? You don’t remember what you did to my family and to me? Remember what you did to me? Me! Do you remember?” The judge ordered that Gibbs be removed from the court for causing a disturbance.
The preceding, however fantastic, is real. It is taken, with mild re-arrangements, from The Brotherhoods by Guy Lawson and William Oldham; the Kaplan transcripts, the paragraph on Tony Café, and Eppolito’s conduct after the verdict are taken from The Good Rat by Jimmy Breslin. Both books present different facets of the Caracappa-Eppolito case, and both are excellent.
FOOTNOTES
1 In the original script, Alice’s last name is Wyatt; though it may be a coincidence, the context of the surrounding plot makes me immediately think of the Nathaniel Hawthorne story that shares Alice’s last name.
There, a man has the mad urge to leave his house and happy marriage in order to observe his wife over a period of two decades, a nearby neighbour in heavy disguise. It is a story of analysis of the mind of this man, rather than events, and nothing that takes place in Highway is borrowed from this story. The only thing they share is this obsession of a husband observing his wife when he is absent, though of course in Highway a husband does not simply observe his wife, but re-creates her as he wants her to be.
In describing Wakefield’s condition, his in-between state after he retreats to this role of voyeur, we may have an apt description of Fred’s state of mind in creating his fantasty life:
The singularity of his situation must have so moulded him to himself, that, considered in regard to his fellow-creatures and the business of life, he could not be said to possess his right mind. He had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world–to vanish–to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead. The life of a hermit is nowise parallel to his. He was in the bustle of the city, as of old; but the crowd swept by and saw him not; he was, we may figuratively say, always beside his wife and at his hearth, yet must never feel the warmth of the one nor the affection of the other. It was Wakefield’s unprecedented fate to retain his original share of human sympathies, and to be still involved in human interests, while he had lost his reciprocal influence on them.
This section, the penultimate moment before Wakefield returns to the wife he abandoned decades earlier, is perhaps apt as well:
He ascends the steps–heavily!–for twenty years have stiffened his legs since he came down–but he knows it not. Stay, Wakefield! Would you go to the sole home that is left you? Then step into your grave!
As is this, the story’s end:
He has left us much food for thought, a portion of which shall lend its wisdom to a moral, and be shaped into a figure. Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.
2 This idea is taken ever further in the original screenplay. The parents are not simply phantom characters, but malevolent spirits who are party to the illusion that Fred has created for himself, but also laugh at his foolishness: this illusion will eventually destroy him. The characters they are most similar to are the elderly couple at the beginning of Mulholland Drive who cackle with glee at the nightmare that this actress has created for herself.
A relevant excerpt of the same scene in the film where Pete walks about the house and finds his parents strangely gone:
Pete is sitting perched unsteadily on the very edge of his bed. He HEARS a succession of highly-amplified SOUNDS at intervals with eerie stretches of silence: CRICKETS in fractured cadence a distant TELEVISION – a FLY buzzing slowly in the room a MOTH’S wings beating against light bulbs in the ceiling fixture – the washing of DISHES.
Pete’s reaction to these sounds is one of petrified confusion. Underlying these sounds is a kind of unearthly, steady DRONE.
Pete gets up off the bed, unsteadily. He moves toward his bedroom door. As he moves the amplified SOUNDS shift.
He can hear laughter. The laughter seems to be LOUD, but at the same time coming from people who are trying to contain the laughter – to hide it.
Pete opens his door and peers out.
Pete’s POV down the hall toward the living room – his mother and father have stopped laughing and are turned with guilty smiles in his direction. They are smoking a joint, passing it back and forth. They are not looking directly at him. They seem to be looking, but not seeing.
Pete’s parents POV down the hall toward Pete’s room. There is no one there – just an empty hallway.
Pete’s parents continue to stare, but then turn away toward each other – they start to laugh quietly again.
Pete’s Pov – the hallway and the living room – there is no one in the living room. It’s empty.
CUT TO:
INT. DAYTON HOUSE – PETE’S BEDROOM – NIGHT
Pete turns from the hallway and comes back in his room – unsettled and confused.
He can hear laughter coming from the living room.
(All images copyright October Films, CiBy 2000, Asymmetrical Productions, and associated producers.)
