A terrible crash disrupts the silence of an empty morning. A car flips multiple times down the road, while another vehicle pauses briefly in front of a warehouse. A faceless passenger places a small, wooden Harmonium on the side of the road, and the vehicle speeds off. Later, a worker at the warehouse slowly approaches the Harmonium, staring at it as if in a trance. Suddenly, a large truck roars down the road, nearly grazing the instrument. The worker scoops up his newfound treasure and runs back into the warehouse. Enclosed within the glass walls of his cage-like office, the worker covers a tear in the Harmonium’s bellows with duct tape. Together, within the confines of his gloomy solitude, they make beautiful music. These are the early moments of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film Punch-Drunk Love, in which the worker, Barry Egan (Adam Sandler), forges an identical relationship with a human Harmonium named Lena (Emily Watson). This film is an exhilarating example of the contemporary romantic comedy, in which the frailties of human relationships are observed through romance. Such an argument can be validated about Punch-Drunk Love by analyzing its use of character archetypes, its exploration of various human relationships, and its relation to other films in its subgenre. Ultimately, this will answer the question, “why is this film truly a comedy of romance?”
In contrast to Anderson’s last film, the three-hour-plus, sprawling ensemble drama Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love runs only half as long, and centers its subversive romantic comedy on three distinct characters. Each of them is an intriguing variation on genre archetypes. Nearly every scene in the film focuses intently on Barry Egan, the painfully introverted owner of a useless novelty business. His crooked smile and pleasant grumbling masks a monstrous inner-rage fueled by his seven sisters, who shift between pathological bouts of doting and taunting. Anderson has confessed in interviews that Barry was based on the classic comic persona (particularly embodied by Buster Keaton) of “a guy in the center and everything circling around him.” [YouTube 4] In this sense, Barry displays traits of the “outsider protagonist,” by deliberately holding himself away from the norm (such as when he wears a glaring blue suit to work). Yet unlike the outsider protagonists of the 60’s, whose lives were made to look somewhat desirable, Barry’s life is anything but. After his first encounter with Lena, Barry races back into the dark warehouse, seeking the self-controlled isolation that gives him comfort. At first, the audience seems to be examining Barry as one would the “self-exploratory male,” from the perspective of a detached observer. Yet Anderson stealthily draws the audience into Barry’s psyche, through some brilliantly subtle mis-en-scene that will be explored later in the paper.
Thus, Barry is closest to the “self-loathing” male archetype, since his anger caused by the sisters who have beaten him into submission has transformed into an inner-disgust at the person he’s become. After leaving Lena’s room with the awkward utterance, “And bye-bye,” the camera rests on Barry as he verbally berates himself while walking down a hallway filled with “exit” signs. Barry has indeed buried himself into in a hole devoid of human connection, yet unlike Charles Grodin in The Heartbreak Kid, he’s growing increasingly uncomfortable in his self-made cage, and at times lashes out against it in fits of spontaneous violence (such as when he kicks in his sister’s glass patio windows). As Shelley Duvall sings the gloriously offbeat song “He Needs Me” (from Robert Altman’s Popeye) in the background, it becomes apparent Barry is in desperate need of human contact, just as a woman arrives as unexpectedly as the Harmonium.
Lena Leonard is perhaps the film’s greatest enigma. Even Emily Watson was initially baffled about how to approach playing her. “In a way, she’s someone’s dream, she’s not a real person,” said Watson in an interview with BBC Films, “The film is about how you see the world when you’re in love. You don’t necessarily see somebody’s psychological baggage, you see the person walking out of the light.” [Bbc.co.uk] Indeed, in Hawaii, Barry sees Lena running toward him out of the sunlight, like an idealized dream-girl. Although her single-minded pursuit of the hesitant Barry reeks of “kook”-like behavior, Lena is actually closer to the “new screwball heroine” introduced in films like Melvin and Howard, one of Anderson’s self-professed favorite movies. [Hard Eight] Lena’s supposed “Gamine-like” innocence conceals needs that set her apart from any objectified romantic soul mate. Like other characters in her progressive female archetype, Lena aggressively draws out Barry through vulnerabilities instead of perfections. Her own neurotic need for connection fuels her infatuated desire for Barry, which stalls only when he abandons her at a hospital. Lena’s needs are real and palpable, and Barry must fulfill them in order for the relationship to continue.
The film’s final major character threatens the central love story, if only by his mere existence. Dean “Mattress Man” Trumbell (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a hot-headed furniture store owner who also manages a phone sex line that targets Barry as one of its victims. “It’s a dream movie,” Hoffman said, “and I’m the subconscious nightmare.” [YouTube 2] Yet Dean’s bark is worse than his bite, considering he sends out four blond brothers to do his dirty work. He shouts a death threat at Barry over the phone, yet when Dean stares his protective punch-drunk victim in the face, he impotently backs off. He mirrors the antagonist archetype embodied by Fred MacMurray in The Apartment, whose formidable exterior hides an internal nature that is weak and cowardly at best. And as Anderson based Barry off a real-life individual who found a loophole in a frequent-flier-miles promotion, Dean is loosely based on Vinnie “Furniture Guy” Testeroni. In a deleted scene, Hoffman re-enacts Testeroni’s disastrous commercial in which a macho stunt sends him plummeting off a pile of mattresses onto the ground. [YouTube 1]
Though the plot of Punch-Drunk Love may initially seem like a simple romance, there are several complex relationships subtly being explored within its small-scale framework. Anderson based Barry’s nightmarish encounters with his sisters on the awkward relationship he has with his own siblings. Elizabeth (Mary Lynn Rajskub) is the sister with the most screen time, and she has a telling moment while on the phone with Lena. After apologizing to Lena for Barry being a freak, Lena affectionately admits, “Yeah, he did seem a little strange.” This prompts Elizabeth to shift into a defensive mode, while spouting, “Well, he’s not that strange. Don’t say that. I think he’s weird, but that’s me.” This blatant contradiction exposes Elizabeth and the other sisters as righteously destructive forces, verbally attacking their brother (out of “sisterly concern”) without ever talking the blame for the detrimental effect it has on Barry, or those they speak to about him. The sisters move blissfully in their own bubble, disrupting Barry at work and lecturing him on his weaknesses, while never taking his feelings into account.
Apart from family relationships, the film also studies the battle between a picked-on innocent (Barry) and a schoolyard bully (Dean). When Dean’s men injure Lena, a furious Barry phones Dean, only to be drowned out by the Mattress Man’s repeated exclamations of, “SHUT UP!” Yet when Barry drives all the way from California to Utah in order to stare down his predator, Dean silently regards Barry’s determination with paralyzed awe. When Barry goes to leave, Dean once again raises his voice, causing Barry to menacingly jerk around. Dean quickly recoils and disappears into the back of his store. In these highly amusing scenes, Anderson illustrates how a confident victim usually has the upper-hand when dealing with a bully.
Yet Punch-Drunk Love is still chiefly about the romantic relationship that develops between Barry and Lena. It’s Lena who makes the first move, by inviting Barry on a date in which he tears up a restroom (and his hand in the process) after she mentions an embarrassing childhood story that Elizabeth informed her about. The violence raging within Barry seems to potentially doom the relationship, until Lena matches his perversity during a lovemaking scene in which they passionately discuss their desire to lovingly mutilate each other’s face. After living in an alienating cocoon his entire life, Barry has found his ideal partner in Lena, who seems curiously turned on by his strangeness. When Barry pursues Lena in Hawaii, he has made the first step toward sprouting his wings and living a life uncontrolled by his demons. At the film’s end, Barry and Lena are ready to escape their mundane lives together.
Punch-Drunk Love is such a beautifully unique work of art that it almost feels sacrilegious to place it within the confines of a particular subgenre. Nevertheless, the film does fit inside the new genre of “disaffection,” joining works by other writer/directors such as David Gordon Green, Steven Soderbergh, and Todd Solondz. This genre is dedicated to exploring the impossibility of human connection in the face of dehumanizing technological advancement (and sociological devolvement). Anger and frustration are usually bubbling beneath the benign surfaces of its characters, as they become awash in emotional confusion. Like Barry, the central people in these films often choose to live in solitude, in an attempt to distance themselves from the outside world. When attempts are made to connect with others, they are often ill-fated, especially when technology is involved.
Consider these two similar sequences. In Punch-Drunk Love, Barry calls a phone sex line and chats about his life, while the woman on the line impatiently waits to get down to business. In Solondz’s Storytelling (2001), a lonely documentary filmmaker named Toby (Paul Giamatti) calls up an old high school friend, in an attempt to reconnect with her. She instead gives him a cold reception and impatiently waits to hang up. Both scenes intensify the excruciating nature of these phone conversations by keeping the camera focused unbearably on the male speaker, as he desperately tries to connect with the detached female voice. While Toby stays seated on his bed, Barry paces through his claustrophobic apartment, as the camera never allows him out of its sight. Both men resemble trapped animals, as the audience is forced to feel their intense unease and frustration in their failed attempt to connect.
The films of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have all dealt with mankind’s struggle to connect, as its male leads struggle to escape their isolation. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Joel (Jim Carrey) forcibly separates himself from human connection by erasing all memories of his ex-girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) from his mind. Yet as their moments together become gradually deleted, Joel remembers why he loved Clementine in the first place, and attempts to mentally fight against her impending annihilation. This is a refreshing variation of the subgenre’s conventions, taking Barry’s forced isolation and his fight against it to fanciful, yet equally emotionally resonant heights. Clementine also mirrors Lena, in that she’s a complex woman who initially seems like an idealized dream-girl for the antisocial protagonist. Kaufman even admits, “She’s not literally somebody I know, but she’s somebody that I think about and who I’m attracted to.” [Kaufman 135] Yet like Anderson, Kaufman makes his female lead three-dimensional, though the future of Joel and Clementine’s relationship remains uncertain.
So, why exactly is Punch-Drunk Love a comedy of romance? The key to this answer lies within Anderson’s astonishingly visceral mis-en-scene. His filmmaking techniques allow the viewer to experience the frailties of Barry’s relationships first-hand, thus strengthening the comedy of his romantic plight. According to playwright and filmmaker Cubie King, Anderson utilizes three particular colors to create striking visual symbolism throughout the film. Not only is blue the color of Barry’s suit, it characterizes the nature of his psyche, shrouding him in drab, awkward color that conspicuously separates him from everyone in a given frame. The only person wearing equally striking clothing is Lena, who is nearly always seen wearing a bright red dress. Yet throughout the film, red also becomes a signpost that directs Barry toward his happiness. As Barry leaves his warehouse for Hawaii, a red truck passes by. As he walks toward the plane that will send him to Lena, two stewardesses clad in red stand waiting. When Barry and Lena finally embrace, their colors compliment each other beautifully. White acts as Barry’s oppressor, flooding him in harshly blinding light whenever he steps outside. White walls surround Barry as he flees the four blond brothers, while Dean sports a white shirt as he screams over the phone at Barry. Yet when Barry achieves the upper hand late in the film, Anderson flares the camera with blue light, thus visualizing the character’s newfound dominance, as well as his pure love for Lena. This use of color externalizes the character’s psyches and relationships in a style that is almost cartoon-like. [Senses of Cinema]
Most importantly, Anderson allows the audience to experience the world from Barry’s psyche. Jon Brion’s percussive score unleashes a jarring rhythm that allows the viewer to feel Barry’s jumpiness. Robert Elswitt’s cinematography often confines Barry within the frame, conveying his inner-claustrophobia. From the unpredictable sound effects (emphasizing neurosis) to the sudden explosions of onscreen color (conveying romantic bliss), Anderson uses the pure components of cinema to express his lead character’s inner feelings. No wonder Anderson has likened Punch-Drunk Love to silent films and musicals. [YouTube 2&3]
In essence, Punch-Drunk Love is truly a comedy of romance, which can be seen within its central archetypes, character relationships, relation to other films in its subgenre, and especially its mis-en-scene. A final, memorable example of this takes place when Barry plays the Harmonium for the first time. A warm (subtly red) glow appears on his face, which is only seen again as he blissfully faces Lena late in the film. This lovely early moment is interrupted by the warehouse doors bursting open, attacking Barry with a hellish white light, frightening Barry along with the viewer. Rarely have human frailties been seen so effectively through romance.
Bibliography:
Anderson, Paul Thomas. Boogie Nights. New York, New York: Faber and Faber, 1998.
Anderson, Paul Thomas. Punch-Drunk Love: The Shooting Script. New York, New York:
Newmarket Press, 2002.
Anderson, Paul Thomas. “Audio Commentary.” Hard Eight. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson.
Perf. Philip Baker Hall and John C. Rielly. Sony: 1999.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dir. Michel Gondry. Perf. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
Focus Features: 2004.
Dawson, Tom. “BBC Films-Interview-Emily Watson.” Bbc.co.uk.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2003/01/22/emily_watson_punch_drunk_love_interview.sht
ml. Copyright: 2007.
Kaufman, Charlie & Michel Gondry. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting
Script. New York, New York: Newmarket Press, 2004.
“Mattress Man Commercial” YouTube. [1]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkeLGisUHtc. Copyright: 2006.
“More cast interviews for punch-drunk love.” YouTube. [2]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2V7wiiwik&mode=related&search. Copyright:
2006.
King, Cubie. “Punch-Drunk Love: The Budding of an Auteur.” Senses of Cinema.
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/pt_anderson.html#b1. Copyright: 2005.
“Paul at a pdl conference.” YouTube. [3]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbq1oNjVWJY&mode=related&search. Copyright:
2006.
“PTA on Paris premiere interviewed about Punch Drunk Love.” YouTube. [4]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRRNUXrbyyw&mode=related&search. Copyright:
2006.
Punch-Drunk Love. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson. Perf. Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Mary
Lynn Rajskub and Philip Seymour Hoffman. New Line: 2003.
Storytelling. Dir. Todd Solondz. Perf. Paul Giamatti and Mark Webber. New Line: 2002.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Persona Non Grata: The Persona of 3 Women on Mulholland Drive
With his eyes squinting into the darkness, and his fingers wiggling as if playing an invisible piano, filmmaker David Lynch speaks to an auditorium crowded with eager students. He’s there to discuss his foundation for consciousness-based education and world peace. A tormented-looking boy approaches a microphone, and asks the cinematic genius why he insists on making films that are confusing and abstract. Lynch’s stern face breaks out into a devious grin reminiscent of the one carried by the Master of Ceremonies at Club Silencio. “Life is full of abstractions,” Lynch declares, “and the only way we can make heads or tails of it is through intuition.” He then goes on to explain how transcendental meditation has assisted him in the creation of all his art, and how it has provided him with enlightenment, and the revelation that “we are one.” [“Brain”]
This philosophy provides the key to unlocking the mystery behind three of the most fascinating, brilliant, and seemingly incomprehensible films in cinema history: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). They were each born out of a similar experience for the filmmakers. While recuperating from illness in a hospital bed, Bergman felt a liberating sensation when unconscious, which gave him the idea for Persona [Carson]. While Altman worried about his wife’s illness, he dreamed he was making a film that later became 3 Women [Thomas 104]. These stories of artistic inspiration are tremendously similar to Lynch’s method of meditation, which undoubtedly played a part in the birth of Mulholland Drive. These three films use similar characters, plots, filmmaking techniques, and themes to tell, more or less, the same story about isolation, shattered illusions, shifting identities, and unwelcome guests. Intuition may provide the only map to guide one through these cinematic dreamscapes, yet upon finding
enlightenment, one may come to the startling revelation that these films “are one.”
To begin with, close attention must be given to the characters themselves. All three films primarily focus on the strange relationship that develops between two women. One of them is talkative and exudes a bubbly personality. She’s embodied by Alma (Bibi Andersson), the nurse in Persona, Millie (Shelley Duvall), the solarium worker in 3 Women, and Diane (Naomi Watts), the aspiring actress in Mulholland Drive. All three of these women are struggling to stay content with their own idealized perception of self, by carrying with them a false persona. Alma pretends to have the utmost confidence in her professional abilities and her impending marriage. Millie pretends to attract the lust of her male co-workers and neighbors, while using societal trends to gather friends. Diane literally pretends (aka dreams) to be Betty, a promising young actress whose talent attracts the attention of directors. These are all false roles the women play to mask their inner weaknesses and insecurities. Alma lacks belief in her abilities, and remains tormented about her past, which includes an erotic episode that gave her unexpected pleasure. The wildly unpopular Millie is ignored by the men she lusts after, and all her trendy chatting falls on the deaf ears of her disinterested co-workers. Diane is a failed actress who falls into immense depression after her relationship with a lesbian lover, who also happens to also be a successful actress, comes to an end. She doesn’t take on a false persona, so much as dream about it, which proves equally destructive for her.
The second woman in these films is the opposite of the first. Instead of consciously living a fake role, she is in search of her own identity. Although she is often silent and deceptively naïve, she is deeply introspective and observant about the events that take place. She seemingly idolizes the first woman, who in turn latches onto her by playing the additional role of ‘caregiver.’ The second woman is eventually revealed to be much stronger than the first. She’s embodied by Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann), the actress gone mute in Persona, Pinky (Sissy Spacek), the mysterious new solarium-worker who moves in with Millie in 3 Women, and Camilla (Laura Elena Harring), the actress suffering from amnesia in Mulholland Drive. Both Elizabeth and Pinky (whose real name is also Millie) study the personality of the “first woman”, even secretly jotting down notes about her. In Diane’s dream, Camilla acquires the first woman’s name and physical identity in order to protect herself from fictional villains. In reality, however, these “second women” are vastly more assured in their personalities than the “first women”.
Elizabeth is secure enough in her identity to control and even absorb that of Alma’s. After a botched suicide attempt that gave her temporary amnesia, Pinky steals Millie’s identity, and brings it to an idealized version, by succeeding in wooing men and acquiring friends. Camilla is, in real life, the idealized version of her ex-lover Diane’s personal goals – she’s a successful film actress with a happy love life. The “second woman” is strong in every way that the “first woman” is weak. This makes the women’s identities begin to shift and even in some cases, “become one.”
There are other characters that revolve around these two women, several of them seeming to be nothing more than figments of the imagination. In Altman’s film, there is a woman reminiscent of Elizabeth, a silent artist named Willie (Janice Rule), who seems to be despairing over a pregnancy that she seems to know will end tragically. There are also various characters that have realistic identities, but carry out surrealistic actions. In Persona, a bewildered Alma is approached (in a dream?) by Elizabeth’s husband, who identifies her as his wife. In 3 Women, Pinky fails to recognize an old couple (nearly comical in their strangeness) who claim to be her parents. In Mulholland Drive, Diane fantasizes about having parents/adult guardians in the form of a monstrously pleased old couple, who later attack her before she commits (or dreams of committing) suicide. With the exception of Willie in 3 Women, these extraneous characters seem to symbolize the fears and anxieties that torment the women’s psyches. In Mulholland Drive, Diane casts the people she despises in real life as villains and other unfortunate souls in her dream (her victims include the director and actress that Camilla’s romantically entangled with). Her most memorable imagined demon is that of a fearsome bum who carries a box full of the characters’ most feared and neglected insecurities. These phantoms have an emotional effect similar to the grotesque creatures Willie paints in her murals.
In order to put these characters into a more comprehensible perspective, one must next focus on the plot itself, in which the two women find themselves temporarily living together in a location that seems shut off from the outside world. Sister Alma is ordered by Elizabeth’s psychiatrist to take the actress to her isolated cottage, where they will live for a few weeks, and allow the patient to recover. Pinky becomes emotionally attached to co-worker Millie, and eagerly responds to her ad posting the need for a roommate. While the cottage in Persona was isolated on a beach, Millie’s lonely apartment room is placed on the second floor, overlooking a large swimming pool. When Diane’s intense love for Camilla fails to reciprocate, she hires an assassin to kill her ex-lover. Out of guilt, she dreams that the assassination was botched by a car accident, and Camilla emerged from the wreckage naïve with amnesia. Casting herself as the angelic Betty, Diane innocently helps Camilla search for her identity, while letting her live in the Hollywood apartment she’s gotten from her aunt. In reality, the aunt is dead, while Diane remains broke and lives alone in a cheap and lonely apartment.
Although the dream-details are more clear-cut in Mulholland Drive, all three films contain segments that seem to be depicting a dream being had by the “first woman”. Alma dreams of standing by Elizabeth, looking ahead as if into a mirror, while the actress sensually strokes back the nurse’s bangs. There’s also a sequence that may symbolize the absorption of Alma’s weak identity into that of the dominant Elizabeth. Alma fiercely reaches out at Elizabeth’s face, as if in an attempt to grab at the soul she has lost within the body of the actress. Alma then does an inexplicable thing: she slashes her own arm, and forces Elizabeth to bend down and drink her blood, creating a visual representation of Elizabeth consuming Alma’s very being. A more obvious dream sequence occurs in 3 Women that blends together various images from the film into a confounding collage – one image shows a maniacally laughing doll morph into the hollow face of Pinky’s rejected “father.” This sequence also represents a considerable “break” in the film’s narrative, which can be seen in the other two films: the end of Diane’s dream in Mulholland Drive and the breaking of the film itself by a burning projector in Persona.
Although the two women’s identities merge, each filmmaker has a slightly different way of depicting it. Bergman visually represented the fusing of their beings in an unforgettable image that combined half of Alma’s face with the other half of Elizabeth’s. Lynch used dream logic to explain how Diane fantasized about splitting herself into the two fictional women who fall happily in love. Altman’s take on the material is considerably more literal, as Pinky begins to wear Millie’s makeup, hang out at the places she used to go, and successfully flirt with the men Millie sought after. She even sleeps with Edgar (Robert Fortier), Willie’s disloyal husband, who Millie also had an affair with out of desperation. After each Millie fails to save Willie’s botched pregnancy, which ends in a miscarriage thanks to Edgar’s absence, the three women bind together as a “family.” It is also implied that they killed Edgar, and Altman even “suggested” that his body is buried under the pile of tires that is seen in the final image [Altman]. The other films also end the story in some form of death and “nothingness.” Lynch ends Mulholland Drive in Diane’s supposed suicide, before cutting to a woman in an empty theater whispering, “Silencio.” This word mirrors the final utterance Alma forces Elizabeth to mutter in Persona: “nothing.” This deconstruction of life’s illusions into seemingly nihilistic fragments will be discussed later in the paper.
Although the cinematic styles of Bergman, Altman, and Lynch are wildly different, they each utilize some of the same filmmaking techniques to tell this singular story. Each film includes an atonal music score that reverberates under every image, creating a brooding sense of unease. Although only Bergman actually melded together the two women’s faces, there are numerous shots in each film that depict a merging of the two women’s souls. In Diane’s dream, when Camilla sleeps in bed next to Betty, mumbling “silencio”, the camera shoots at an angle where half of Betty’s face looks over Camilla’s profile, and their features line up, creating an image similar to Bergman’s. During the 3 Women dream sequence, Mille and Pinky sit motionless next to a pool, in the exact same pose as the twin girls who work with them. Not only does the use of twins by Altman in his subverting of the horror genre foreshadow Duvall’s involvement with more sinister twins in The Shining (1980), it also emphasizes the growing parallels between the two women. There are also shots, notably an angle where Pinky dresses in a mirror while Millie gabs through a doorway, that force the separated women to look as if they’re facing and blurring into one another. All three filmmakers use slow pacing and jarring visuals (such as brilliant flashes of white light) to give the film the rhythm and texture of a brooding, and even mournful, nightmare.
Yet as Lynch remarked to the confounded student, “intuition” is the only valid language to interpret such abstract works of art as these three films. All three filmmakers have argued that there is no real answer or overall meaning to these films. Despite the preceding similarities noted above, no ‘evidence’ could really ever be considered proof that the three films are telling the same story. The best place to find connections between works of art are not in the specifics of character or camera angles, but in fundamental themes, and this is the area where the three films truly merge into one being.
The first most glaring theme is the fallacy of role playing, in both artistic performance and life itself. Like Elizabeth, whose stage performance of “Electra” – and her voice – was halted by inner torment, the role players in all three films can’t stop reality from seeping under their practiced façades. Diane uses dreams, and later masturbation, as a defense mechanism against dealing with the inadequacies of her life, both romantically and professionally. In the case of Altman’s film, the women are subjected to forever playing roles because of their failure to exist in the real world. At the film’s conclusion, the three women isolate themselves in a house, and play the roles of grandmother (Willie), mother (Millie), and daughter (Pinky) as a zombie-like ritual. Since they have devoted themselves to playing roles, their lives are hollow. Willie wakes up from a vivid dream in the final shot, thus implying that perhaps the entire film was a dream. During Diane’s dream, all the acting is slightly heightened (examples include Betty’s bubbly demeanor, the villain’s bizarre verbal patterns, the stereotypical casting of Robert Forster as a cop, etc) to highlight the inherently false nature of Diane’s personal dreamed delusions.
A more subtle theme of the films, notably Persona and Mulholland Drive, are the lesbian undertones of the two women’s relationship. Although Pinky awkwardly clung to Millie, and described her as “the most perfect person she ever met,” their bond is more narcissistic and competitive than romantic. Alma, however, delivers a haunting monologue about having an orgasm while watching her nude female friend have sex with a stranger. Elizabeth is sexually stirred by this confession, which calls into question whether their later sensual embrace was Alma’s fantasy, or a remembered event. Diane dreams of having passionate sex with Camilla, but the reality of their relationship’s intimacy remains unknown.
Yet the lesbian attraction merely implied by Bergman is brought completely into the open by Lynch, as is the theme of “an inability to create.” It is Diane’s failure to succeed in Hollywood and build lasting relationships that eventually drives her over the edge. Willie’s miscarriage symbolizes the stagnant lives of the three women, who are occasionally framed through a kitsch water machine to look like overgrown fetuses, too timid to leave the womb. In a repeated monologue before their faces combine, Alma recites an ambiguous, detailed story to Elizabeth about the contemptuous relationship she has with her son. “You wanted a dead child,” Alma declares, while describing how Elizabeth later hated her adoring son’s “thick lips” and “moist…pleading eyes.” This description fits that of the unknown boy who, at the film’s opening, climbs out of bed to curiously stroke the morphing faces of Alma and Elizabeth. Does he symbolize a boy possibly rejected by both women? Regardless, the characters in each of these films lack an ability to create, which eventually seals their rather nihilistic fate.
This leads to a discussion of a major thematic element touched upon by each filmmaker: the shattering of illusions. Bergman bookends his film with footage of lighting embers, film reels, projected light, and fragmented images such as silent movies, cartoons, crucifixions, sexual organs, Jews rounded up by Nazis, and a Buddhist monk burning himself in Vietnam. These last two images later terrify Elizabeth, implying that the world’s horrors have made her unable to create fanciful illusions onstage, and thus scared her into silent solitude. The other aforementioned footage draws attention to the illusion of cinema itself, deconstructing it before the viewer’s very eyes. This directly mirrors the sequence at Club Silencio that immediately precedes Diane’s awakening from her dream. While music plays in the club’s theater, people fade on and off the stage, directly noting that the audible music is nothing but a recording, and an “illusion.” This is a blatant reference to Diane’s frightening recognition of the fact that everything she’s just experienced has been a dream.
While this theme speaks volumes about Lynch’s dissatisfaction with Hollywood-bred illusion, as well as Bergman’s modernist despair that temporarily stretched to a disbelief in cinema itself [Carson], Altman seems much more disenchanted with the illusion of societal standards for women. Millie’s embracement of media images and faddish catalogues has caused her to lose touch with reality. 3 Women’s utilization of the theme has less to do with psychosis and performance art as it has to do the illusions of a successful lifestyle fed to American women. Altman’s women are victimized by a cruel society and thoughtless men, and thus are granted a hermetic existence on the outskirts of civilization. The women in all the films are victims of force-fed illusions.
The final theme explored by each of these films involves the concept of a “persona non grata”, which means “unwelcome person” [Webster 240]. Each story deals with the infiltration of a persona non grata into the minds and spirits of these female characters. Just as the man in Diane’s dream is psychologically tormented by the bum behind Winkie’s diner, so is Diane herself frightened by the reality she hopes to have swallowed up by her dreamland. It isn’t so much the intruder of another woman that makes up the persona non grata in this story, as it is the suppression of an unwelcome truth – Alma’s insecurity, Millie’s superficiality, Diane’s delusions – that allows society as a whole to take advantage of these weak souls and crush them. As a review for Persona stated over its theatrical trailer, “[the film’s] about loneliness, estrangement, our ability to reach one another…Persona is an illusion shattered.” [“Trailer”]
In conclusion, one’s own personal enlightenment may be experienced while unconscious, in a dream, transcendentally meditating, or watching the flickering of a cinematic mirage, but rarely while reading words on a page. Although there are numerous similarities between the characters, plots, filmmaking techniques, and themes on display in these three films, words simply aren’t the adequate tools to describe the mystifying unity that exists between these three films. These movies seem to be built from personal intuitions the filmmakers have sensed about the nature of existence, and therefore can only be interpreted by viewers through the use of their own intuition. Why do two women find themselves blurring into one another? Is there earth-shattering significance to such an event, or is it merely just a dream? Is there evidence in our present society of people on a path to self-destruction because they have sold their souls to unreachable dreams? Aren’t we each tormented by our own persona non grata?
Bibliography:
Altman, Robert. “Audio Commentary.” 3 Women. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. Shelley
Duvall and Sissy Spacek. Criterion: 2004.
A Poem in Images. Dir. Greg Carson. Perf. Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingmar
Bergman. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2004.
“Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain.” David Lynch Foundation.
http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/tour/index.html. Copyright: 2005.
Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring.
Universal: 2002.
“Original Theatrical Trailer.” Persona. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2004.
Persona. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Perf. Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Metro
Goldwyn Mayer: 2004.
Thomas, David. Altman on Altman. London, England: Faber and Faber Limited, 2006.
3 Women. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. Criterion: 2004.
Webster’s New World Pocket Dictionary: Fourth Edition. Cleveland, Ohio: Wiley
Publishing, Inc., 2000.
This philosophy provides the key to unlocking the mystery behind three of the most fascinating, brilliant, and seemingly incomprehensible films in cinema history: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001). They were each born out of a similar experience for the filmmakers. While recuperating from illness in a hospital bed, Bergman felt a liberating sensation when unconscious, which gave him the idea for Persona [Carson]. While Altman worried about his wife’s illness, he dreamed he was making a film that later became 3 Women [Thomas 104]. These stories of artistic inspiration are tremendously similar to Lynch’s method of meditation, which undoubtedly played a part in the birth of Mulholland Drive. These three films use similar characters, plots, filmmaking techniques, and themes to tell, more or less, the same story about isolation, shattered illusions, shifting identities, and unwelcome guests. Intuition may provide the only map to guide one through these cinematic dreamscapes, yet upon finding
enlightenment, one may come to the startling revelation that these films “are one.”
To begin with, close attention must be given to the characters themselves. All three films primarily focus on the strange relationship that develops between two women. One of them is talkative and exudes a bubbly personality. She’s embodied by Alma (Bibi Andersson), the nurse in Persona, Millie (Shelley Duvall), the solarium worker in 3 Women, and Diane (Naomi Watts), the aspiring actress in Mulholland Drive. All three of these women are struggling to stay content with their own idealized perception of self, by carrying with them a false persona. Alma pretends to have the utmost confidence in her professional abilities and her impending marriage. Millie pretends to attract the lust of her male co-workers and neighbors, while using societal trends to gather friends. Diane literally pretends (aka dreams) to be Betty, a promising young actress whose talent attracts the attention of directors. These are all false roles the women play to mask their inner weaknesses and insecurities. Alma lacks belief in her abilities, and remains tormented about her past, which includes an erotic episode that gave her unexpected pleasure. The wildly unpopular Millie is ignored by the men she lusts after, and all her trendy chatting falls on the deaf ears of her disinterested co-workers. Diane is a failed actress who falls into immense depression after her relationship with a lesbian lover, who also happens to also be a successful actress, comes to an end. She doesn’t take on a false persona, so much as dream about it, which proves equally destructive for her.
The second woman in these films is the opposite of the first. Instead of consciously living a fake role, she is in search of her own identity. Although she is often silent and deceptively naïve, she is deeply introspective and observant about the events that take place. She seemingly idolizes the first woman, who in turn latches onto her by playing the additional role of ‘caregiver.’ The second woman is eventually revealed to be much stronger than the first. She’s embodied by Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann), the actress gone mute in Persona, Pinky (Sissy Spacek), the mysterious new solarium-worker who moves in with Millie in 3 Women, and Camilla (Laura Elena Harring), the actress suffering from amnesia in Mulholland Drive. Both Elizabeth and Pinky (whose real name is also Millie) study the personality of the “first woman”, even secretly jotting down notes about her. In Diane’s dream, Camilla acquires the first woman’s name and physical identity in order to protect herself from fictional villains. In reality, however, these “second women” are vastly more assured in their personalities than the “first women”.
Elizabeth is secure enough in her identity to control and even absorb that of Alma’s. After a botched suicide attempt that gave her temporary amnesia, Pinky steals Millie’s identity, and brings it to an idealized version, by succeeding in wooing men and acquiring friends. Camilla is, in real life, the idealized version of her ex-lover Diane’s personal goals – she’s a successful film actress with a happy love life. The “second woman” is strong in every way that the “first woman” is weak. This makes the women’s identities begin to shift and even in some cases, “become one.”
There are other characters that revolve around these two women, several of them seeming to be nothing more than figments of the imagination. In Altman’s film, there is a woman reminiscent of Elizabeth, a silent artist named Willie (Janice Rule), who seems to be despairing over a pregnancy that she seems to know will end tragically. There are also various characters that have realistic identities, but carry out surrealistic actions. In Persona, a bewildered Alma is approached (in a dream?) by Elizabeth’s husband, who identifies her as his wife. In 3 Women, Pinky fails to recognize an old couple (nearly comical in their strangeness) who claim to be her parents. In Mulholland Drive, Diane fantasizes about having parents/adult guardians in the form of a monstrously pleased old couple, who later attack her before she commits (or dreams of committing) suicide. With the exception of Willie in 3 Women, these extraneous characters seem to symbolize the fears and anxieties that torment the women’s psyches. In Mulholland Drive, Diane casts the people she despises in real life as villains and other unfortunate souls in her dream (her victims include the director and actress that Camilla’s romantically entangled with). Her most memorable imagined demon is that of a fearsome bum who carries a box full of the characters’ most feared and neglected insecurities. These phantoms have an emotional effect similar to the grotesque creatures Willie paints in her murals.
In order to put these characters into a more comprehensible perspective, one must next focus on the plot itself, in which the two women find themselves temporarily living together in a location that seems shut off from the outside world. Sister Alma is ordered by Elizabeth’s psychiatrist to take the actress to her isolated cottage, where they will live for a few weeks, and allow the patient to recover. Pinky becomes emotionally attached to co-worker Millie, and eagerly responds to her ad posting the need for a roommate. While the cottage in Persona was isolated on a beach, Millie’s lonely apartment room is placed on the second floor, overlooking a large swimming pool. When Diane’s intense love for Camilla fails to reciprocate, she hires an assassin to kill her ex-lover. Out of guilt, she dreams that the assassination was botched by a car accident, and Camilla emerged from the wreckage naïve with amnesia. Casting herself as the angelic Betty, Diane innocently helps Camilla search for her identity, while letting her live in the Hollywood apartment she’s gotten from her aunt. In reality, the aunt is dead, while Diane remains broke and lives alone in a cheap and lonely apartment.
Although the dream-details are more clear-cut in Mulholland Drive, all three films contain segments that seem to be depicting a dream being had by the “first woman”. Alma dreams of standing by Elizabeth, looking ahead as if into a mirror, while the actress sensually strokes back the nurse’s bangs. There’s also a sequence that may symbolize the absorption of Alma’s weak identity into that of the dominant Elizabeth. Alma fiercely reaches out at Elizabeth’s face, as if in an attempt to grab at the soul she has lost within the body of the actress. Alma then does an inexplicable thing: she slashes her own arm, and forces Elizabeth to bend down and drink her blood, creating a visual representation of Elizabeth consuming Alma’s very being. A more obvious dream sequence occurs in 3 Women that blends together various images from the film into a confounding collage – one image shows a maniacally laughing doll morph into the hollow face of Pinky’s rejected “father.” This sequence also represents a considerable “break” in the film’s narrative, which can be seen in the other two films: the end of Diane’s dream in Mulholland Drive and the breaking of the film itself by a burning projector in Persona.
Although the two women’s identities merge, each filmmaker has a slightly different way of depicting it. Bergman visually represented the fusing of their beings in an unforgettable image that combined half of Alma’s face with the other half of Elizabeth’s. Lynch used dream logic to explain how Diane fantasized about splitting herself into the two fictional women who fall happily in love. Altman’s take on the material is considerably more literal, as Pinky begins to wear Millie’s makeup, hang out at the places she used to go, and successfully flirt with the men Millie sought after. She even sleeps with Edgar (Robert Fortier), Willie’s disloyal husband, who Millie also had an affair with out of desperation. After each Millie fails to save Willie’s botched pregnancy, which ends in a miscarriage thanks to Edgar’s absence, the three women bind together as a “family.” It is also implied that they killed Edgar, and Altman even “suggested” that his body is buried under the pile of tires that is seen in the final image [Altman]. The other films also end the story in some form of death and “nothingness.” Lynch ends Mulholland Drive in Diane’s supposed suicide, before cutting to a woman in an empty theater whispering, “Silencio.” This word mirrors the final utterance Alma forces Elizabeth to mutter in Persona: “nothing.” This deconstruction of life’s illusions into seemingly nihilistic fragments will be discussed later in the paper.
Although the cinematic styles of Bergman, Altman, and Lynch are wildly different, they each utilize some of the same filmmaking techniques to tell this singular story. Each film includes an atonal music score that reverberates under every image, creating a brooding sense of unease. Although only Bergman actually melded together the two women’s faces, there are numerous shots in each film that depict a merging of the two women’s souls. In Diane’s dream, when Camilla sleeps in bed next to Betty, mumbling “silencio”, the camera shoots at an angle where half of Betty’s face looks over Camilla’s profile, and their features line up, creating an image similar to Bergman’s. During the 3 Women dream sequence, Mille and Pinky sit motionless next to a pool, in the exact same pose as the twin girls who work with them. Not only does the use of twins by Altman in his subverting of the horror genre foreshadow Duvall’s involvement with more sinister twins in The Shining (1980), it also emphasizes the growing parallels between the two women. There are also shots, notably an angle where Pinky dresses in a mirror while Millie gabs through a doorway, that force the separated women to look as if they’re facing and blurring into one another. All three filmmakers use slow pacing and jarring visuals (such as brilliant flashes of white light) to give the film the rhythm and texture of a brooding, and even mournful, nightmare.
Yet as Lynch remarked to the confounded student, “intuition” is the only valid language to interpret such abstract works of art as these three films. All three filmmakers have argued that there is no real answer or overall meaning to these films. Despite the preceding similarities noted above, no ‘evidence’ could really ever be considered proof that the three films are telling the same story. The best place to find connections between works of art are not in the specifics of character or camera angles, but in fundamental themes, and this is the area where the three films truly merge into one being.
The first most glaring theme is the fallacy of role playing, in both artistic performance and life itself. Like Elizabeth, whose stage performance of “Electra” – and her voice – was halted by inner torment, the role players in all three films can’t stop reality from seeping under their practiced façades. Diane uses dreams, and later masturbation, as a defense mechanism against dealing with the inadequacies of her life, both romantically and professionally. In the case of Altman’s film, the women are subjected to forever playing roles because of their failure to exist in the real world. At the film’s conclusion, the three women isolate themselves in a house, and play the roles of grandmother (Willie), mother (Millie), and daughter (Pinky) as a zombie-like ritual. Since they have devoted themselves to playing roles, their lives are hollow. Willie wakes up from a vivid dream in the final shot, thus implying that perhaps the entire film was a dream. During Diane’s dream, all the acting is slightly heightened (examples include Betty’s bubbly demeanor, the villain’s bizarre verbal patterns, the stereotypical casting of Robert Forster as a cop, etc) to highlight the inherently false nature of Diane’s personal dreamed delusions.
A more subtle theme of the films, notably Persona and Mulholland Drive, are the lesbian undertones of the two women’s relationship. Although Pinky awkwardly clung to Millie, and described her as “the most perfect person she ever met,” their bond is more narcissistic and competitive than romantic. Alma, however, delivers a haunting monologue about having an orgasm while watching her nude female friend have sex with a stranger. Elizabeth is sexually stirred by this confession, which calls into question whether their later sensual embrace was Alma’s fantasy, or a remembered event. Diane dreams of having passionate sex with Camilla, but the reality of their relationship’s intimacy remains unknown.
Yet the lesbian attraction merely implied by Bergman is brought completely into the open by Lynch, as is the theme of “an inability to create.” It is Diane’s failure to succeed in Hollywood and build lasting relationships that eventually drives her over the edge. Willie’s miscarriage symbolizes the stagnant lives of the three women, who are occasionally framed through a kitsch water machine to look like overgrown fetuses, too timid to leave the womb. In a repeated monologue before their faces combine, Alma recites an ambiguous, detailed story to Elizabeth about the contemptuous relationship she has with her son. “You wanted a dead child,” Alma declares, while describing how Elizabeth later hated her adoring son’s “thick lips” and “moist…pleading eyes.” This description fits that of the unknown boy who, at the film’s opening, climbs out of bed to curiously stroke the morphing faces of Alma and Elizabeth. Does he symbolize a boy possibly rejected by both women? Regardless, the characters in each of these films lack an ability to create, which eventually seals their rather nihilistic fate.
This leads to a discussion of a major thematic element touched upon by each filmmaker: the shattering of illusions. Bergman bookends his film with footage of lighting embers, film reels, projected light, and fragmented images such as silent movies, cartoons, crucifixions, sexual organs, Jews rounded up by Nazis, and a Buddhist monk burning himself in Vietnam. These last two images later terrify Elizabeth, implying that the world’s horrors have made her unable to create fanciful illusions onstage, and thus scared her into silent solitude. The other aforementioned footage draws attention to the illusion of cinema itself, deconstructing it before the viewer’s very eyes. This directly mirrors the sequence at Club Silencio that immediately precedes Diane’s awakening from her dream. While music plays in the club’s theater, people fade on and off the stage, directly noting that the audible music is nothing but a recording, and an “illusion.” This is a blatant reference to Diane’s frightening recognition of the fact that everything she’s just experienced has been a dream.
While this theme speaks volumes about Lynch’s dissatisfaction with Hollywood-bred illusion, as well as Bergman’s modernist despair that temporarily stretched to a disbelief in cinema itself [Carson], Altman seems much more disenchanted with the illusion of societal standards for women. Millie’s embracement of media images and faddish catalogues has caused her to lose touch with reality. 3 Women’s utilization of the theme has less to do with psychosis and performance art as it has to do the illusions of a successful lifestyle fed to American women. Altman’s women are victimized by a cruel society and thoughtless men, and thus are granted a hermetic existence on the outskirts of civilization. The women in all the films are victims of force-fed illusions.
The final theme explored by each of these films involves the concept of a “persona non grata”, which means “unwelcome person” [Webster 240]. Each story deals with the infiltration of a persona non grata into the minds and spirits of these female characters. Just as the man in Diane’s dream is psychologically tormented by the bum behind Winkie’s diner, so is Diane herself frightened by the reality she hopes to have swallowed up by her dreamland. It isn’t so much the intruder of another woman that makes up the persona non grata in this story, as it is the suppression of an unwelcome truth – Alma’s insecurity, Millie’s superficiality, Diane’s delusions – that allows society as a whole to take advantage of these weak souls and crush them. As a review for Persona stated over its theatrical trailer, “[the film’s] about loneliness, estrangement, our ability to reach one another…Persona is an illusion shattered.” [“Trailer”]
In conclusion, one’s own personal enlightenment may be experienced while unconscious, in a dream, transcendentally meditating, or watching the flickering of a cinematic mirage, but rarely while reading words on a page. Although there are numerous similarities between the characters, plots, filmmaking techniques, and themes on display in these three films, words simply aren’t the adequate tools to describe the mystifying unity that exists between these three films. These movies seem to be built from personal intuitions the filmmakers have sensed about the nature of existence, and therefore can only be interpreted by viewers through the use of their own intuition. Why do two women find themselves blurring into one another? Is there earth-shattering significance to such an event, or is it merely just a dream? Is there evidence in our present society of people on a path to self-destruction because they have sold their souls to unreachable dreams? Aren’t we each tormented by our own persona non grata?
Bibliography:
Altman, Robert. “Audio Commentary.” 3 Women. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. Shelley
Duvall and Sissy Spacek. Criterion: 2004.
A Poem in Images. Dir. Greg Carson. Perf. Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingmar
Bergman. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2004.
“Consciousness, Creativity, and the Brain.” David Lynch Foundation.
http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/tour/index.html. Copyright: 2005.
Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring.
Universal: 2002.
“Original Theatrical Trailer.” Persona. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2004.
Persona. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Perf. Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Metro
Goldwyn Mayer: 2004.
Thomas, David. Altman on Altman. London, England: Faber and Faber Limited, 2006.
3 Women. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek. Criterion: 2004.
Webster’s New World Pocket Dictionary: Fourth Edition. Cleveland, Ohio: Wiley
Publishing, Inc., 2000.
That's the Way it Crumbles, Cooler-Wise: Human Frailty as Romantic Comedy in The Cooler
He’s not exactly the Invisible Man, but he knows how to disappear better than anybody. His crooked grin masks untold layers of insecurity and self-doubt. Those who employ him utilize his weaknesses to increase their strengths. The man’s loss is his boss’s gain. And though his eye is hopelessly caught on his pretty female co-worker, he wouldn’t dream of admiring her out of anything other than his peripheral vision. “Why can’t I ever fall in love with someone nice like you?” she might ask him. His inevitable response would reek of rueful finality: “Yeah. Well—that’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.” All these attributes may seemingly pertain exclusively to C.C. Baxter, the protagonist of Billy Wilder’s legendary 1960 Oscar-winner The Apartment. Yet the above characteristics apply equally to Bernie Lootz, the hero of Wayne Kramer’s 2003 directorial debut, The Cooler. Released over four decades after Wilder’s classic, Kramer’s film emerged as a similar study of how human frailties romantically entangle two damaged souls in ways decidedly comedic, but not always laugh-worthy.
Shot in just three weeks, primarily within the remodeled Reno Hotel Casino, The Golden Phoenix, the film’s production was brisk and relatively uneventful. [Internet Movie Database (2)] Director Kramer allowed his established cast to possess a certain level of creative freedom, while reining them in whenever they veered too far from his artistic vision. The film’s leading man, William H. Macy, affectionately referred to Kramer as “one tenacious son of a bitch,” [IndieWire] while his co-stars Maria Bello and Ron Livingston agreed that their director was “very secure” on set. “I think he realized the value of what he had in a couple of guys like Alec Baldwin and Maria Bello,” said Livingston. [Ign] Yet the real drama behind the scenes occurred within the minds of the film’s performers. The principal actors infused their characters with their own frailties.
Macy had made a career out of playing ‘lovable losers’ in acclaimed films such as Fargo (1996) and Magnolia (1999). “I had sort of sworn off losers and then I read the script [for The Cooler] and I thought, ‘This is hysterical.’ There are no jokes in it, but the movie is very funny,” admitted Macy. [IndieWire] As an unlucky man hired to metaphysically jinx gamblers at a Reno casino, Macy was allowed to playfully parody his earlier work, allowing him to have a comfortable onscreen charisma. Yet the role also provided the actor with a formidable challenge: it would be Macy’s first-ever romantic lead. While preparing to do a nude sex scene with his love interest, played by Bello, he decided to go to a restaurant with the actress a couple weeks prior. “I told her how scared I was, and she told me how scared she was,” said Macy. [IndieWire]
Bello remembers staying up nights with Macy, hanging out and discussing the next day’s scenes. “There was a real comfort from the moment we met,” said Bello, “[Macy] made me feel very at ease and free to express myself in any way, and I think that really shows.” [Star Chat] After playing shallow parts in films like Coyote Ugly (2000), Bello was eager to challenge herself as an actress, and fought for the role of Natalie, a conflicted cocktail waitress at Macy’s casino, as well as a failed mother. “There were so many pieces of me that I’ve not been able to express fully on the screen because it’s not written on the page,” Bello said. [Star Chat] Thus, the passion Macy and Bello felt for the project, coupled with the comfort they felt worked together, allowed the acting duo to thoroughly, if nervously, embrace their explicit lovemaking scenes.
Alec Baldwin delivered an Oscar-nominated performance as Shelley, the casino boss who secretly hires Bello to woo Macy, in order to keep his ‘cooler’ from leaving the casino. His plan backfires when Bello falls in love with Macy, thus breaking his ‘cooler’s’ bad-luck karma. Yet the palpable frustration and anger in his onscreen performance stemmed from off-screen occurrences. He was fresh off his divorce from actress Kin Basinger, and on the day before he was scheduled to shoot a fiery confrontation scene between him and Bello, the National Enquirer ran a story accusing him of beating up his ex-wife. Director Kramer professed that he hadn’t expected Baldwin to show up on the set that day, yet the actor came and did the scene, fueling his performance with his raw feelings of pain and outrage. [Kramer] When Baldwin hits Bello in the face, the expression of instant regret and self-loathing on his face is entirely genuine and scarily believable. Hence, Baldwin’s frailties are acquired by his character.
The Cooler was released on November 26th, 2003, after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival that January. Anti-American sentiment had been sweeping the rest of the world that year, as U.S. President George W. Bush launched war against Iraq on March 19th, 2003. America was reeling from its involvement in a new war, as well as the political divisiveness of its citizens. Just six days prior to the film’s release, a massive anti-Bush protest was held in London. [World Atlas] Cinema was used by American audiences as a means to escape the terror and anger of the present day. Thus, during the first three winters following the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Lord of the Rings trilogy raked in record numbers at the box office, sending viewers on a classic fantastical journey loaded with Biblical archetypes. The trilogy’s final installment, The Return of the King, dominated the number one box office slot after being released in December 2003. It would go on to win eleven Oscars, including Best Picture.
In comparison, The Cooler didn’t really have much of a chance in finding an audience. Given a very limited release, the film bowed out with a gross estimated at $8.3 million. [Internet Movie Database (1)] But more importantly, the film’s depiction of damaged characters defined by their wounds would have perhaps proved too downbeat for mainstream appeal in post-9/11 America. The Bernie character reflects the nation’s mental state during the period. America was engaged in a war that was shunned not only by half the country, but by the majority of other nations across the globe. The country was morally conflicted about its engagement in Iraq, and yet was following government orders all the same. Similarly, Bernie is following the orders of his corrupt boss Shelley, by utilizing his bad karma to keep casino players from winning big bucks. It’s a morally reprehensible job, but the well-behaved Bernie performs it like a good employee (or citizen). America sure felt like a loser in 2003, and Bernie is its mirror-image.
These parallels may seem as far-fetched as the film’s plot, but thematically, they really do make sense. The film’s anti-war sentiment is evidenced in the blinding optimism of its message: that ‘love conquers all.’ After Bernie’s karma is transformed when finding true love with Natalie, Shelley scolds Bernie like a neglected army recruiter. “What is happening to you?” Shelley exclaims, but Bernie can only smile and bob his head. He’s in love, and that jubilant emotion has strengthened him as a person, making him unwilling to bow down to the amoral demands of his now-powerless boss. Shelley’s nostalgic preference for the old-time casinos thus labels him as a man from another era, whose policies and existence are headed toward extinction. His character becomes a symbol for the Bush Administration and its push for a war many argued to be outdated, immoral and unnecessary. In true anti-establishment form, the film offers Shelley his just desserts, destroying him as well as his beloved casinos, which are shown being demolished under the end credit scroll.
Where exactly The Cooler exists within the annals of film history remains difficult to peg. Some historians may argue that the movie is a product of the “smart film” movement, which emerged in the 1990’s as a cynical type of film often accused for being nihilistic. These films—which include those by directors like Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, and frequent Macy-collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson—set forth the age of irony by objectively depicting shocking events. According to Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Sconce, these films were characterized by elements such as, “a related thematic interest in random fate, [as well as] a focus on the white, middle-class family as a crucible of miscommunication and emotional dysfunction.” [Hammond 432] While The Cooler includes both of these elements—the character’s fates are routinely determined by luck, and the principal protagonists are failed middle-class parents—the film is anything but nihilistic. Described by Kramer as a “gritty fantasy,” [Kramer] the film is blatantly emotional and romantic, while using luck to both reward deserving characters and punish evildoers (most obviously during the final moments, when a random drunk driver saves the protagonists’ lives). The film even has elements of magical realism, such as Macy’s luck increases. In the style of a fantasy, Macy’s baggy suit becomes tailor-made, his clothes brighten, and the light increases around him.
Most notably, The Cooler blends social satire with a neurotic romance, and is therefore the mirror-image of The Apartment. Even when comparing the film’s principal trio of actors, the results are near-identical. Both Macy and Jack Lemmon were celebrated for playing plucky everymen; both Bello and Shirley MacLaine were spunky newcomers on the brink of stardom; both Baldwin and Fred MacMurray were predominantly comedic actors not well-known for their dramatic chops. Though both films are often labeled as romantic comedies, they deal with deathly serious topics. As Macy noted earlier, the film doesn’t offer laughs with easy gags. Every bit of the comedy and romance stems from not from a given character’s action, but how the character goes about performing a given action. In a nutshell, The Apartment and The Cooler are strikingly similar in their depictions of sexuality, business and wounded characters.
Wilder has long been championed for bringing sexual transgression into American cinema. Upon initial release, The Apartment was criticized in various publications for its “tasteless” and “immoral” plot about a man who works up his company’s food chain by letting executives use his apartment for trysts. [Diamond xiii] As Wilder took advantage of the loosening screen censorship by normalizing sexual content, Kramer similarly pushed the MPAA’s limit on sexual frankness. The Cooler’s sex scenes were devoid of any Hollywood fantasy, and instead depicted the sexual act with realism. When the rating system threatened the film with an NC-17 rating, for a brief shot of Maria Bello’s public hair, Kramer was forced to edit it out. [Kramer]
Both films also point a satirical eye at corrupt business practices. Wilder was attracted to the idea of a man lending his apartment not out of friendship, but as “a career move.” [Diamond vii] Kramer’s film depicts a man lending his bad fortune to a casino boss, who can use it to manipulate the fortune of others. Both of these men’s misfortunes (Lemon’s loneliness, Macy’s bad luck) are exploited for their boss’s personal gain, which is negated once the men fall in love. Yet while The Apartment directly casts corporate structure as the villain of the piece, The Cooler’s old-fashioned villain Shelley even finds himself victimized by contemporary corporate strategists, embodied by Larry (Ron Livingston). This makes The Cooler’s conflict decidedly more complex.
The key similarity of the films is how the characters are defined by their wounds. The love interest (MacLaine/Bello) is seen by men only as a sexual object, and hungers to have a loving relationship. She gets it with the protagonist (Lemmon/Macy), an insecure man with a clumsy yet pure heart. Yet the relationship is threatened by their villainous boss (MacMurray/Baldwin), whose corruption and heartlessness has alienated him from all human contact. He therefore emerges as the film’s loneliest character. Since these wounds are treated realistically, the films end on a note of hopefulness, instead of offering a tidy happy ending. While Lemmon and MacLaine’s relationship remains uncertain, Macy and Bello are obviously in love—though back in Reno, the equally corrupt Livingston takes Baldwin’s place, while ominously promising a “bright future.”
In the final analysis, The Cooler is truly a romantic comedy built out of human frailties. The insecurities and frustrations of its cast were injected into their performances. Historically, the film expressed the societal frailties of a conflicted country at war. And of course, The Cooler’s wounded characters mirror the people who inhabit Wilder’s Apartment. To paraphrase the final line of Wilder’s immortal script: “And that’s about it. Paper-wise.”
Bibliography:
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“USA, Timeline 2003.” World Atlas.
http://www.mapreport.com/years/2003/countries/usa.html. Copyright: 2000.
Shot in just three weeks, primarily within the remodeled Reno Hotel Casino, The Golden Phoenix, the film’s production was brisk and relatively uneventful. [Internet Movie Database (2)] Director Kramer allowed his established cast to possess a certain level of creative freedom, while reining them in whenever they veered too far from his artistic vision. The film’s leading man, William H. Macy, affectionately referred to Kramer as “one tenacious son of a bitch,” [IndieWire] while his co-stars Maria Bello and Ron Livingston agreed that their director was “very secure” on set. “I think he realized the value of what he had in a couple of guys like Alec Baldwin and Maria Bello,” said Livingston. [Ign] Yet the real drama behind the scenes occurred within the minds of the film’s performers. The principal actors infused their characters with their own frailties.
Macy had made a career out of playing ‘lovable losers’ in acclaimed films such as Fargo (1996) and Magnolia (1999). “I had sort of sworn off losers and then I read the script [for The Cooler] and I thought, ‘This is hysterical.’ There are no jokes in it, but the movie is very funny,” admitted Macy. [IndieWire] As an unlucky man hired to metaphysically jinx gamblers at a Reno casino, Macy was allowed to playfully parody his earlier work, allowing him to have a comfortable onscreen charisma. Yet the role also provided the actor with a formidable challenge: it would be Macy’s first-ever romantic lead. While preparing to do a nude sex scene with his love interest, played by Bello, he decided to go to a restaurant with the actress a couple weeks prior. “I told her how scared I was, and she told me how scared she was,” said Macy. [IndieWire]
Bello remembers staying up nights with Macy, hanging out and discussing the next day’s scenes. “There was a real comfort from the moment we met,” said Bello, “[Macy] made me feel very at ease and free to express myself in any way, and I think that really shows.” [Star Chat] After playing shallow parts in films like Coyote Ugly (2000), Bello was eager to challenge herself as an actress, and fought for the role of Natalie, a conflicted cocktail waitress at Macy’s casino, as well as a failed mother. “There were so many pieces of me that I’ve not been able to express fully on the screen because it’s not written on the page,” Bello said. [Star Chat] Thus, the passion Macy and Bello felt for the project, coupled with the comfort they felt worked together, allowed the acting duo to thoroughly, if nervously, embrace their explicit lovemaking scenes.
Alec Baldwin delivered an Oscar-nominated performance as Shelley, the casino boss who secretly hires Bello to woo Macy, in order to keep his ‘cooler’ from leaving the casino. His plan backfires when Bello falls in love with Macy, thus breaking his ‘cooler’s’ bad-luck karma. Yet the palpable frustration and anger in his onscreen performance stemmed from off-screen occurrences. He was fresh off his divorce from actress Kin Basinger, and on the day before he was scheduled to shoot a fiery confrontation scene between him and Bello, the National Enquirer ran a story accusing him of beating up his ex-wife. Director Kramer professed that he hadn’t expected Baldwin to show up on the set that day, yet the actor came and did the scene, fueling his performance with his raw feelings of pain and outrage. [Kramer] When Baldwin hits Bello in the face, the expression of instant regret and self-loathing on his face is entirely genuine and scarily believable. Hence, Baldwin’s frailties are acquired by his character.
The Cooler was released on November 26th, 2003, after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival that January. Anti-American sentiment had been sweeping the rest of the world that year, as U.S. President George W. Bush launched war against Iraq on March 19th, 2003. America was reeling from its involvement in a new war, as well as the political divisiveness of its citizens. Just six days prior to the film’s release, a massive anti-Bush protest was held in London. [World Atlas] Cinema was used by American audiences as a means to escape the terror and anger of the present day. Thus, during the first three winters following the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Lord of the Rings trilogy raked in record numbers at the box office, sending viewers on a classic fantastical journey loaded with Biblical archetypes. The trilogy’s final installment, The Return of the King, dominated the number one box office slot after being released in December 2003. It would go on to win eleven Oscars, including Best Picture.
In comparison, The Cooler didn’t really have much of a chance in finding an audience. Given a very limited release, the film bowed out with a gross estimated at $8.3 million. [Internet Movie Database (1)] But more importantly, the film’s depiction of damaged characters defined by their wounds would have perhaps proved too downbeat for mainstream appeal in post-9/11 America. The Bernie character reflects the nation’s mental state during the period. America was engaged in a war that was shunned not only by half the country, but by the majority of other nations across the globe. The country was morally conflicted about its engagement in Iraq, and yet was following government orders all the same. Similarly, Bernie is following the orders of his corrupt boss Shelley, by utilizing his bad karma to keep casino players from winning big bucks. It’s a morally reprehensible job, but the well-behaved Bernie performs it like a good employee (or citizen). America sure felt like a loser in 2003, and Bernie is its mirror-image.
These parallels may seem as far-fetched as the film’s plot, but thematically, they really do make sense. The film’s anti-war sentiment is evidenced in the blinding optimism of its message: that ‘love conquers all.’ After Bernie’s karma is transformed when finding true love with Natalie, Shelley scolds Bernie like a neglected army recruiter. “What is happening to you?” Shelley exclaims, but Bernie can only smile and bob his head. He’s in love, and that jubilant emotion has strengthened him as a person, making him unwilling to bow down to the amoral demands of his now-powerless boss. Shelley’s nostalgic preference for the old-time casinos thus labels him as a man from another era, whose policies and existence are headed toward extinction. His character becomes a symbol for the Bush Administration and its push for a war many argued to be outdated, immoral and unnecessary. In true anti-establishment form, the film offers Shelley his just desserts, destroying him as well as his beloved casinos, which are shown being demolished under the end credit scroll.
Where exactly The Cooler exists within the annals of film history remains difficult to peg. Some historians may argue that the movie is a product of the “smart film” movement, which emerged in the 1990’s as a cynical type of film often accused for being nihilistic. These films—which include those by directors like Todd Solondz, Quentin Tarantino, and frequent Macy-collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson—set forth the age of irony by objectively depicting shocking events. According to Northwestern University professor Jeffrey Sconce, these films were characterized by elements such as, “a related thematic interest in random fate, [as well as] a focus on the white, middle-class family as a crucible of miscommunication and emotional dysfunction.” [Hammond 432] While The Cooler includes both of these elements—the character’s fates are routinely determined by luck, and the principal protagonists are failed middle-class parents—the film is anything but nihilistic. Described by Kramer as a “gritty fantasy,” [Kramer] the film is blatantly emotional and romantic, while using luck to both reward deserving characters and punish evildoers (most obviously during the final moments, when a random drunk driver saves the protagonists’ lives). The film even has elements of magical realism, such as Macy’s luck increases. In the style of a fantasy, Macy’s baggy suit becomes tailor-made, his clothes brighten, and the light increases around him.
Most notably, The Cooler blends social satire with a neurotic romance, and is therefore the mirror-image of The Apartment. Even when comparing the film’s principal trio of actors, the results are near-identical. Both Macy and Jack Lemmon were celebrated for playing plucky everymen; both Bello and Shirley MacLaine were spunky newcomers on the brink of stardom; both Baldwin and Fred MacMurray were predominantly comedic actors not well-known for their dramatic chops. Though both films are often labeled as romantic comedies, they deal with deathly serious topics. As Macy noted earlier, the film doesn’t offer laughs with easy gags. Every bit of the comedy and romance stems from not from a given character’s action, but how the character goes about performing a given action. In a nutshell, The Apartment and The Cooler are strikingly similar in their depictions of sexuality, business and wounded characters.
Wilder has long been championed for bringing sexual transgression into American cinema. Upon initial release, The Apartment was criticized in various publications for its “tasteless” and “immoral” plot about a man who works up his company’s food chain by letting executives use his apartment for trysts. [Diamond xiii] As Wilder took advantage of the loosening screen censorship by normalizing sexual content, Kramer similarly pushed the MPAA’s limit on sexual frankness. The Cooler’s sex scenes were devoid of any Hollywood fantasy, and instead depicted the sexual act with realism. When the rating system threatened the film with an NC-17 rating, for a brief shot of Maria Bello’s public hair, Kramer was forced to edit it out. [Kramer]
Both films also point a satirical eye at corrupt business practices. Wilder was attracted to the idea of a man lending his apartment not out of friendship, but as “a career move.” [Diamond vii] Kramer’s film depicts a man lending his bad fortune to a casino boss, who can use it to manipulate the fortune of others. Both of these men’s misfortunes (Lemon’s loneliness, Macy’s bad luck) are exploited for their boss’s personal gain, which is negated once the men fall in love. Yet while The Apartment directly casts corporate structure as the villain of the piece, The Cooler’s old-fashioned villain Shelley even finds himself victimized by contemporary corporate strategists, embodied by Larry (Ron Livingston). This makes The Cooler’s conflict decidedly more complex.
The key similarity of the films is how the characters are defined by their wounds. The love interest (MacLaine/Bello) is seen by men only as a sexual object, and hungers to have a loving relationship. She gets it with the protagonist (Lemmon/Macy), an insecure man with a clumsy yet pure heart. Yet the relationship is threatened by their villainous boss (MacMurray/Baldwin), whose corruption and heartlessness has alienated him from all human contact. He therefore emerges as the film’s loneliest character. Since these wounds are treated realistically, the films end on a note of hopefulness, instead of offering a tidy happy ending. While Lemmon and MacLaine’s relationship remains uncertain, Macy and Bello are obviously in love—though back in Reno, the equally corrupt Livingston takes Baldwin’s place, while ominously promising a “bright future.”
In the final analysis, The Cooler is truly a romantic comedy built out of human frailties. The insecurities and frustrations of its cast were injected into their performances. Historically, the film expressed the societal frailties of a conflicted country at war. And of course, The Cooler’s wounded characters mirror the people who inhabit Wilder’s Apartment. To paraphrase the final line of Wilder’s immortal script: “And that’s about it. Paper-wise.”
Bibliography:
“A Conversation with Maria Bello.” Star Chat.
http://www.tribute.ca/newsletter/120/starchat_05.html. Copyright: 2003.
The Cooler. Dir. Wayne Kramer. Perf. William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec
Baldwin. Lions Gate: 2004.
“The Cooler: Box Office and Business.” Internet Movie Database. (1)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318374/business. Copyright: 2003.
“The Cooler: Trivia.” Internet Movie Database. (2)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318374/trivia. Copyright: 2003.
Diamond, I.A.L. & Billy Wilder. The Apartment. London, England: Faber and Faber
Ltd, 1998.
Hammond, Michael & Linda Ruth Williams. Contemporary American Cinema.
Glasgow, Great Britain: Bell and Bain Ltd, 2006.
“IGN Interviews Ron Livingston.” Ign.com.
http://movies.ign.com/articles/442/442011p1.html. Copyright: 2003.
Kramer, Wayne. “Audio Commentary.” The Cooler. Dir. Wayne Kramer. Perf.
William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin. Lions Gate: 2004.
“William H. Macy Makes Losing Hot with ‘The Cooler.’” IndieWire: People.
http://www.indiewire.com/people/people_031219macy.html. Copyright: 2003.
“USA, Timeline 2003.” World Atlas.
http://www.mapreport.com/years/2003/countries/usa.html. Copyright: 2000.
A Plane Under the Influence: The Cassavetes Touch in United 93
An American housewife is victimized by a fragile mental state which sends her spiraling toward a breakdown. An American airplane is victimized by Islamic hijackers who send it spiraling toward the ground. These may seem like two wildly dissimilar subjects for a movie, yet they were brought to cinematic life by two different filmmakers who utilized similar styles to achieve a similar effect of ultimate realism. John Cassavetes directed his unforgettable portrait of a woman’s mental breakdown in 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, while Paul Greengrass directed the best film so far in 2006, with his depiction of the September 11th plane hijacking in United 93. Cassavetes had a notorious disdain for entertainment in American film, and once stated that his goal was to “create films that are a roadmap through emotional and intellectual terrains that provide a solution on how to save pain” [Carney 374]. With his roots in documentary filmmaking, Greengrass had similar intentions for United 93, to conduct a believable re-creation of a real-life tragedy that would provide catharsis to viewers. The filmmakers’ similarities can be evidenced in their use of actors, cinematography, and an absence of storytelling conventions during a key sequence from both of their films.
In A Woman, Mable Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) is confronted by her husband Nick (Peter Falk), his mother (Katherine Cassavetes), and the family doctor (Eddie Shaw), who watch helplessly as Mable’s sanity bursts apart in front of them. In United 93, Ben Sliney is in charge of Virginia’s National Air Traffic Command center when he, along with every one of his co-worker, watch helplessly as the Twin Towers burst apart in front of them on a TV projection. These small but pivotal scenes contain perfect examples of each filmmaker’s stylistic approach.
In their use of actors, both Cassavetes and Greengrass fly in the face of convention. They each gather a cast that mixes professional actors with non-actors. Cassavetes openly loves working with amateurs because “they have no preconceived notions” of how a scene should be played [Carney 167], and often pick up on things faster than the professionals. Similarly, Greengrass favors the mix because it creates a magical chemistry where “the actors stop acting and the non-actors start to act” [United]. A Woman’s cast featured the well-known professional actor Peter Falk, in a role entirely different from his popular character on TV’s “Colombo”, along with non-professionals including several of Cassavetes’ friends and family members. Greengrass avoided such personal choices while instead going for a more universal approach, by casting unknown professionals alongside people who were involved with the real-life tragedy.
A Woman’s breakdown scene features Cassavetes’s wife Gena, his mother Katherine, his producer’s son Eddie, and Falk. This bizarre casting method intensified the scene’s painfully candid emotions. Cassavetes’s onset sparring with Gena no doubt added rage to her spastic tics, while Katherine’s inability to fully grasp her son’s filmmaking fueled her own onscreen exasperation [Woman]. Since the actors were forbidden to discuss their characters with each other, certain scenes took on a visceral spontaneity. Gena’s outbursts became so outlandish that Eddie was momentarily convinced that his co-star was truly losing it, which caused his face to pale in pure horror [Woman]. The director’s dislike of studio sets caused him to film in actual houses (occasionally his own), including the one in which this scene takes place. After renting the Hollywood house from its owners, Cassavetes set up production offices upstairs, and made various rooms look smaller, thus giving the location a realistic intimacy [Carne 319]. The resulting scene plays like an ordinary, overheard domestic squabble.
Greengrass’s approach to casting both resembles and differs from that of Cassavetes. Various air traffic controllers and military personnel play themselves, while acting out precisely what they did on September 11th, in the room where they were on that day. The sequence featuring Ben Sliney (playing himself) reacting to footage of the explosion emanating from the World Trade Center, is interspersed with mini-scenes at the real air traffic control centers in Massachusetts and New York, as well as on board the doomed Flight 93, populated by real stewardesses and pilots. This creates a veracious tone in every movement and utterance of dialogue. Where Greengrass differs from Cassavetes is in his actors’ preparation. Each actor playing a deceased individual on Flight 93 was encouraged to visit the families of their deceased character. While this gesture was undoubtedly respectful and moving, it caused some actors to take a subtly idealistic approach to their characters, perhaps making them a touch more saintly than necessary, in order to please the victims’ families. This is one of the only elements of Greengrass’s film that compromises the purity of Cassavetes’s approach, in which the actors never discussed their characters, thereby avoiding the tainting of their performance by the outside world. Yet Greengrass’s approach does work in an emotional context.
In the realm of cinematography, both filmmakers use seemingly identical styles. They both shoot scenes with handheld cameras that, according to Cassavetes, push “the actors’ tempo up without words” [Carne 343]. To capture the essence of unrehearsed human behavior, both filmmakers shot their scenes in prolonged, uninterrupted takes (sometimes up to an hour long) which allowed actors to truly live in the moment, without thinking of a camera rolling. In A Woman, Eddie became so involved in an argument with Falk that he accidentally hit the camera, creating an improvised moment of jarringly visceral violence. In each of the sequences being analyzed, two cameramen were generally used. One of them shot mostly in wide-angles, creating master shots which would be interspersed with the second cameraman’s tighter close-ups, which intrude on the action to capture the smallest of details. The focus in both scenes becomes blurred, and the framing of various shots are devoid of a central focus. Individual edits cut off characters in mid-sentence, such as Eddie’s final line in A Woman’s scene (“I have a letter here that says-”). This utter lack of artistic composition causes the cinematography to seem observational, as if it’s capturing the sight of an invisible spectator in the room.
Curiously enough, Greengrass’s sole cinematographic departure from Cassavetes in essence becomes an elaboration on the past director’s goals. Each shot in the breakdown scene is fairly stationary, save for a few noticeable shakes. This is in keeping with Cassavetes’s forbiddance of simulating emotion through a technical effect [Carne 351]. Yet in United 93, Greengrass keeps the camera moving, but never smoothly. As Ben and his co-workers stare at the burning towers, the camera darts back and forth from the terrifying footage, back to their confounded faces. Although this visual approach seems to simulate emotion through technical effects, it’s actually just as objective as Cassavetes’s style. The camera moves like a confused onlooker struggling to find meaning in the chaos surrounding it. This puts the viewer entirely inside the action, without the luxury of a cinematographer that directs their attention toward points of interest. The audience thus feels the helpless confusion of the characters, which makes their experience of the onscreen action all the more realistic and viscerally affecting.
Finally, both Cassavetes and Greengrass clearly treasure an absence of storytelling conventions. Both sequences occur in real-time, thereby avoiding any explanation of a character or event. Greengrass admitted that he made no attempt to explain the technical jargon used by the military and air traffic controllers, because in order for the film “to feel real, it had to be challenging” [United]. In the final analysis, the lack of explanation in both films allows the viewer to easily get to the core of the issues being studied, without getting sidetracked by needless details. Not only are the labels of ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ never issued, but the inherent meaning of the scenes are never preached. This allows each scene’s content to speak for itself, while inviting any form of interpretation from viewers. Since both A Woman and United 93 demolish any form of narrative convention, they are left to follow the rule of Cassavetes, who said that “in replacing narrative, you need an idea” [Carne 314]. Both scenes, involving the observation of a tragic event, are built around the same idea: when a failure to communicate occurs (in a marriage or a nation), tragedy inevitably strikes.
In the end, the filmmaking techniques of Cassavetes and Greengrass are strikingly similar not only in their use of actors, cinematography, and a dismissal of storytelling conventions, but also in their inherent goals. While Cassavetes wanted to provide viewers with a “solution on how to save pain,” Greengrass actually eased the pain felt by the families of 9/11 victims, who attested to the film’s cathartic power after screening the movie. The general consensus was that by experiencing the tragedy to the maximum degree of realism, they could finally reclaim a sense of inner peace for themselves. Such a reaction begs the question, why must we humans experience pain so that we may find peace? Can we only manage to face reality through the flickering of movie screen?
Bibliography:
Carne, Ray. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London, England: Faber and Faber Limited,
2001.
Ferris, Mike & Bo Harwood. “Audio Commentary.” A Woman Under the Influence.
Dir. John Cassavetes. Perf. Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands. Criterion: 2004.
Greengrass, Paul. “Feature Commentary.” United 93. Dir. Paul Greengrass. Perf.
Christian Clemenson and Ben Sliney. Universal: 2006.
In A Woman, Mable Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) is confronted by her husband Nick (Peter Falk), his mother (Katherine Cassavetes), and the family doctor (Eddie Shaw), who watch helplessly as Mable’s sanity bursts apart in front of them. In United 93, Ben Sliney is in charge of Virginia’s National Air Traffic Command center when he, along with every one of his co-worker, watch helplessly as the Twin Towers burst apart in front of them on a TV projection. These small but pivotal scenes contain perfect examples of each filmmaker’s stylistic approach.
In their use of actors, both Cassavetes and Greengrass fly in the face of convention. They each gather a cast that mixes professional actors with non-actors. Cassavetes openly loves working with amateurs because “they have no preconceived notions” of how a scene should be played [Carney 167], and often pick up on things faster than the professionals. Similarly, Greengrass favors the mix because it creates a magical chemistry where “the actors stop acting and the non-actors start to act” [United]. A Woman’s cast featured the well-known professional actor Peter Falk, in a role entirely different from his popular character on TV’s “Colombo”, along with non-professionals including several of Cassavetes’ friends and family members. Greengrass avoided such personal choices while instead going for a more universal approach, by casting unknown professionals alongside people who were involved with the real-life tragedy.
A Woman’s breakdown scene features Cassavetes’s wife Gena, his mother Katherine, his producer’s son Eddie, and Falk. This bizarre casting method intensified the scene’s painfully candid emotions. Cassavetes’s onset sparring with Gena no doubt added rage to her spastic tics, while Katherine’s inability to fully grasp her son’s filmmaking fueled her own onscreen exasperation [Woman]. Since the actors were forbidden to discuss their characters with each other, certain scenes took on a visceral spontaneity. Gena’s outbursts became so outlandish that Eddie was momentarily convinced that his co-star was truly losing it, which caused his face to pale in pure horror [Woman]. The director’s dislike of studio sets caused him to film in actual houses (occasionally his own), including the one in which this scene takes place. After renting the Hollywood house from its owners, Cassavetes set up production offices upstairs, and made various rooms look smaller, thus giving the location a realistic intimacy [Carne 319]. The resulting scene plays like an ordinary, overheard domestic squabble.
Greengrass’s approach to casting both resembles and differs from that of Cassavetes. Various air traffic controllers and military personnel play themselves, while acting out precisely what they did on September 11th, in the room where they were on that day. The sequence featuring Ben Sliney (playing himself) reacting to footage of the explosion emanating from the World Trade Center, is interspersed with mini-scenes at the real air traffic control centers in Massachusetts and New York, as well as on board the doomed Flight 93, populated by real stewardesses and pilots. This creates a veracious tone in every movement and utterance of dialogue. Where Greengrass differs from Cassavetes is in his actors’ preparation. Each actor playing a deceased individual on Flight 93 was encouraged to visit the families of their deceased character. While this gesture was undoubtedly respectful and moving, it caused some actors to take a subtly idealistic approach to their characters, perhaps making them a touch more saintly than necessary, in order to please the victims’ families. This is one of the only elements of Greengrass’s film that compromises the purity of Cassavetes’s approach, in which the actors never discussed their characters, thereby avoiding the tainting of their performance by the outside world. Yet Greengrass’s approach does work in an emotional context.
In the realm of cinematography, both filmmakers use seemingly identical styles. They both shoot scenes with handheld cameras that, according to Cassavetes, push “the actors’ tempo up without words” [Carne 343]. To capture the essence of unrehearsed human behavior, both filmmakers shot their scenes in prolonged, uninterrupted takes (sometimes up to an hour long) which allowed actors to truly live in the moment, without thinking of a camera rolling. In A Woman, Eddie became so involved in an argument with Falk that he accidentally hit the camera, creating an improvised moment of jarringly visceral violence. In each of the sequences being analyzed, two cameramen were generally used. One of them shot mostly in wide-angles, creating master shots which would be interspersed with the second cameraman’s tighter close-ups, which intrude on the action to capture the smallest of details. The focus in both scenes becomes blurred, and the framing of various shots are devoid of a central focus. Individual edits cut off characters in mid-sentence, such as Eddie’s final line in A Woman’s scene (“I have a letter here that says-”). This utter lack of artistic composition causes the cinematography to seem observational, as if it’s capturing the sight of an invisible spectator in the room.
Curiously enough, Greengrass’s sole cinematographic departure from Cassavetes in essence becomes an elaboration on the past director’s goals. Each shot in the breakdown scene is fairly stationary, save for a few noticeable shakes. This is in keeping with Cassavetes’s forbiddance of simulating emotion through a technical effect [Carne 351]. Yet in United 93, Greengrass keeps the camera moving, but never smoothly. As Ben and his co-workers stare at the burning towers, the camera darts back and forth from the terrifying footage, back to their confounded faces. Although this visual approach seems to simulate emotion through technical effects, it’s actually just as objective as Cassavetes’s style. The camera moves like a confused onlooker struggling to find meaning in the chaos surrounding it. This puts the viewer entirely inside the action, without the luxury of a cinematographer that directs their attention toward points of interest. The audience thus feels the helpless confusion of the characters, which makes their experience of the onscreen action all the more realistic and viscerally affecting.
Finally, both Cassavetes and Greengrass clearly treasure an absence of storytelling conventions. Both sequences occur in real-time, thereby avoiding any explanation of a character or event. Greengrass admitted that he made no attempt to explain the technical jargon used by the military and air traffic controllers, because in order for the film “to feel real, it had to be challenging” [United]. In the final analysis, the lack of explanation in both films allows the viewer to easily get to the core of the issues being studied, without getting sidetracked by needless details. Not only are the labels of ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist’ never issued, but the inherent meaning of the scenes are never preached. This allows each scene’s content to speak for itself, while inviting any form of interpretation from viewers. Since both A Woman and United 93 demolish any form of narrative convention, they are left to follow the rule of Cassavetes, who said that “in replacing narrative, you need an idea” [Carne 314]. Both scenes, involving the observation of a tragic event, are built around the same idea: when a failure to communicate occurs (in a marriage or a nation), tragedy inevitably strikes.
In the end, the filmmaking techniques of Cassavetes and Greengrass are strikingly similar not only in their use of actors, cinematography, and a dismissal of storytelling conventions, but also in their inherent goals. While Cassavetes wanted to provide viewers with a “solution on how to save pain,” Greengrass actually eased the pain felt by the families of 9/11 victims, who attested to the film’s cathartic power after screening the movie. The general consensus was that by experiencing the tragedy to the maximum degree of realism, they could finally reclaim a sense of inner peace for themselves. Such a reaction begs the question, why must we humans experience pain so that we may find peace? Can we only manage to face reality through the flickering of movie screen?
Bibliography:
Carne, Ray. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London, England: Faber and Faber Limited,
2001.
Ferris, Mike & Bo Harwood. “Audio Commentary.” A Woman Under the Influence.
Dir. John Cassavetes. Perf. Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands. Criterion: 2004.
Greengrass, Paul. “Feature Commentary.” United 93. Dir. Paul Greengrass. Perf.
Christian Clemenson and Ben Sliney. Universal: 2006.
S*O*U*N*D* in M*A*S*H*
S*O*U*N*D*
*(some) *(overlapping) *(undertones) *(need) *(description)
In Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*
*(some) *(overlapping) *(undertones) *(need) *(description)
In Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*
Several bloodied bodies of wounded American soldiers fly through the sky, like airborne corpses, carried by helicopters to the nearest Mobile Army Security Hospital. Located three miles from the front line, this unit is inhabited by surgeons who utilize ironic humor as a defense mechanism against the madness of war. This is the setting for director Robert Altman’s watershed comedy M*A*S*H* (1970), a film that broke as many rules as its anti-establishment characters, in a no-holds-barred attempt to capture reality. With an anarchic audacity worthy of Hawkeye Pierce, Altman blatantly ignored the Classical Hollywood style of sound, particularly its showcasing of individual voices, its use of music to convey character emotions, and its inclusion of a narrator to both advance the narrative and ground it in reality. The film substituted these conventions with revolutionary sound techniques that constructed a stark portrait of realism, while subverting it with an attitude of defiant detachment. Therefore, the sound in M*A*S*H* directly reflects the psyche of its rebellious protagonists.
First of all, Altman thoroughly abandoned the idea of playing favoritism with sound. In the majority of Hollywood films prior to M*A*S*H*, only characters with scripted dialogue were audible. Extras were either directed to do mindless bits of background business, or create the illusion of ‘conversation’ by repeating nonsense words such as “hurumph.” Altman’s democratic approach to filmmaking, of allowing all actors to have an equal part in creating the story, led him to obliterate this rule by supplying every performer in a given scene with a microphone. The admittance of overlapping, and occasionally indeterminable, dialogue thus became a trademark of Altman’s work, and it allows every verbal exchange in M*A*S*H* to acquire the documentary-style authenticity of an overheard conversation.
Sometimes this technique helps in better establishing character dynamics. The very first moment of dialogue occurs when Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Roger Bowen) barks out orders to Cpl. Radar (Gary Burghoff). Their voices overlap not to provide the film’s opening with a cheap stunt, but to establish the fact that Radar is infinitely more knowledgeable and quick-witted than Blake, and can both predict and articulate every order before they leave the Colonel’s mouth. This also establishes the oppressively repetitive atmosphere of the setting, where nothing occurs but the same hellish routine of dealing with the dead. Radar’s continuous interruption of Blake carries with it an attitude of “been there, heard that,” and is in itself a humorous form of defiance. Overlapping dialogue also allows every performer to acquire an unrehearsed spontaneity that allows them to embody, instead of portray, their characters. This makes every person in M*A*S*H* seem like a fully realized human being, including anesthesiologist Ugly John (Carl Gottlieb), who tells Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) that he’ll be “passing gas” for him. These little details give the characters a humanity that transcends any scripted line.
Furthermore, Altman’s admittance of indeterminable dialogue also creates a sense of realism in character interactions. Unlike Hollywood films that used a “presence” track to include audible but unobtrusive location atmosphere under the dominant dialogue, Altman allows the presence in M*A*S*H* to sometimes be as loud as the dialogue. Most indoor locations in the unit have little to no privacy from the outside world, as army jeeps and helicopter whiz by. The film’s characters (as well as the audience) are thus never provided a total escape from the horrors of the location. Sometimes this technique is used thematically, such as when Maj. O’Houlihan (Sandy Kellerman) makes her grand entrance, stepping off a helicopter with a salute and a smile. Her naïve outlook on war is symbolized by the dominant sound of the helicopter, which drowns out any war sounds around her, thus making her initially oblivious to her gritty surroundings. An absence of audible dialogue can also be used for comic effect, such as during the climactic football game, when someone on the opposing team provokes a M*A*S*H* player by calling him a racial slur. When he gets his revenge on the antagonist player, his words are muted, thus leaving them to the imagination of the audience, and making the enraged reaction of his enemy all the more hilarious. There are even moments when sounds speak more volumes than words, such as Hawkeye’s signature whistle, that conveys countless emotions and attitudes throughout the course of the film.
Second of all, Altman also did away with the Hollywood convention of using music to convey character emotions. In usual mainstream fare, the music would be happy when the characters were happy, or swell up emotionally during a romantic sequence. While the technique of overlapping/indeterminable dialogue aided in establishing realism, Altman’s use of music was the first of two sound techniques that subverted believability with an ironic eye. Instead of conveying character emotions, the music usually conveys self-conscious cinematic conventions. When Hawkeye and Trapper John (Elliot Gould) are captured by police, the music swells into exaggerated suspenseful alarm. Yet both characters remain unflappably calm, and eventually make a casual escape. Another example of this technique occurs when Hawkeye asks Lt. Dish (Jo Ann Pflug) to have sex with an unconscious Capt. Painless (John Schuck), to relieve him of his homosexual impulses. The stated awkwardness of the characters is not at all expressed by the music, which swells with nearly operatic romantic ecstasy. Yet the most famous example of this happens during Hawkeye’s entrance, as a studio-imposed scroll (describing the film’s Korean War setting, which failed at erasing Vietnam parallels) is accompanied by a score drooling with over-the-top patriotism. This music is sharply juxtaposed with the inglorious carnage and lack of heroism in the footage.
By joining together realistic footage with wildly artificial music, the film puts the audience into the amused but uneasy mindset of the characters. The shocking opening, depicting gory bodies transported to the M*A*S*H* unit, is scored with the alternatively upbeat and melancholy song “Suicide is Painless”, which is also performed live (and happily) during the mock-suicide of (who else?) Capt. Painless. The message here seems to be that suicide would be painless for these miserable surgeons, who use humor as their only means of escape. This is also mirrored by the violent football game accompanied by comical music that sounds like a cross between an out-of-control circus, and an adolescent marching band. A Japanese radio station, played over various speakers in the unit, also injects ironic humor into key moments, such as when “It’s time to say sayonara” is sung over the forced exit of prig Maj. Burns (Robert Duvall). “Shoeshine Boy” is played twice, during two interruptions of Hawkeye, one in which he’s called to work, another in which he’s called home.
Finally, perhaps the biggest stroke of genius in the sound of M*A*S*H* is its unconventional use of a narrator. Normally, a Hollywood film would utilize a narrator to both advance the film’s narrative and ground the plot in a historical or cultural reality. This narrator was usually the supreme voice of authority, had a god’s eye-perspective of each character’s psyche, and provided a comfortable voice of wisdom to the audience, thus diffusing the tension of dramatic scenes – a post-M*A*S*H* example of this would be the insufferable Barry Lyndon (1975). Altman’s much-talked-about use of an authoritative voice over speakers in the M*A*S*H* unit broke all of the preceding Hollywood conventions. It was also the second of Altman’s sound techniques to cast a humorously ironic eye on the ‘reality’ his film establishes. Until the very end, the speaker in M*A*S*H* seems totally oblivious to the plot being shown to the audience, and thus becomes a character itself. Its voice of authority can hardly be thought of as infallible, since it routinely stutters, mispronounces words, and often ends with the order “please disregard the last transmission.” The unprofessional nature of the speaker makes it even easier for the soldiers to disregard its banning of porn and marijuana. In the same vein of the film’s ironic music, the speaker often advertises escapist war pictures (one of which is labeled “The Biggest Parade of Laughs of World War Two”) that contradict the reality of the film it’s in. The final moments of M*A*S*H* have the speaker advertise the film the audience has just seen, thus inviting the viewer to discard the film’s events with the same detachment of the characters.
In the end, M*A*S*H* is a triumphant depiction of war’s absurdity, with its own built-in defense mechanism. Yet beyond its unconventional sound techniques of muddled dialogue, ironic music, and a seemingly clueless narrator, Altman’s film asks inherent questions about the nature of reality that he explored in his next film Brewster McCloud (1971). To what extent do we, the human race, truly experience life for what it is, and how do we choose to ignore life’s complexities and ambiguities in order to preserve our own sanity? Why is it necessary for us, like the characters, to laugh that we may not cry? Watching the films of Robert Altman, I sometimes feel like Maj. O’Houlihan, a trained optimist adrift in a chaotic world beyond easy comprehension. Altman’s ironic humor promises no safety from the overwhelming reality of his films.
Extraordinary People: The Oscar-winning Screenwriting of Alvin Sargent
Within the annals of film history, Ordinary People has the misfortune of being chiefly remembered as the movie that beat out Raging Bull for the Best Picture Oscar in 1980. It won three other Academy Awards, for Best Supporting Actor (Timothy Hutton), Best Director (Robert Redford), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Alvin Sargent). Most film majors at Columbia remain baffled about how a low-key “soap opera” could have won the top prize over Scorsese’s masterpiece. And although Bull remains one of the greatest films of its decade, People has a tangible reason for its success. Beyond its amazing performances and sensitive direction, it is the screenplay that allows the film’s themes to emanate from the behavior and emotions of its characters. Screenwriter Sargent’s use of metaphor, dialogue, and character complexity are the reasons why I chose to study this film, before I wrote my own screenplay entitled Role Play, which is also a character study. My screenplay, like People, also deals with the façades we seek comfort in, and centers around a young character on a journey toward self-discovery.
First of all, Sargent’s use of metaphors is sparse but potent. These are the moments that you may not catch upon the first viewing, and thus makes any repeated viewings immensely rewarding (instead of merely repetitive). The metaphors in People also contain hints about character nuance that would seem obvious if openly stated. Sargent makes sure that not a frame is wasted, and that every moment contains a deeper meaning. Consider an early scene in Conrad’s English class, where his teacher asks him about a key character within the text they are reading. “Do you feel he was powerless to the grip of circumstance?” she asks, prompting a clueless Conrad to respond inconclusively. The guilt over his brother’s death causes Conrad to become distracted in everyday life, and he therefore can’t see the truth staring him the face. The truth is, Conrad was powerless to the grip of circumstance, in that the storm that killed his brother (during their boat trip) was not the fault of his own, but in reality, the result of his brother simply giving up (and letting go of the boat). This scene foreshadows the discoveries to come without the audience (upon first viewing) being conscious of it, and Conrad’s behavior “metaphorically” hints at his inability to see the truth of his predicament.
Some metaphors are more silent ones, such as when Conrad’s father Calvin is jogging through a forest, while remembering a preceding fight between his wife and son. His ever-failing struggle to create peace in his family, and the fact he’s allowing himself to be the ‘rope’ in his family’s emotional tug of war, finally causes him to collapse. This moment viscerally illustrates Calvin’s internal struggle reaching a boiling point, as his increasingly frenzied running is seen over dialogue from his family’s argument. The sequence climaxes with Calvin tripping and falling, leading immediately to the scene it was foreshadowing, Calvin’s visit to Conrad’s psychiatrist. Here, Calvin’s articulated feelings (about his losing battle to keep his family together) are easily comprehended by the audience, after metaphorically experiencing them during the previous scene.
My favorite metaphor in the film occurs after one of its most wrenching scenes, in which Conrad’s mother Beth refuses to be in a photograph with her son. Although she cheerily suggests that Conrad take a picture with Calvin instead, Conrad can easily sense her feeling of discomfort and coldness around him, and he eventually explodes. This comes as a shock to Beth’s parents, who are present in the room. Beth flees to the kitchen, and accidentally drops a plate a plate on the floor, splitting it in half. As she calmly informs her mother that she can’t deal with Conrad’s outbursts anymore, her attention drifts toward the plate, which her eyes study methodically. Finally, she interrupts further interrogations from her mother by holding up the plate and observing, “I think we can save this. It’s a nice clean break.” This one moment brilliantly encompasses the character of Beth, who is unable to deal with life’s “mess”, and can only fix problems that have a “nice, clean” solution. Her relationship with Conrad cannot be saved because there are too many painful complexities to their relationship – she had always favored the deceased older son (Buck), which only intensifies Conrad’s guilt, and led to his failed suicide attempt. As Calvin later observes, Beth “buried her love along with Buck”, and is now a broken woman who hides behind a hollow smile, and can only live within a limited existence under her own control. She wants to break off from Conrad like a plate neatly breaking in two, but life will prove to be not so easy.
This leads to the next major strength of the film, which is the dialogue. The mainstream cinema of today routinely insults the intelligence of its audience by having characters spell out emotions and motivations in long-winded exposition. In the latest Star Wars film (for example), when Padme wants to tell Anakin that he’s breaking her heart, and that he’s going down a path she can’t follow, she simply states, “Anakin, you’re breaking my heart. You’re going down a path I can’t follow.” How boring is that? The dialogue in People is exquisitely subtle in comparison, allowing the characters to partake in the kind of discussion that is commonplace in suburban households. What is implied under this mundane chatter is always more resonant than what is being heard.
After Conrad accidentally startles her mother, who is silently sitting in the Buck’s room, he makes another of his earnest attempts to connect with her. The dialogue in this scene wonderfully captures the essence of their relationship, by implying (rather than stating) their true feelings:
Beth: Weren’t you swimming?
Conrad: Yeah, sorry I scared you.
Beth: How’d it go?
Conrad: Good. I swam well.
Beth: Good. [heads for her bedroom]
Conrad: I think I could swim the 50 if my timing was better. I’m a little off.
Beth: You’ll have to work at that. [opens bedroom door]
Conrad: I got 74 on a Trig quiz.
Beth: 74? Gee, I was awful at Trig.
Conrad: Oh. Yeah? Did you…You took Trig?
Beth: Wait a minute. Did I take Trig? I bought you two shirts. They’re on your bed.
With that, Beth escapes into her bedroom and shuts the door. Conrad wants Beth to love him (and take an active interest in him), but Beth’s emotional weakness causes her to remain oblivious to anyone’s emotions other than her own. If the characters had simply stated these facts, they wouldn’t resonate nearly as much as they are when implied. Sargent’s dialogue is deceptively simple, yet subtly conveys volumes.
The final element of People’s screenplay I find inspiring, and want to include in my own feature script, is the character complexities. With the exception of Conrad’s psychiatrist (who mainly functions as a source of grounded wisdom), every character in the film has enough depth to defy being labeled an archetype (or stereotype). When Conrad’s friends turn on him when he quits the swim team, they aren’t just acting like villainous jocks. Conrad’s seemingly cold indifference to the team leads his friends to understandably feel betrayed, and it isn’t until late in the film that Conrad admits why he can’t hang out with them anymore. He admits that “it’s too painful to be around” the friends that he and his deceased brother hung out with. This is an unfortunate end to a friendship, where both sides are equally hurt, and no ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ labels are issued. Similarly, his relationship with soon-to-be-girlfriend Jeannine has its own flaws and awkwardness, such as when her laughter disrupts Conrad’s serious description of his attempted suicide. Her laughter is generated by the embarrassment she feels when Conrad’s friends begin to tease her, although Conrad initially takes it as a sign of her insensitivity. Such misunderstandings are simple, yet very common in everyday life.
The character of Karen, Conrad’s friend at the hospital, is similar to the character complexities in my feature script. She believes that in order to exist in the ‘real world’, she must ignore her own problems, and thus play the role of a fully-functional, upbeat person (which explains her involvement in her high school drama club). Yet playing a role your entire life soon leads to self-destruction and Karen later commits suicide. The main character in Role Play is on a journey toward discovering similar truths about himself and his own “artificial roles”, although his ending is a happier one.
In the end, Ordinary People is a profoundly inspiring film to me as both a filmmaker and a film lover. It demonstrates how characters truly can carry a film themselves, if they are written in a way that their emotional journeys can provide as much discovery to the audience as they can for themselves. Through subtle metaphor, perceptive dialogue, and character complexity, Alvin Sargent’s screenplay for this film is a masterpiece of character nuance. What seems ordinary on the surface, is revealed to be quite the opposite underneath, and as the characters in my screenplay struggle with their own identities, I hope their struggle can be even a fraction as involving as this film.
First of all, Sargent’s use of metaphors is sparse but potent. These are the moments that you may not catch upon the first viewing, and thus makes any repeated viewings immensely rewarding (instead of merely repetitive). The metaphors in People also contain hints about character nuance that would seem obvious if openly stated. Sargent makes sure that not a frame is wasted, and that every moment contains a deeper meaning. Consider an early scene in Conrad’s English class, where his teacher asks him about a key character within the text they are reading. “Do you feel he was powerless to the grip of circumstance?” she asks, prompting a clueless Conrad to respond inconclusively. The guilt over his brother’s death causes Conrad to become distracted in everyday life, and he therefore can’t see the truth staring him the face. The truth is, Conrad was powerless to the grip of circumstance, in that the storm that killed his brother (during their boat trip) was not the fault of his own, but in reality, the result of his brother simply giving up (and letting go of the boat). This scene foreshadows the discoveries to come without the audience (upon first viewing) being conscious of it, and Conrad’s behavior “metaphorically” hints at his inability to see the truth of his predicament.
Some metaphors are more silent ones, such as when Conrad’s father Calvin is jogging through a forest, while remembering a preceding fight between his wife and son. His ever-failing struggle to create peace in his family, and the fact he’s allowing himself to be the ‘rope’ in his family’s emotional tug of war, finally causes him to collapse. This moment viscerally illustrates Calvin’s internal struggle reaching a boiling point, as his increasingly frenzied running is seen over dialogue from his family’s argument. The sequence climaxes with Calvin tripping and falling, leading immediately to the scene it was foreshadowing, Calvin’s visit to Conrad’s psychiatrist. Here, Calvin’s articulated feelings (about his losing battle to keep his family together) are easily comprehended by the audience, after metaphorically experiencing them during the previous scene.
My favorite metaphor in the film occurs after one of its most wrenching scenes, in which Conrad’s mother Beth refuses to be in a photograph with her son. Although she cheerily suggests that Conrad take a picture with Calvin instead, Conrad can easily sense her feeling of discomfort and coldness around him, and he eventually explodes. This comes as a shock to Beth’s parents, who are present in the room. Beth flees to the kitchen, and accidentally drops a plate a plate on the floor, splitting it in half. As she calmly informs her mother that she can’t deal with Conrad’s outbursts anymore, her attention drifts toward the plate, which her eyes study methodically. Finally, she interrupts further interrogations from her mother by holding up the plate and observing, “I think we can save this. It’s a nice clean break.” This one moment brilliantly encompasses the character of Beth, who is unable to deal with life’s “mess”, and can only fix problems that have a “nice, clean” solution. Her relationship with Conrad cannot be saved because there are too many painful complexities to their relationship – she had always favored the deceased older son (Buck), which only intensifies Conrad’s guilt, and led to his failed suicide attempt. As Calvin later observes, Beth “buried her love along with Buck”, and is now a broken woman who hides behind a hollow smile, and can only live within a limited existence under her own control. She wants to break off from Conrad like a plate neatly breaking in two, but life will prove to be not so easy.
This leads to the next major strength of the film, which is the dialogue. The mainstream cinema of today routinely insults the intelligence of its audience by having characters spell out emotions and motivations in long-winded exposition. In the latest Star Wars film (for example), when Padme wants to tell Anakin that he’s breaking her heart, and that he’s going down a path she can’t follow, she simply states, “Anakin, you’re breaking my heart. You’re going down a path I can’t follow.” How boring is that? The dialogue in People is exquisitely subtle in comparison, allowing the characters to partake in the kind of discussion that is commonplace in suburban households. What is implied under this mundane chatter is always more resonant than what is being heard.
After Conrad accidentally startles her mother, who is silently sitting in the Buck’s room, he makes another of his earnest attempts to connect with her. The dialogue in this scene wonderfully captures the essence of their relationship, by implying (rather than stating) their true feelings:
Beth: Weren’t you swimming?
Conrad: Yeah, sorry I scared you.
Beth: How’d it go?
Conrad: Good. I swam well.
Beth: Good. [heads for her bedroom]
Conrad: I think I could swim the 50 if my timing was better. I’m a little off.
Beth: You’ll have to work at that. [opens bedroom door]
Conrad: I got 74 on a Trig quiz.
Beth: 74? Gee, I was awful at Trig.
Conrad: Oh. Yeah? Did you…You took Trig?
Beth: Wait a minute. Did I take Trig? I bought you two shirts. They’re on your bed.
With that, Beth escapes into her bedroom and shuts the door. Conrad wants Beth to love him (and take an active interest in him), but Beth’s emotional weakness causes her to remain oblivious to anyone’s emotions other than her own. If the characters had simply stated these facts, they wouldn’t resonate nearly as much as they are when implied. Sargent’s dialogue is deceptively simple, yet subtly conveys volumes.
The final element of People’s screenplay I find inspiring, and want to include in my own feature script, is the character complexities. With the exception of Conrad’s psychiatrist (who mainly functions as a source of grounded wisdom), every character in the film has enough depth to defy being labeled an archetype (or stereotype). When Conrad’s friends turn on him when he quits the swim team, they aren’t just acting like villainous jocks. Conrad’s seemingly cold indifference to the team leads his friends to understandably feel betrayed, and it isn’t until late in the film that Conrad admits why he can’t hang out with them anymore. He admits that “it’s too painful to be around” the friends that he and his deceased brother hung out with. This is an unfortunate end to a friendship, where both sides are equally hurt, and no ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’ labels are issued. Similarly, his relationship with soon-to-be-girlfriend Jeannine has its own flaws and awkwardness, such as when her laughter disrupts Conrad’s serious description of his attempted suicide. Her laughter is generated by the embarrassment she feels when Conrad’s friends begin to tease her, although Conrad initially takes it as a sign of her insensitivity. Such misunderstandings are simple, yet very common in everyday life.
The character of Karen, Conrad’s friend at the hospital, is similar to the character complexities in my feature script. She believes that in order to exist in the ‘real world’, she must ignore her own problems, and thus play the role of a fully-functional, upbeat person (which explains her involvement in her high school drama club). Yet playing a role your entire life soon leads to self-destruction and Karen later commits suicide. The main character in Role Play is on a journey toward discovering similar truths about himself and his own “artificial roles”, although his ending is a happier one.
In the end, Ordinary People is a profoundly inspiring film to me as both a filmmaker and a film lover. It demonstrates how characters truly can carry a film themselves, if they are written in a way that their emotional journeys can provide as much discovery to the audience as they can for themselves. Through subtle metaphor, perceptive dialogue, and character complexity, Alvin Sargent’s screenplay for this film is a masterpiece of character nuance. What seems ordinary on the surface, is revealed to be quite the opposite underneath, and as the characters in my screenplay struggle with their own identities, I hope their struggle can be even a fraction as involving as this film.
Magnolia: Mis-en-Scene in Full Bloom
When a movie is thought of as superficial by the general public, it usually isn’t because of its content. Ever since the art of cinema was conceived, filmmakers with good intentions have created stories that sound great on paper, but end up failing miserably onscreen. What these unfortunate souls will hopefully come to realize is that audiences usually connect with films not necessarily because they heard a great story, but because they had a great experience. The power of a given film is not judged purely on the basis of its content, but on the skillful techniques the filmmaker uses in which to present the content. This is where mis-en-scene becomes an invaluable resource for filmmakers to use to convey crucial story elements visually without succumbing to a lot of preachy dialogue. One man who uses mis-en-scene to its maximum effect is Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote and directed 1999’s ensemble drama Magnolia, a film that thrives splendidly on visual storytelling.
Any scene in Magnolia can be successfully dissected to demonstrate its complex technical strategy and symbolic visuals, yet there is one early scene that proves to be a perfect example of cinematic subtext. Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) enters the apartment of his daughter Claudia (Melora Walters). He finds her asleep in her bedroom, and stands at the edge of her bed. Claudia wakes up in alarm, and demands to know what her father is doing in her house. Jimmy attempts to tell her that he just wants to straighten things out between the two of them, and even truthfully confesses to her that he’s dying of cancer. Claudia only becomes more and more insistent for Jimmy to leave, and she screams and hits him with her bed sheets until he finally exits the room. On paper, this sounds like a sadistic scene where a sick old man is pushed away by his angry, monstrous daughter. Onscreen, it is a brilliant example of mis-en-scene being used as catalyst to express the internal conflicts of the characters that will only be revealed later in the film.
When characters have pivotal encounters such as this one, the setting must be a fitting location for the action to occur. Claudia’s bedroom is small and cramped, the perfect setting for an explosion of intimate rage to occur. All the audience is permitted to see of the room is the bed itself, and a nearby window that’s barely covered by a ragged curtain. The bare walls and pale bed sheet force the audience to focus intently on the action between the characters. Jimmy enters the room through a doorway placed opposite of the bed, so when he enters the room he naturally stands at the foot of the bed, thus leading Claudia to be startled. What the audience doesn’t yet know about the characters is that when Claudia was a child, Jimmy had molested her--a fact that brings the scene into a whole new light. This makes the scene’s location of a bedroom all the more prophetic, in that it evokes the past sexual perversity Jimmy may have inflicted on his daughter, perhaps in her childhood bedroom. Yet this event, revealed later through carefully scripted dialogue, is foreshadowed through other elements of mis-en-scene.
Although Magnolia is a fictional film, it takes place in a real location (the San Fernando Valley), and doesn’t contain many flights of fancy (until its final climactic passage). Hence, the costumes and makeup are deceptively natural, and don’t seem to contain much meaning at first glance. Jimmy has slickly combed hair that helps to illustrate his celebrity status as a long-time game show host. He wears a respectable sweater vest with a white shirt collar sticking out of the top. His most striking article of clothing is a gray overcoat that swoops about the frame like a malevolent cape, therefore hinting at the past sins he attempts to cover up. Jimmy’s look contrasts greatly with that of Claudia’s, whose messy blonde hair and long-sleeved pajamas assist in illustrating her status as a lonely coke-addict. Her raw, ashen face leads the audience to focus on her defiant eyes that never waver from their focus on the enemy in front of them. Jimmy’s face looks quite pale in comparison, as if he might blend into the walls. Although his features are more polished and clean, his wrinkled, aged face emphasizes the subtle look of guilt and sorrow in his eyes. Although both characters look like normal people, the costumes and makeup further establish them as three-dimensional characters with complex personalities.
One of the most slyly effective aspects of the scene is the lighting, which visually articulates the scene’s subtext. At first the scene has a muted lighting tone, as Jimmy observes Claudia asleep in her bed. The morning sunlight from the window is covered by a curtain until Claudia awakes, and accidentally knocks the curtain onto the floor. This immediately focuses all of the light on Jimmy, who’s suddenly illuminated as if a spotlight is shining down on him. All of Claudia’s, and the audience’s, attention is directed to Jimmy who pathetically mocks being clueless as to why his daughter is ranting (“I’m not gonna call you a slut or something”), thus adding to the theatrical nature of the sun’s spotlight effect. Claudia is meanwhile huddled in the shadows, with the sun occasionally falling on half of her face, giving her a tragic, film noir-style look. While Jimmy is showcased as the object of perverse attention, it is Claudia who is photographed as the sympathetic character, wallowing in the shadows of her pain. The sunlight stays focused on Jimmy even as he leaves, when Claudia jumps out of bed, and stands nearly in shadow surrounded by the light. In the end, the lighting poetically visualizes Claudia’s piercing view of her father, that moves directly though his superficiality, and into the blinding light of his unforgivable flaws.
One of Anderson’s strengths as a director is eliciting career-best performances from his actors, and the riveting character portrayals by Hall and Walters in this scene are no exception. Yet the mis-en-scene doesn’t come from the performances themselves, but from the figure expression and movement that naturally comes from them. Blinking away sleep, Claudia is vulnerable to her father’s presence, and her face becomes increasingly tense and angry as her consciousness sets in. Jimmy talks softly and matter-of-factly while having an expression of calm discontent on his face. Every scream from his daughter makes his face look more alarmed with confusion, as if he has no idea what she could possibly be upset about. He even holds out his hand in fatherly protest of her shrieking so she knows he isn’t joking about his illness. Claudia remains nothing more than a jittery time bomb of anger that explodes with the striking of her father with her bed sheets, being the only weapon readily available. Her shrill screams and violent demeanor sharply contrast with Jimmy’s slow wavering from side-to-side and almost serene emotional detachment. While Claudia’s movements are sharp and quick in defiance, Jimmy movements are delicate, somber, and reek of denial.
While time plays important roles in many of Magnolia’s sequences, this particular scene basically takes place in filmic real time. There’s nothing very flashy or artful about how long this scene’s events unfold, although they seem to unfold longer than they actually do. The scene is barely a minute long, and yet it is agonizing to watch because Anderson doesn’t censor a single scream or awkward pause. He captures the depth of the pain and anguish in long, wrenching takes so that when Jimmy finally leaves, the audience breathes a sigh of relief right along with Claudia.
It is in the humble opinion of this writer that the single most important mis-en-scene element in this entire scene is the use of space. Nearly all of the scene’s subtext depends on the way the characters are positioned in the frame. When Jimmy enters through the doorway from off screen right, his enormous overcoat makes him look like a lumbering, faceless giant as he stands at the foot of the bed. Claudia is meanwhile pinned against her wall on the far left, and nearly seems to be sinking into the depths of her bed sheets. Visually, Jimmy is the dominant force throughout the entire scene, while Claudia is shoved in a corner and forced to look up at him. The physical distance between the two characters is exaggerated in order to accentuate their emotional distance, and Claudia has only her bed sheets to defend herself from Jimmy’s approach. When the sunlight hits Jimmy, he staggers and squints, but is framed from a low angle, enabling him to still tower above Claudia. After she has been reduced to screeching hysterics, Jimmy turns to leave, and his coat momentarily shrouds the screen in complete darkness, thus making him all the more formidable of a figure. The darkness is broken only by Claudia’s throwing of the bed sheets. She is now being filmed from a low angle, yet is still looking up at the fearsome figure finally leaving her midst. The genius in Anderson’s use of space is how he visually makes Jimmy the dominant figure and Claudia the victim, even though it is Claudia who throws out Jimmy at the end of the scene. Thus, the internal conflict is conveyed not through trite dialogue or narration, but through the subtle visual mastery of mis-en-scene.
Now, imagine how this scene would have played if it simply had relied on dialogue as opposed to visual techniques. It would have consisted of Jimmy attempting to reconcile with his daughter, and Claudia screaming about being molested by her father. All of the underlying plot detail would’ve been thrown out in the open without a hint of subtlety or realism. Then it would have been nothing more than an average daytime soap opera. Instead, director Paul Thomas Anderson respects the audience’s intelligence by telling his story through visual imagery that provokes, captivates, and exhilarates even the most casual of viewers. That is the difference between films that simply tell great stories, and films that give audiences great experiences.
Any scene in Magnolia can be successfully dissected to demonstrate its complex technical strategy and symbolic visuals, yet there is one early scene that proves to be a perfect example of cinematic subtext. Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) enters the apartment of his daughter Claudia (Melora Walters). He finds her asleep in her bedroom, and stands at the edge of her bed. Claudia wakes up in alarm, and demands to know what her father is doing in her house. Jimmy attempts to tell her that he just wants to straighten things out between the two of them, and even truthfully confesses to her that he’s dying of cancer. Claudia only becomes more and more insistent for Jimmy to leave, and she screams and hits him with her bed sheets until he finally exits the room. On paper, this sounds like a sadistic scene where a sick old man is pushed away by his angry, monstrous daughter. Onscreen, it is a brilliant example of mis-en-scene being used as catalyst to express the internal conflicts of the characters that will only be revealed later in the film.
When characters have pivotal encounters such as this one, the setting must be a fitting location for the action to occur. Claudia’s bedroom is small and cramped, the perfect setting for an explosion of intimate rage to occur. All the audience is permitted to see of the room is the bed itself, and a nearby window that’s barely covered by a ragged curtain. The bare walls and pale bed sheet force the audience to focus intently on the action between the characters. Jimmy enters the room through a doorway placed opposite of the bed, so when he enters the room he naturally stands at the foot of the bed, thus leading Claudia to be startled. What the audience doesn’t yet know about the characters is that when Claudia was a child, Jimmy had molested her--a fact that brings the scene into a whole new light. This makes the scene’s location of a bedroom all the more prophetic, in that it evokes the past sexual perversity Jimmy may have inflicted on his daughter, perhaps in her childhood bedroom. Yet this event, revealed later through carefully scripted dialogue, is foreshadowed through other elements of mis-en-scene.
Although Magnolia is a fictional film, it takes place in a real location (the San Fernando Valley), and doesn’t contain many flights of fancy (until its final climactic passage). Hence, the costumes and makeup are deceptively natural, and don’t seem to contain much meaning at first glance. Jimmy has slickly combed hair that helps to illustrate his celebrity status as a long-time game show host. He wears a respectable sweater vest with a white shirt collar sticking out of the top. His most striking article of clothing is a gray overcoat that swoops about the frame like a malevolent cape, therefore hinting at the past sins he attempts to cover up. Jimmy’s look contrasts greatly with that of Claudia’s, whose messy blonde hair and long-sleeved pajamas assist in illustrating her status as a lonely coke-addict. Her raw, ashen face leads the audience to focus on her defiant eyes that never waver from their focus on the enemy in front of them. Jimmy’s face looks quite pale in comparison, as if he might blend into the walls. Although his features are more polished and clean, his wrinkled, aged face emphasizes the subtle look of guilt and sorrow in his eyes. Although both characters look like normal people, the costumes and makeup further establish them as three-dimensional characters with complex personalities.
One of the most slyly effective aspects of the scene is the lighting, which visually articulates the scene’s subtext. At first the scene has a muted lighting tone, as Jimmy observes Claudia asleep in her bed. The morning sunlight from the window is covered by a curtain until Claudia awakes, and accidentally knocks the curtain onto the floor. This immediately focuses all of the light on Jimmy, who’s suddenly illuminated as if a spotlight is shining down on him. All of Claudia’s, and the audience’s, attention is directed to Jimmy who pathetically mocks being clueless as to why his daughter is ranting (“I’m not gonna call you a slut or something”), thus adding to the theatrical nature of the sun’s spotlight effect. Claudia is meanwhile huddled in the shadows, with the sun occasionally falling on half of her face, giving her a tragic, film noir-style look. While Jimmy is showcased as the object of perverse attention, it is Claudia who is photographed as the sympathetic character, wallowing in the shadows of her pain. The sunlight stays focused on Jimmy even as he leaves, when Claudia jumps out of bed, and stands nearly in shadow surrounded by the light. In the end, the lighting poetically visualizes Claudia’s piercing view of her father, that moves directly though his superficiality, and into the blinding light of his unforgivable flaws.
One of Anderson’s strengths as a director is eliciting career-best performances from his actors, and the riveting character portrayals by Hall and Walters in this scene are no exception. Yet the mis-en-scene doesn’t come from the performances themselves, but from the figure expression and movement that naturally comes from them. Blinking away sleep, Claudia is vulnerable to her father’s presence, and her face becomes increasingly tense and angry as her consciousness sets in. Jimmy talks softly and matter-of-factly while having an expression of calm discontent on his face. Every scream from his daughter makes his face look more alarmed with confusion, as if he has no idea what she could possibly be upset about. He even holds out his hand in fatherly protest of her shrieking so she knows he isn’t joking about his illness. Claudia remains nothing more than a jittery time bomb of anger that explodes with the striking of her father with her bed sheets, being the only weapon readily available. Her shrill screams and violent demeanor sharply contrast with Jimmy’s slow wavering from side-to-side and almost serene emotional detachment. While Claudia’s movements are sharp and quick in defiance, Jimmy movements are delicate, somber, and reek of denial.
While time plays important roles in many of Magnolia’s sequences, this particular scene basically takes place in filmic real time. There’s nothing very flashy or artful about how long this scene’s events unfold, although they seem to unfold longer than they actually do. The scene is barely a minute long, and yet it is agonizing to watch because Anderson doesn’t censor a single scream or awkward pause. He captures the depth of the pain and anguish in long, wrenching takes so that when Jimmy finally leaves, the audience breathes a sigh of relief right along with Claudia.
It is in the humble opinion of this writer that the single most important mis-en-scene element in this entire scene is the use of space. Nearly all of the scene’s subtext depends on the way the characters are positioned in the frame. When Jimmy enters through the doorway from off screen right, his enormous overcoat makes him look like a lumbering, faceless giant as he stands at the foot of the bed. Claudia is meanwhile pinned against her wall on the far left, and nearly seems to be sinking into the depths of her bed sheets. Visually, Jimmy is the dominant force throughout the entire scene, while Claudia is shoved in a corner and forced to look up at him. The physical distance between the two characters is exaggerated in order to accentuate their emotional distance, and Claudia has only her bed sheets to defend herself from Jimmy’s approach. When the sunlight hits Jimmy, he staggers and squints, but is framed from a low angle, enabling him to still tower above Claudia. After she has been reduced to screeching hysterics, Jimmy turns to leave, and his coat momentarily shrouds the screen in complete darkness, thus making him all the more formidable of a figure. The darkness is broken only by Claudia’s throwing of the bed sheets. She is now being filmed from a low angle, yet is still looking up at the fearsome figure finally leaving her midst. The genius in Anderson’s use of space is how he visually makes Jimmy the dominant figure and Claudia the victim, even though it is Claudia who throws out Jimmy at the end of the scene. Thus, the internal conflict is conveyed not through trite dialogue or narration, but through the subtle visual mastery of mis-en-scene.
Now, imagine how this scene would have played if it simply had relied on dialogue as opposed to visual techniques. It would have consisted of Jimmy attempting to reconcile with his daughter, and Claudia screaming about being molested by her father. All of the underlying plot detail would’ve been thrown out in the open without a hint of subtlety or realism. Then it would have been nothing more than an average daytime soap opera. Instead, director Paul Thomas Anderson respects the audience’s intelligence by telling his story through visual imagery that provokes, captivates, and exhilarates even the most casual of viewers. That is the difference between films that simply tell great stories, and films that give audiences great experiences.
Superficial Reality: The Existential Philosophy of The Purple Rose of Cairo
There is a moment toward the end of Woody Allen’s 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo where Hollywood actor Gil Shepherd confronts the fictional character he portrayed in a movie, Tom Baxter. They are both fighting for the affections of a star-struck waitress, to whom Tom professes, “I love you. I’m honest, dependable, courageous, romantic, and a great kisser.” Gil fires back, “And I’m real!” This deceptively simple exchange is, in actuality, a prime example of the film’s existential argument: that fiction, with its consistent attributes and qualities, is in a sense more real (and more definable) than the ever-changing reality. By comparing writer/director Allen’s art and ideas to that of the more blatantly existential playwright Luigi Pirandello, as well as that of philosophers Alfred Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, the above argument can thus be clarified and defended.
The Purple Rose of Cairo centers around the tragic heroine of Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a Depression-era waitress who’s married to an unemployed, abusive lout named Monk (Danny Aiello). While Monk spends his time gambling, womanizing, and keeping his wife home with the alternate use of grovels and threats, Cecilia’s only mode of escape is the movies. After being fired from her job for daydreaming, Cecilia seeks solace in the local theater, repeatedly viewing its latest feature, The Purple Rose of Cairo. As her eyes focus on the handsome character of Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), his eyes finally acknowledge hers. Mystified by her repeated presence, and stricken with sudden love, Tom walks off the screen and into Cecilia’s life.
Studio moguls are aghast, audience members are bewildered, and Gil Shepherd (also Daniels), the actor who portrayed Tom, is called in to help search for his fictional self. Meanwhile, Tom attempts to romance Cecilia, while discovering that he’s ill-prepared to exist in real life (he carries only fake money, expects a “fade out” to occur before making love, etc). Fearing for his career, Gil has a chance encounter with Cecilia, and after learning of her companionship with Tom, attempts to woo her away from his fictional character while professing his supposedly ‘real’ love for her. Cecilia is now romantically torn between the two men, and is forced to make decision that will determine the fate of all three corners of the love triangle. While all of this is occurring, the characters left on the screen bicker amongst themselves, throw snide remarks at the audience, fear of “being annihilated” (a.k.a. the projector turning off), and have their chance to ponder the meaning of their own existence.
Tom finally returns to the theater with Cecilia, and takes her up into the screen with him for a night on the town, full of nightclubs, dancing, and champagne (which is portrayed by ginger ale, much to Cecilia’s shock). Yet the lovers’ night is interrupted by Gil, who stands in the empty theater, and expresses his “real” devotion to Cecilia. Finally, Cecilia descends from the screen, and chooses reality (Gil) over fiction (Tom, who wanders back into the screen, devastated). The studio promptly destroys all prints of Purple Rose, while Cecilia leaves Monk. Upon her return to the theater, she finds that Gil has abandoned her for his career, and she is left back at square one. Once again, her eyes seek consolation in the flicker of the film screen.
Sixty-four years previous to Purple Rose’s release, Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello unleashed a play entitled Six Characters In Search of an Author, a work of art that remarkably mirrors the existential quandaries Allen had used as the focus of his film. In the play, a theatre troupe’s rehearsal is interrupted by the appearance of six fictional characters that have been abandoned by the playwright who created them. The characters, which consist of archetypical dysfunctional family members such as Father and Stepdaughter, demand that the actors allow them to have their story told, much to the Producer’s dismay. Once the characters finish acting out their story, they are permanently frozen in their emotional state, with the exception of the Stepdaughter, whose realized destiny has given her the ability to leave the stage, and laugh mockingly as she parades through the audience and into the lobby.
Pirandello, whose radical existentialism led him to acquiring the name “Son of Chaos”, once stated, “Everything that lives, by the very fact that it lives, has form, and by that same fact must die; except the work of art, which precisely lives forever, in so far as it is form.” (Cambon 38) In an effort to prove this belief, he wrote Six Characters, which depicted fictional creations experiencing conscious suffering while being condemned to repeatedly play out their tragic story. This made them more real than the flesh-and-blood theater troupe, whose cold obsession with the box office reveals them to be hollow portals for the stories they portray. Their lack of defining characteristics and emotion virtually disappear behind the distinguishable archetypes and eternal emotional arches of fictional beings that live on in their place.
In Purple Rose, Woody Allen explores and affirms these exact ideas in the characters of Tom and Gil. While Tom may be a fictional creation, his characteristics are real and consistent. Every facial expression he makes and every line of dialogue he utters holds no ambiguity or deceptive layers; what they look like or say is what they are. As philosophy professor Sander H. Lee observed, every line in Tom’s Purple Rose (the film-within-the-film) is used merely to “advance the plot.” (Lee 84) Every word Tom says has an equally pure goal; when he wishes to express his love for Cecilia, he says “I love you.” His personality traits (honesty, dependability, etc) have been hard-wired into him by his creators, which thus make him an entirely consistent being. Even during moments of temptation, such as when he is seduced by adoring prostitutes, Tom holds firm to his devotion to Cecilia. The fact that his one-dimensional personality can be defined at all is what ultimately labels him as fiction, in an existential context.
On the flip side is Gil, who spends the majority of the film deceiving Cecilia by putting on the Hollywood charm he used to portray Tom with, in an effort to temporarily romance her. But behind each of his actions, are hidden motives to preserve his rising career by forcing Tom back onto the screen. None of Gil’s feelings about anything are ever obvious or easily defined, except for his obsession with success (mirroring the box office desires of the theater troupe from Six Characters). After acting sweet and humble while asking Cecilia to take him to Tom, Gil immediately veers into savage anger when confronting his fictional self (thus exposing his promise to “not be angry” as a lie). Even the frown his face elicits at the end (during his plane ride back to Hollywood) can be read multiple ways; he could either be expressing regret over abandoning Cecilia, or he could simply be air-sick (a condition he previously mentioned having). Ultimately, Gil is playing the role of a man in love during the course of the film, while Tom is nothing but a man in love. Like the Pirandello’s theater troupe, Gil’s emotional abyss allows him to experience no suffering, while Tom (being an emotional construct) can only love, and thus can only suffer once he is ditched by Cecilia.
From a purely philosophical standpoint, Purple Rose is immediately evocative of such writings as Alfred Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Both stories involve characters that are trapped in an endless cycle of events from which they have no escape. While this comparison may at first seem to be a diversion from the main argument, it helps to establish fiction as the ideal and reality as the empty place. In Purple Rose, there are two types of Sisyphus: the characters in the film, and the Cecilia, who repeatedly attends the theater to view them. While Cecilia knows her life may never be as glamorous and grand as the ones she watches on the screen, she thrives on the daydream that it will. Similarly, Sisyphus knows that no matter how many times he rolls the rock up the hill, he will never reach the “summit” and the rock will just roll back down again. And yet, as Camus writes, “The struggle toward the summit is sufficient to fill the heart of a man. We must imagine that Sisyphus is happy.” (Bree 208) We must also imagine Cecilia is happy at the film’s end, as she settles into her reliable pattern of staring up at the happiness she craves, and yet allowing her heart to fill with the joyful possibility of one day reaching the heights (although it’s doubtful she ever will).
Like a fictional being in relation to an actor’s hollowness, the events of a film become more real for the viewer than his/her own real experience of viewing it. Although both are recurring events, the film itself has real closure (punctuated by a final fade-out), while the viewer’s experience has no closure afterward (punctuated by leaving the theater). The film-going experience is thus revealed to affirm the power of fiction over reality. In the same way an actor disappears into a character, the audience disappears into the experiences of the onscreen characters. During this experience, the audience sits motionless, with faces as blank as an empty page that is eagerly awaiting the text of a story to be written upon it. While viewers may experience varying levels and types of emotion in their everyday lives, film provides distinct emotions in their purest and most ideal form (such as total amusement, devastation, joviality, etc). Afterward, viewers may attempt to recapture the emotions they felt while watching the film. Once again, fiction proves itself to be the real, tangible depth of feeling, which flesh-and-blood beings (notably Cecilia) use to fill up the void in their empty, temporary existences.
On a deeper level, however, Purple Rose seems even more evocative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of “existence preceding essence.” According to Sartre’s atheistic beliefs, there is no God, and therefore no predetermined meaning for each of our lives to follow. In Sartre’s own words, “there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is.” (Abel 387) Thus, our personalities, our characteristics, our choices, and our futures are entirely up to us to decide and define. Yet how do we define ourselves in an existence without definition or meaning? The answer is shockingly simple: we create meaning, through the use of patterns, rules, fables, and artwork that establish an essence that we can mold our lives after. Initially, it seems that this theory may contradict the central argument that fiction is more real than reality, since a fictional artwork’s essence was determined by its creator before it existed. The characters in Purple Rose each have a significant essence that the filmmaker has created them to capture (the love interest, the comic relief, etc). Cecilia, however, has no such consolable characteristics, and since her present existence is wrought with poverty and misery, she imagines a fictional essence for herself in the cinema (perhaps the love interest for Tom).
Yet the implication of Sartre’s argument of ‘man as nothing but what he makes of himself’ is found in the all-encompassing statement that ‘you are what you do.’ In the context of Purple Rose, Cecilia may dream of a better life, yet when she has the chance to earn a better living by having a job, her constant daydreaming makes her clumsy and gets her fired. Cecilia only fantasizes about what the fictional characters onscreen actually do repeatedly during each screening. It is the fictional Tom who makes the first move, by leaving the rigid constraints of the cinema, and entering the chaotic reality to be with Cecilia. Through this singular action alone, Tom betrays his own predetermined essence to create an existence for himself that he believes will lead to happiness. Hence, the fictional Tom creates his own essence (thus making him real), while the flesh-and-blood churchgoer Cecilia continuously searches for an essence she believes to be predetermined (thus making her less real).
Even Atheist writer/director Allen mirrors the philosophy of Camus, by making nearly one film a year, while remaining vocal about being unhappy with his own work (much like Sisyphus, who repeatedly strives to achieve an impossible goal). Yet, as Sartre may have put it, Allen must seek contentment in the fact that his work creates meaning in an existence he believes to be thoroughly meaningless. No wonder Allen himself has referred to Sartre as “romantic…great fun to read.” (Lee 223) Allen even compares film to God, during a scene when Cecilia explains, to a clueless Tom, how church provides her with “a reason for everything. Eh, otherwise, i-i-it-it’d be like a movie with no point and no happy ending.” (Allen 408) In the same way film creates meaning in the lives of real people, so does religion, which in the long run becomes more real (and ever-lasting) than its temporarily existing believers.
And so, the focus returns to the exchange between Gil and Tom toward the end of the film. Tom’s argument that he is “honest, dependable, etc” reveals attributes as pure and unchanging as those of Pirandello’s six characters, as repetitious as those of Camus’s Sisyphus, and an essence that (although predetermined) gives him a clearer and more definable existence. If ‘man simply is’, then ‘Tom simply is honest, dependable, etc.’ Gil’s comeback “And I’m real!” solidifies the sad truth that reality is the only argument Gil can make about his own existence. The attributes Gil possess change countless times, and thus make his essence less definable, and therefore less real. Cecilia discovers that when she chooses reality over fiction, she loses all hope of finding reliable happiness. In conclusion, Woody Allen’s overall belief truly seems to be that “film ought to win over reality.” (Conrad 107) And if there is a philosophical victory at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, it is that the realm of unchanging fiction will always be more real than our superficial reality.
Bibliography:
Abel, Donald C. Fifty Readings in Philosophy; Second Edition. New York, New York: The
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2004.
Allen, Woody. Three Films of Woody Allen. New York, New York: Random House, Inc.,
1987.
Bree, Germaine. Camus; Revised Edition. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc., 1964
Cambon, Glauco. Pirandello. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
Conrad, Mark T. & Skoble, Aeon J. Woody Allen and Philosophy. Peru, Illinois: Carus
Publishing Company, 2004.
Lee, Sander H. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland
& Company, Inc., 2002.
The Purple Rose of Cairo. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, and Danny
Aiello. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2001.
The Purple Rose of Cairo centers around the tragic heroine of Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a Depression-era waitress who’s married to an unemployed, abusive lout named Monk (Danny Aiello). While Monk spends his time gambling, womanizing, and keeping his wife home with the alternate use of grovels and threats, Cecilia’s only mode of escape is the movies. After being fired from her job for daydreaming, Cecilia seeks solace in the local theater, repeatedly viewing its latest feature, The Purple Rose of Cairo. As her eyes focus on the handsome character of Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), his eyes finally acknowledge hers. Mystified by her repeated presence, and stricken with sudden love, Tom walks off the screen and into Cecilia’s life.
Studio moguls are aghast, audience members are bewildered, and Gil Shepherd (also Daniels), the actor who portrayed Tom, is called in to help search for his fictional self. Meanwhile, Tom attempts to romance Cecilia, while discovering that he’s ill-prepared to exist in real life (he carries only fake money, expects a “fade out” to occur before making love, etc). Fearing for his career, Gil has a chance encounter with Cecilia, and after learning of her companionship with Tom, attempts to woo her away from his fictional character while professing his supposedly ‘real’ love for her. Cecilia is now romantically torn between the two men, and is forced to make decision that will determine the fate of all three corners of the love triangle. While all of this is occurring, the characters left on the screen bicker amongst themselves, throw snide remarks at the audience, fear of “being annihilated” (a.k.a. the projector turning off), and have their chance to ponder the meaning of their own existence.
Tom finally returns to the theater with Cecilia, and takes her up into the screen with him for a night on the town, full of nightclubs, dancing, and champagne (which is portrayed by ginger ale, much to Cecilia’s shock). Yet the lovers’ night is interrupted by Gil, who stands in the empty theater, and expresses his “real” devotion to Cecilia. Finally, Cecilia descends from the screen, and chooses reality (Gil) over fiction (Tom, who wanders back into the screen, devastated). The studio promptly destroys all prints of Purple Rose, while Cecilia leaves Monk. Upon her return to the theater, she finds that Gil has abandoned her for his career, and she is left back at square one. Once again, her eyes seek consolation in the flicker of the film screen.
Sixty-four years previous to Purple Rose’s release, Sicilian playwright Luigi Pirandello unleashed a play entitled Six Characters In Search of an Author, a work of art that remarkably mirrors the existential quandaries Allen had used as the focus of his film. In the play, a theatre troupe’s rehearsal is interrupted by the appearance of six fictional characters that have been abandoned by the playwright who created them. The characters, which consist of archetypical dysfunctional family members such as Father and Stepdaughter, demand that the actors allow them to have their story told, much to the Producer’s dismay. Once the characters finish acting out their story, they are permanently frozen in their emotional state, with the exception of the Stepdaughter, whose realized destiny has given her the ability to leave the stage, and laugh mockingly as she parades through the audience and into the lobby.
Pirandello, whose radical existentialism led him to acquiring the name “Son of Chaos”, once stated, “Everything that lives, by the very fact that it lives, has form, and by that same fact must die; except the work of art, which precisely lives forever, in so far as it is form.” (Cambon 38) In an effort to prove this belief, he wrote Six Characters, which depicted fictional creations experiencing conscious suffering while being condemned to repeatedly play out their tragic story. This made them more real than the flesh-and-blood theater troupe, whose cold obsession with the box office reveals them to be hollow portals for the stories they portray. Their lack of defining characteristics and emotion virtually disappear behind the distinguishable archetypes and eternal emotional arches of fictional beings that live on in their place.
In Purple Rose, Woody Allen explores and affirms these exact ideas in the characters of Tom and Gil. While Tom may be a fictional creation, his characteristics are real and consistent. Every facial expression he makes and every line of dialogue he utters holds no ambiguity or deceptive layers; what they look like or say is what they are. As philosophy professor Sander H. Lee observed, every line in Tom’s Purple Rose (the film-within-the-film) is used merely to “advance the plot.” (Lee 84) Every word Tom says has an equally pure goal; when he wishes to express his love for Cecilia, he says “I love you.” His personality traits (honesty, dependability, etc) have been hard-wired into him by his creators, which thus make him an entirely consistent being. Even during moments of temptation, such as when he is seduced by adoring prostitutes, Tom holds firm to his devotion to Cecilia. The fact that his one-dimensional personality can be defined at all is what ultimately labels him as fiction, in an existential context.
On the flip side is Gil, who spends the majority of the film deceiving Cecilia by putting on the Hollywood charm he used to portray Tom with, in an effort to temporarily romance her. But behind each of his actions, are hidden motives to preserve his rising career by forcing Tom back onto the screen. None of Gil’s feelings about anything are ever obvious or easily defined, except for his obsession with success (mirroring the box office desires of the theater troupe from Six Characters). After acting sweet and humble while asking Cecilia to take him to Tom, Gil immediately veers into savage anger when confronting his fictional self (thus exposing his promise to “not be angry” as a lie). Even the frown his face elicits at the end (during his plane ride back to Hollywood) can be read multiple ways; he could either be expressing regret over abandoning Cecilia, or he could simply be air-sick (a condition he previously mentioned having). Ultimately, Gil is playing the role of a man in love during the course of the film, while Tom is nothing but a man in love. Like the Pirandello’s theater troupe, Gil’s emotional abyss allows him to experience no suffering, while Tom (being an emotional construct) can only love, and thus can only suffer once he is ditched by Cecilia.
From a purely philosophical standpoint, Purple Rose is immediately evocative of such writings as Alfred Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Both stories involve characters that are trapped in an endless cycle of events from which they have no escape. While this comparison may at first seem to be a diversion from the main argument, it helps to establish fiction as the ideal and reality as the empty place. In Purple Rose, there are two types of Sisyphus: the characters in the film, and the Cecilia, who repeatedly attends the theater to view them. While Cecilia knows her life may never be as glamorous and grand as the ones she watches on the screen, she thrives on the daydream that it will. Similarly, Sisyphus knows that no matter how many times he rolls the rock up the hill, he will never reach the “summit” and the rock will just roll back down again. And yet, as Camus writes, “The struggle toward the summit is sufficient to fill the heart of a man. We must imagine that Sisyphus is happy.” (Bree 208) We must also imagine Cecilia is happy at the film’s end, as she settles into her reliable pattern of staring up at the happiness she craves, and yet allowing her heart to fill with the joyful possibility of one day reaching the heights (although it’s doubtful she ever will).
Like a fictional being in relation to an actor’s hollowness, the events of a film become more real for the viewer than his/her own real experience of viewing it. Although both are recurring events, the film itself has real closure (punctuated by a final fade-out), while the viewer’s experience has no closure afterward (punctuated by leaving the theater). The film-going experience is thus revealed to affirm the power of fiction over reality. In the same way an actor disappears into a character, the audience disappears into the experiences of the onscreen characters. During this experience, the audience sits motionless, with faces as blank as an empty page that is eagerly awaiting the text of a story to be written upon it. While viewers may experience varying levels and types of emotion in their everyday lives, film provides distinct emotions in their purest and most ideal form (such as total amusement, devastation, joviality, etc). Afterward, viewers may attempt to recapture the emotions they felt while watching the film. Once again, fiction proves itself to be the real, tangible depth of feeling, which flesh-and-blood beings (notably Cecilia) use to fill up the void in their empty, temporary existences.
On a deeper level, however, Purple Rose seems even more evocative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of “existence preceding essence.” According to Sartre’s atheistic beliefs, there is no God, and therefore no predetermined meaning for each of our lives to follow. In Sartre’s own words, “there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is.” (Abel 387) Thus, our personalities, our characteristics, our choices, and our futures are entirely up to us to decide and define. Yet how do we define ourselves in an existence without definition or meaning? The answer is shockingly simple: we create meaning, through the use of patterns, rules, fables, and artwork that establish an essence that we can mold our lives after. Initially, it seems that this theory may contradict the central argument that fiction is more real than reality, since a fictional artwork’s essence was determined by its creator before it existed. The characters in Purple Rose each have a significant essence that the filmmaker has created them to capture (the love interest, the comic relief, etc). Cecilia, however, has no such consolable characteristics, and since her present existence is wrought with poverty and misery, she imagines a fictional essence for herself in the cinema (perhaps the love interest for Tom).
Yet the implication of Sartre’s argument of ‘man as nothing but what he makes of himself’ is found in the all-encompassing statement that ‘you are what you do.’ In the context of Purple Rose, Cecilia may dream of a better life, yet when she has the chance to earn a better living by having a job, her constant daydreaming makes her clumsy and gets her fired. Cecilia only fantasizes about what the fictional characters onscreen actually do repeatedly during each screening. It is the fictional Tom who makes the first move, by leaving the rigid constraints of the cinema, and entering the chaotic reality to be with Cecilia. Through this singular action alone, Tom betrays his own predetermined essence to create an existence for himself that he believes will lead to happiness. Hence, the fictional Tom creates his own essence (thus making him real), while the flesh-and-blood churchgoer Cecilia continuously searches for an essence she believes to be predetermined (thus making her less real).
Even Atheist writer/director Allen mirrors the philosophy of Camus, by making nearly one film a year, while remaining vocal about being unhappy with his own work (much like Sisyphus, who repeatedly strives to achieve an impossible goal). Yet, as Sartre may have put it, Allen must seek contentment in the fact that his work creates meaning in an existence he believes to be thoroughly meaningless. No wonder Allen himself has referred to Sartre as “romantic…great fun to read.” (Lee 223) Allen even compares film to God, during a scene when Cecilia explains, to a clueless Tom, how church provides her with “a reason for everything. Eh, otherwise, i-i-it-it’d be like a movie with no point and no happy ending.” (Allen 408) In the same way film creates meaning in the lives of real people, so does religion, which in the long run becomes more real (and ever-lasting) than its temporarily existing believers.
And so, the focus returns to the exchange between Gil and Tom toward the end of the film. Tom’s argument that he is “honest, dependable, etc” reveals attributes as pure and unchanging as those of Pirandello’s six characters, as repetitious as those of Camus’s Sisyphus, and an essence that (although predetermined) gives him a clearer and more definable existence. If ‘man simply is’, then ‘Tom simply is honest, dependable, etc.’ Gil’s comeback “And I’m real!” solidifies the sad truth that reality is the only argument Gil can make about his own existence. The attributes Gil possess change countless times, and thus make his essence less definable, and therefore less real. Cecilia discovers that when she chooses reality over fiction, she loses all hope of finding reliable happiness. In conclusion, Woody Allen’s overall belief truly seems to be that “film ought to win over reality.” (Conrad 107) And if there is a philosophical victory at the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, it is that the realm of unchanging fiction will always be more real than our superficial reality.
Bibliography:
Abel, Donald C. Fifty Readings in Philosophy; Second Edition. New York, New York: The
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2004.
Allen, Woody. Three Films of Woody Allen. New York, New York: Random House, Inc.,
1987.
Bree, Germaine. Camus; Revised Edition. New York, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc., 1964
Cambon, Glauco. Pirandello. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
Conrad, Mark T. & Skoble, Aeon J. Woody Allen and Philosophy. Peru, Illinois: Carus
Publishing Company, 2004.
Lee, Sander H. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland
& Company, Inc., 2002.
The Purple Rose of Cairo. Dir. Woody Allen. Perf. Mia Farrow, Jeff Daniels, and Danny
Aiello. Metro Goldwyn Mayer: 2001.
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